A Fight to the Last Pike Among the many props that John Brown took with him on an 1857 fund-raising tour across New England was a bowie knife that he allegedly took from a vanquished foe during his "Bleeding Kansas" campaign. While passing through Connecticut, he met with a blacksmith named Charles Blair, who helped him use the knife as a model for a double-edged spear, mounted on a six-foot-long wooden shaft. Brown explained to Blair that such spears, cheap enough to churn out in mass quantities, would be kept by Free State Kansans "in their log cabins" as a last-ditch defense for themselves and their cause. By the time Blair finished the 950 pikes Brown had ordered, the abolitionist had changed his plan for the crude weaponry. "Give a slave a pike and you make him a man," Brown explained as he plotted his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., the goal of which was to raise an army of blacks to cripple the institution of slavery. Brown's mission at Harpers Ferry failed, of course, and the pikes never made it into the hands of many slaves. But the discovery of the weapons during his capture gave the fearsome looking pikes some degree of threatening celebrity. Edmund Ruffin, one of the most virulent Southern ideologues advocating for secession, acquired several of Brown's pikes and sent them to the governors of each slave-holding state. He affixed a label to the handles: "Sample of the favors designed for us by our NORTHERN BRETHREN." The pikes were certainly one of the stranger curiosities from Brown's curious existence, and even recent histories treat Brown's pikes as a symbolic folly. However, the idea clearly was not so strange to Americans of the 1850s and 1860s. Though he was no relation to the antislavery zealot, Georgia Gov. Joseph E. Brown was particularly inspired by Ruffin's gift and the potential utility of his namesake's weapon. On Feb. 20, 1862, Governor Brown asked Georgia's blacksmiths and mechanics to make 10,000 "six foot staff[s] with an 18-inch knife." Indeed, even their intended use was the same. As one Confederate general recalled, they were "a sort of rude bayonet, or steel lance, fastened, not to guns, but to long poles or handles, and were to be given to men who had no other arms." As the governor explained, "I need to arm every able-bodied person in the state of Georgia." Even as the South was holding its own on the Civil War battlefields, Deep South politicians were making plans to fight to the last man. There were reasons to believe that day might not be far off, in fact. Brown's embrace of the pike as a defensive weapon was a direct reaction to the days-old news from Fort Donelson, Tenn. That victory, which opened the way to the Tennessee heartland and guaranteed Kentucky stayed in the Union, seemed full of bad omens for the Confederacy. What especially disturbed Brown and others, though, was how helpless the civilian population had been in the face of the Union military onslaught. "Had 5,000 reserves thus armed and well trained to the use of these terrible weapons been brought to the charge at the proper time," he explained, "who can say that the victory would not have been ours" at Fort Donelson? And while we think of the Civil War as the prototype of industrial warfare, at the time the pike was hardly ancient history. The Duke of Wellington had put 79,000 pikes in the hands of the Spanish against Napoleon, and they had proved superior weapons against cavalry charges during the War of 1812. "If pikes had been useful in the hands of past military men," Governor Brown asked rhetorically, "why would they not be effective in the hands of Georgia soldiers?" But if the governor's plan spoke to a certain early desperation in the South, it also underscored diverging Confederate strategies - indeed, diverging ideas about the Confederacy itself. Governor Brown was a rebel's rebel; he considered President Jefferson Davis a dangerous tyrant and used every opportunity to decry the mistakes of the central government in Richmond. He railed against Confederate conscription as a "dangerous usurpation ... of the reserved rights of the States" and said that Davis's policies were "at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution." Brown's disagreements with Davis stemmed from a set of basic contradictions: How could the Confederacy run a government predicated on state's rights and simultaneously raise taxes, conscript soldiers and centralize authority in order to run a war? Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. Moreover, Joseph Brown's pikes emphasized the real military challenges the Confederacy faced. He recognized, as many other military minds have since argued, that a defensive strategy might have saved the Confederacy. But he also saw his pikes as the fitting last defense of a people of principle. "The late reverses which have attended our arms, show the absolute necessity of renewed energy and determination on our part," Brown explained. We are left to choose between freedom at the end of a desperate and heroic struggle and submission to tyranny, followed by the most abject and degraded slavery to which a patriotic and generous people were ever exposed ... Independence or death should be the watchword and reply of every freeborn son of the South. But instead of taking Brown up in his call for a pike centered defense, Southerners simply acknowledged the governor's passion for the weapons. Stonewell Jackson requested similar weaponry a month later from Robert E. Lee and pikes were eventually produced for the state arsenals of Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia. And for a while the weapons incited a certain fervor among the public. As the periodical The Southern Watchman explained, "It is said the Yankees exhibit a natural aversion to cold steel - if so, they will scatter when they see these [pikes]." Eventually Georgian blacksmiths churned out 7,000 pikes. But they were treated as little more than a novelty, a relic of strategies abandoned for the more dashing and inspiring offensives of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Joe Brown's cold steel saw as little action as John Brown's Connecticut forged pikes. By the time the Union Army pushed into Georgia, in the fall of 1863, the population had been worn down by years of aggressive, but pointless, Southern campaigns into Union territory. In the end, offense proved too attractive, even for rebels who claimed to be defending their rights. Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook. Sources: Testimony of Charles Blair, Mason Report; Charleston Mercury, Dec. 5, 1860; John B. Gordon, "Reminiscences of the Civil War"; Allen D. Candler, The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia; Joseph H. Parks, "Joseph E. Brown of Georgia"; James McPherson, "Battle Cry of Freedom"; The Southern Watchman, Feb. 12, 1862. R. Blakeslee Gilpin is an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and the author of "John Brown Still Lives!: America's Long Reckoning With Violence, Equality, and Change."