Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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found a powerful symbol of their own deepest longing to confront and defeat the
slaveholding interest.
John Brown became a household name for his guerilla fighting against proslav-
ery forces in Kansas and a hero to abolitionists for his bold, if abortive, defense of
the antislavery settlement at Osawatomie. Along with his antislavery militancy,
Brownalsoexemplifiedthebiracialismthat characterized the more aggressive
wing of the A merican antislavery movement. Granted land by Gerrit Smith in
the Adirondack Mountains, Brown had moved to the region in the late 1840s.
Brown and his large family lived in North Elba, a community made up largely of
free blacks who had also received small landholdings from Smith as part of an
experiment in independent black property holding. By all accounts, Brown related
to his black neighbors on equal terms, avoiding the paternalistic attitudes that
some white abolitionists exhibited toward African Americans. During the decade
they resided in North Elba, moreover, the Browns were heavily involved in the
Underground Railroad, an informal , biracial network committed to helpi ng
fugitive slaves escape from bondage.
By 1858, the basic alliance tha t underwrote the Harpers Fe rry Raid had been
formed. Like the six abolitionists who supported him, John Brown had come to
believe that violence was both a legitimate and necessary weapon against an
increasingly powerful and arrogant slave power. By working together, he believed,
whites and blacks, enslaved and free, could end the system of slavery and purify
the country of its central sin. For the abolitionists, Brown was the man they had
been looking for—someone who had a history of working effectively with blacks
and who was willing to die if necessary to defeat slavery.
An Antislavery Revolution
JohnBrown’splantoraidtheHarpersFerryArmorywasbuiltfirmlyuponhis
experience as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Having concealed scores
of fugitive slaves in the mountains of upstate New York, Brown was familiar with
the uses of rugged terrain as hiding places and bases of operation. Yet Brown’s
vision for t he Harpers Ferry operation was also a significant departure from his
earlier ac tivities. As historian David Reynolds has argued, Brown intended not
simply to use the Appalachian Mountains as a hiding place for small groups of
slaves fleeing to the North, but rather to use weapons captured f rom the armory
at Harpers Ferry to create a slave army capable of invading the South itself. Using
the mountain s as a place of refuge and a bas e of operations, the new army would
target regions of the South where the population of slaves was largest. O nce the
slaves of these regions were liberated, the army would protect their movement into
the mountains, where they would be defended to the last against any attempt at
416 Harpers Fer ry Raid (1859)
recapture. The maroon community established by these repea ted raids w ould
bec ome an independent society with its own laws and even its own constitution.
Indeed, prior to the raid, Brown had written a “Provisional Constitution” to govern
the new society he envision ed. Ultimately, Brown believed, the mass exodus of
slaves from the plantation South and the ensuing terror caused by the raids would
destroy slavery forever.
To consider a maneuver on the scale that Brown envisioned, he needed financial
and logistical support as well as a group of men willing to participate in what
would be an extremely dangerous operation. More than two years before the raid,
Brown had gone to Boston to secure backers among leading abolitionists for a
major southern foray. Trading on the fame he h ad gained for his wars in Kansas,
he met with activists like Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Stearns, whose willingness to use
violence against the slaveholding South had grown during recent clashes over
the Fugitive Slave Act. Along with the New York abolitionist Ger rit Smith, these
men would become known as the “Secret Six” for their monetary support of
Brown’s raid. In addition to their antislavery militancy, many of these men been
influenced by transcendentalism, a romantic philosophy that emphasized the prior-
ity of the individual conscience over unjust human laws or institutions. In John
Brown, these men found a powerful example of someone willing to live out this
philosophy. Although several of the backers expressed doubts as Brown revealed
the details of his plan over the next two years, his powerful personality and will-
ingness to sacrifice himself for the cau se overcame their doubts. They ultimately
raised over $4,000 for his venture. Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who also
knew of Brown’s plan, d eclined to participate. Although he knew and admired
Brown, Douglass regarded the raid as doomed to failure.
