Visceral Totems of a Brutal War

BY JOHN M. COSKI

If you were to take a tour of the Museum’s collections storage vault, you may find yourself staring into a long drawer packed with what look for all the world like Medieval pikes. “What are those doing here?” you might ask.

If you are a knowledgeable student of the American Civil War, you could answer your own question.

“Those must be some of those pikes that John Brown ordered for his raid on Harper’s Ferry!” Indeed, the Museum has in its collections three “John Brown pikes.” If your tour of the Museum also included the flagship exhibit, A People’s Contest, you would have seen three John Brown pikes on display in the pre-gallery case.

If all the Museum’s John Brown pikes are on display, what are those pikes in storage? They sure look like John Brown pikes – long wooden poles topped with iron double-edged blades, roughly a foot long. Deep in the recesses of your Civil War knowledge you might recall an odd factoid that Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown commissioned pikes to arm his state troops early in the war. It certainly makes sense that a handful of those weapons would wind up in the collections of what was originally the Confederate Museum founded 25 years after the war.

At first blush, the “Joe Brown pike,” created to defend a slaveholding republic against invaders, seems like the literal and figurative antithesis of the “John Brown pike,” created to arm enslaved people in a rebellion against their enslavers. Nevertheless, the two pikes shared many similarities, not only in their general appearance, but also in their histories. Their atavistic appearance and symbolic connotations made them what historian Jason Phillips dubbed “visceral totems” that “foretold a brutal war of close combat and personal killings.”

John Brown Pikes

In 1857-1858, as he was touring New England to solicit funds and support, John Brown (revered or reviled as “Old Osawatomie” for his revenge killings of pro-slavery men in of pro-slavery men in Kansas) asked Collinsville, Connecticut, blacksmith Charles Blair to forge 950 pikes for his continued battle against slavery in Kansas. The pike featured a fearsome looking double-edged blade modeled on a bowie knife captured from a pro-slavery soldier in the Kansas wars mounted on a six-foot shaft. Blair delayed work on the job until early 1859 when Brown showed up again with a final payment of $450. Unable to complete what had become a rush job, Blair sub-contracted the work to blacksmith Chauncey Hart of Unionville, Connecticut.

John Brown

ACWM Collection

The pikes were no longer needed in Kansas, but Brown had other plans for them. Along with a supply of firearms, the pikes arrived at Brown’s staging area across the Potomac River from Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown’s October 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry failed. Few slaves rallied to Brown’s cadre of abolitionist crusaders, and most of the weapons Brown had stockpiled went unused – including all of the 950 pikes.

Useless (or, at least, unused) as a weapon for a slave uprising, the pikes became extremely effective weapons for propaganda against northern abolitionists – most famously in the hands of Virginia agronomist and southern nationalist “fire-eater” Edmund Ruffin. On the day of John Brown’s execution, December 2, 1859, Ruffin exhibited one of the pikes with the label “Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethren.” With obvious satisfaction, Ruffin wrote in his diary that the display “attracted much attention. I hope it will produce some effect.” He later arranged to send a pike to thirteen slaveholding state governors to remind them of the dangers they faced from radical abolitionists.

Ruffin portrayed the pikes as “spears,” an image calculated to exploit slaveholders’ fear of “barbaric” Africans rising against them. Befitting a double-edged weapon, the “primitive” quality of the pikes cut two ways. Historian Jason Phillips explained that the historically minded John Brown regarded pikes as weapons that the masses of Europeans wielded to overthrow the aristocracy. Their symbolic value, as well as their ease of use, made them appropriate for the Harper’s Ferry raid.

By the beginning of the civil war that John Brown predicted and helped precipitate, more than half of his pikes were souvenirs in private hands.

Edmund Ruffin

ACWM Collection

Joe Brown Pikes

Less than a year after America’s cataclysmic civil war began, another man named Brown had contracted for a large order of pikes to help fight that war. “The late reverses which have attended our arms, show the absolute necessity of renewed energy and determination on our part,” wrote Governor Joseph Emerson Brown to the “Mechanics of Georgia” on February 20, 1862. Citing matter-of-factly the North’s “superior numbers” and the “quantity and quality of their arms,” Brown asked rhetorically, “What is to be done in this emergency?” His answer: “Use the ‘Georgia Pike’ with a six feet staff, and the side knife eighteen inches blade, weighing about three pounds.” Brown then imagined a scenario in which brave Georgia men armed with pikes rushing “with terrible impetuosity into the lines of the enemy.” “I already have a considerable number of these pikes and knives,” he wrote, and appealed to the mechanics to produce another 10,000 within the next month.

