ALL OF JEFFERSON COUNTY had remained uneasy in the weeks following the Harper's Ferry insurrection, but Charlestown had increasingly turned into an armed camp as the date for Brown's execution approached. The rumors of an abolitionist rescue mission had never abated, and a mysterious series of barn fires gave renewed life to the story that a rebellion of armed slaves was still about to commence. In response, Governor Wise had ordered the mobilization of over 3000 militia and cadets to guard the approaches to Charlestown. Strangers were questioned and searched, and sometimes detained if they were not able to provide reassuring answers upon interrogation.

The defensive operation was under the command of state militia general William Taliaferro, with the assistance of a contingent of cadets from the Virginia Military Academy led by Professor Thomas Jackson (who would not be revered as “Stonewall” until the beginning of the Civil War). President Buchanan believed that the extensive preparations were unnecessary, but he prudently assigned a few dozen federal troops, again under the leadership of Colonel Lee, to join the ranks at Charlestown.

Many Northerners ridiculed the obsessive suspicions of the Virginians, but others fed the hysteria. In Ohio, the incorrigible Marshal Johnson was still doing his best to ensnare his nemeses in Oberlin. He persuaded the Cleveland postmaster – a fellow Democrat and Buchanan appointee – to monitor the Sturtevants’ mail, although nothing incriminating was ever discovered. More pointedly, he advised Andrew Hunter that “some movement is on foot to rescue if possible Brown and his Confederates,” involving as many as “9000 desperate men” from the Western Reserve. Johnson therefore offered to “put a watch on the depot at Oberlin” and to “instantly communicate by telegraph” if it appeared that an armed mission was about to depart for Virginia.