Brown believed that the Harpers Ferry Armory could be captured by a small
group of men, and he assembled a group of 21 willing to follow him into the
South. The band included Brown’s sons Owen, Oliver, and Watson, as well as five
African Americans. The latter group contained Dangerfield Newby, a former slave
whose family was still held in bondage not far from Harpers Ferry, and Shields
Green, a fugitive slave who joined the raiders against the advice of Frederick
Douglass. The other raiders were recruited by Brown personally during his Kansas
activities and on speaking t ours throughout the North. But it was only when this
small grou p of men gathered in a rented far mhouse on the Ma ryland side of the
Potomac River that Brown explained the full scope of his plan to them. Citing sta-
tistics and pointing t o m aps showing where the largest concentrations of slaves
lived, Brown described his vision of a rolling invasion of the South led by slaves
armed with weapons from the armory a few miles away. He also showed them
the nearly 1,000 iron pikes that had been sent by an ally as additional weaponry
Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) 417
for the slave army. Convinced that word of the raid w ould spread like wildfire,
Brown told his men that they were about to participate in the most decisive event
in American history since the Revolution.
Events at Harpers Ferry
All of these ideas and plans depended upon the successful capture of the Harpers
Ferry Armory, the arrival of slaves from the surrounding areas, and their willing-
ness to participate in the liberation system Brown had devised. As the men could
tell from their reconnaissance of the area, the town of Harpers Ferry was located
in a peninsula of land where t he Shenandoah and Potomac rivers converged.
Despite a secluded appearance, it was easily accessible by road to Baltimore and
Washington, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad passed b y the town on the
bridge spanning the Potomac. Though the population was only about 5,000, the
community was significant because of a federal arsenal built in the early 19th cen-
tury that manufactured 10,000 weapons per year for the U.S. military. The narrow
main street in the town contained the weapons factories themselves, the arsenal
where they were housed, and an engine house where the facility’s firefighting
equipment was kept. Some distance away was a rifle works where muskets were
produced. On the morning of Sunday, October 16, 1859, Brown told his men that
they would attack just after dark that very evening. The raiders would begin by
seizing the bridges over the two rivers. Success then depended upon a quick cap-
ture of the armory, arsenal, engine house, and rifle works, while other raiders ral-
lied the local slaves. Just after sunset, the raid began.
The raid commenced wel l as Brown’s men secure d the bridges , cut the te le-
graph wires, and seized the armory c omplex and rifle works with almost no
opposition. Several hostages were taken during these initial operations, and Brown
planned to use them if necessary to negotiate his own escape and that of his men.
At the same time, six of the raiders traveled through the surrounding countryside
hoping to spread the news of the event among the local slaves. One of the first hos-
tages taken in this part of the operation was Colonel Lewis Washington, a distant
relative of George Washington, and whose plantation was located a few miles
away from Harpers Ferry. Washington and his slaves were taken back to Brown’s
headquarters at the armory, where he was joined by a n eighboring planter and
his slaves who had endured the same fate. But if these events unfolded as
expected, Brown seemed surprised that the slaves he had liberated were ambiva-
lent at best about what had happened to them. He was also dismayed that there
was no evidence of a more general uprising among slaves in the surrounding
region. Certain that southern blacks would leap at the chance to strike out against
slaveholders, he failed t o account for the confusion and fear of reprisal that such
418 Harpers Fer ry Raid (1859)
events inevitably produced in them. This lukewarm response at least temporarily
undermined Brown’s faith in the larger plan and seems to have immobilized him.
Instead of ordering his men to take what weapons they could carry into the
mountains west of Harpers Ferry, Brown del ayed and pre pared for a dramatic
and perhaps final stand against the forces of slavery.
