Narrow Escape at Harper’s Ferry

NARROW ESCAPE AT HARPER’S FERRY.– We clip the following interesting article from an exchange paper:—

There was to be a military execution away up above the heads of everybody in Harper’s Ferry, on Bolivar heights, and with about a thousand others I went to see it. Two soldiers had been convicted of desertion, and their death sentence approved by Gen. Sheridan. I skip the details. About twelve o’clock noon they found themselves on their knees in front of two coffins inside three sides of a hollow square of soldiers, with a firing party two rods in front. Their eyes were being bandaged ; three minutes more, I think would have settled their accounts with this world, when an orderly came galloping up that steep, muddy hill with a telegram. Gen. Stevenson, who commanded there, opened it. It was signed ‘A. Lincoln,’ and directed an indefinite suspension of the sentence. A suspicion crossed my mind that we had ben participating in a gotten-up dramatic entertainment, to produce a good moral effect on the soldiers present, particularly the two most interested. In other words, I suspected that this telegram had been received by Gen. Stevenson before the funeral cortege left Harper’s Ferry. I was on the staff in those days, and was privileged to ask questions, so I waited on the general at his headquarters, two hours after and inquired about it. He assured me that my suspicious were unfounded.

“But the line from here to Baltimore is down and I had no reason to expect a dispatch. How it got here I don’t know. Certainly they would have been dead in a few minutes.”

The statement of the operator at Baltimore, afterward published, gave intensity to the dramatic situation out on bleak Bolivar heights on that dismal February morning. The President’s dispatch was received about ten o’clock that morning, with the cipher of the War department to hurry it to Harper’s Ferry. For hours the line had been down between that and Baltimore ; there was no train that would be timely. It was the judgement of the operator that this ended the matter ; that the men must die. Yet an effort might be made to reach Harper’s Ferry from the west. He made the trial ; he kept right on making it for an hour and a half. As he failed, and continued to fail, his anxiety grew greater to save the doomed men. I dare not say how many thousand miles those words of the President traveled backward and forward in that ninety minutes. They went to New York, to Buffalo, to Cincinnati, Pittsburg, to Wheeling, and elsewhere, often returning like Noah’s dove of mercy, and as often sent out again. They reached Cumberland at last, and thence flashed down to Harper’s Ferry in time.