The Georgia chief of ordnance reported in December 1862 that he had received 7,099 pikes, 5,870 of which were at the state arsenal, and 1,229 had been issued to the Confederate quartermasters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Augusta, Georgia. Having successfully acquired that large stock of pikes (and of knives), Brown was compelled to inform the Georgia General Assembly that the investment in pikes may have been pointless. “By the mercy of a kind Providence, and the valor of our troops, we have since procured a much better supply of firearms, “he wrote in December 1862, “and but little use has been made of the pike.”

The governor covered his bureaucratic flank by dropping the name of his favorite adversary, President Jefferson Davis. “The fact that President Davis, at a time when other arms were scarce, accepted pikes and knives from Georgia, showed his appreciation of them as a military weapon.” And just because Georgia troops hadn’t used them yet didn’t mean that they were useless. Brown reminded the Assembly that the Spanish routed Napoleon’s troops with pikes in 1808-1809. If others could, “why may not the gallant sons of Georgia take them in hand and strike for their homes and their liberties, when no better weapon is at their command?”

Gov. Joseph Brown

ACWM Collection

Joseph Brown, unconsciously echoing John Brown, portrayed the pike as the weapon of the brave but poorly armed underdog fighting for his liberties against an oppressor. Confronting the numerical and material superiority of the North, white southerners were in the position of European peasants fighting against the aristocracy – and in a position analogous to enslaved African-Americans rising against their white southern owners.

The parallel between his pikes and those of “Old Osawatomie” must have come to Joseph Brown’s mind when he made one final argument for the utility of the state’s 7,099 pikes: “In case of servile insurrection,” he wrote, “as the insurgents would not probably have firearms, our militia might make the pike and knife a most destructive weapon.”

There is no credible evidence that Joe Brown pikes were ever used – whether against enslaved people or against “Yankees” – any more than John Brown pikes were used by enslaved people against slaveowners. Occasional columns published in newspapers hinted that the Georgia Militia may have used pikes during the November 1864 skirmish at Griswoldville, Georgia. This claim probably traced back to a widely syndicated 1890 newspaper report about a “popular druggist” named Dr. Hall who owned a “rusty old relic of the late war” that he had found near the Griswoldville battlefield. The reporter noted matter-of-factly that the pikes “were used by the [C]onfederates at the beginning and some of the troops through the late war.”

Another article, widely syndicated from the New York Evening World in 1890, described a pike in the collection of the Georgia Historical Society. “A lot of these pikes were sent to Savannah to be used in the defense of Fort Pulaski,” the article concluded. “They were never used, however, but they might have been – and had the boys in blue seen them glistening in the starlight, they would have prayed heaven to defend them from primitive implements of warfare.”

An Athens, Georgia, newspaper ran a story in 1884 noting that ‘It has been charged, gravely by some, flippantly by many, that there was no man killed or wounded during the war by the Joe Brown pike. A man can be produced, living in Atlanta, who carries an empty sleeve on account of one of the said pikes.” That man, Richard Yancey, lost his arm while making a pike. The writer wondered aloud – and, yes, rather flippantly – whether Yancey would qualify for a pension under the recent state law.

Unlike John Brown pikes, which carried a terrifying association with slave insurrection and retained a deadly serious connotation, the Joe Brown pikes became a source of levity. They were ambidextrous curios whose double-edged blade was as useful for poking fun at Confederates as fighting against well-armed “Yankees.” “Georgia’s enterprising Governor no doubt had more confidence in the boys than they had in the pikes, for the Georgia soldiers refused to use them except ‘to go for gophers’,” wrote one soldier in Confederate Veteran magazine in 1913. “Some of the soldiers shed tears and others laughed heartily when these unique implements of feudal warfare were presented to them, but they soon laid them aside.” A Yorkville, South Carolina, newspaper declared “laughable” stories heard around the United Confederate Veterans 1915 reunion about “the famous old ‘Joe Brown pikes,’ so dreaded by the Union soldiers, with which the southerners fought hand to hand when the ammunition gave out.”

The state of Georgia reportedly sold many or most of the pikes in 1869. Like the John Brown pikes, they had a long after-life as souvenirs, many of which have been donated to collections such as those of the American Civil War Museum.

John M. Coski is the Museum’s Research Historian. This article draws from multiple sources, including Jason Phillips’ article on John Brown Pikes in Joan E. Cashin, ed., War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War (2018) and Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War (2011), which are available from the Museum Store (see pages 30-31); The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia, Volume II (1909); digitized newspaper articles found on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America data base, and the Museum’s object accession files. John Brown and Joe Brown pikes reside in many public collections and have been the subjects of several excellent on-line articles by Dr. R. Blakeslee Gilpin.