A major reason why that final stand came so quickly was that Brown and his
men had failed to prevent the Baltimore and Ohio train from carrying the news
of the raid east. When the train stopped at the Potomac Bridge in the early hours
of October 17, its crew was met with gunfire from raiders Oli v er Brown and Stewart
Taylor. Yet only two hours later , Brown inexplicably told his men to release the train
and its passengers. At the next stop, the conductor wired news of the raid to
Baltimore, and from there it spread rapidly over the entire region. By then, the town
itself was awake and in the grip of panic over the strange events unfolding in its
midst. Church bells rang out a message of danger , and soon the local militia accom-
panied by hundreds of rifle-toting citizens began gathering around the buildings
where Brown and his men were holed up. John Brown himself remained in the
armory’s engine house with a group of raiders and some hostages while an even
smaller group led by John Kagi had barricaded themselves in the rifle works. The
raiders guarding the bridges tried desperately to rejoin their comrades in the town,
but most were killed by to wnspeople before reaching safety. One of them, the former
slave Dangerfield Newby, was shot in the street near the armory, and his body was
horribly mutilated by enraged passersby.
As townspeople and raiders began a full-scale gun battle, the casualty rates
began to rise rapidly. Brown sent his son Watson and another raider out to nego-
tiate with the crowd, but they were both immediately shot to death. The rifle
works fell to the crowd soon after, and the party of raiders guarding it were
gunned down in a hail of bullets as they attempted flee across the river.
The options for Brown and his remaining raiders narrowed almost to nothing as
state and federal troops arrived at the scen e in large numbers. By th e late after-
noon, exaggerated reports that hundreds of abolitionists were attacking Harpers
Ferry had convinced President James Buchanan to send in the U.S. Marines to
restore order. The ranking officer was Colonel Robert E. Lee, a Virgi nian and a
hero of the Mexican-American War. Lee was on leave from military duty in Texas
when he received the order to take command of the Harpers Ferry mission, and he
moved with alacrity. Along with Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, another Virginian, Lee
prepared to storm the engine house at dawn on October 18. Before they attacked,
Lieutenant Stuart appeared at the engine house door with a note demanding that
Brown and his men surrender without conditions. Brown fearlessly demanded
that he and his men be allowed t o escape, and Stuart gave the signal for the
assault to begin.
Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) 419
Raiders who were still physically capable of firing weapons at tempted to fend
off the attack, but the marines easily broke into the engine house and took control.
Two of Brown’s men were killed at once, and Brown himself sustained a terrible
abdominal wound and several lacerations to the head. He and the remaining raid-
ers were quickly taken into custody, and their personal effects from the Maryland
farmhouse were confiscated. According to historian Steven Oates, the total death
toll from the Harpers Ferry Raid was 17, includ ing 10 raiders, one marine, and
three ci tizens of Harpers Ferry. John Brown’s dream of leading a slave army into
the Deep South had ended in a bloody tragedy after just 36 hours.
The Aftermath
In late October 1859, John Brown went on trial in Charles Town, Virginia, a few
miles from Harpers Ferry. The charge he faced was treason against the state of
Virginia, a crime for which he was convicted a nd sentenced to hang. During his
trial, Brown vociferously repudiated attempts by his lawyers to mount an insanity
defense. However eccentric his actions might seem to those unsympathetic to his
cause, he maintained that a deep commitment to social justice, not insanity, had
motivated his plan. He also argued that the liberation o f the slaves, not the indis-
criminate killing of innocent southern whites, was his ultimate intention. Yet it is
also clear from his testimony at the trial t hat Brown remained convinced that
American slavery was destined for a violent end. On the day of his execution, he
passed a note to one of his jailers in which he expressed certainty that America’s
guilty complicity in slavery could be purged only through blood atonement. The
bloody Civil War that followed seemed to bear out his prophecy.
The Harpers Ferry Raid indeed helped to fulfill the predictions of its chief archi-
tect. In the South, fear of slave insurrection gripped hundreds of communiti es.
When evidence from Brown’s papers showed that his raid had been financed by
a conspiracy of six northern abolitionists, southern secessionists argued that the ir
region was no longer safe i n the American Union. Only by leaving the United
States and creating a new southern Confederacy, they argued, could the threat of
a massive slave rebellion, led by northern “fana tics,” be prevented. T hese argu-
ments gained even greater legitimacy as some prominent writers and journa lists
in the North expressed admiration for Brown. Well-known New England transcen-
dentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau celebrated his
bravery and moral idealism, while promin ent northern ministers like Theodore
Tilton of New York held him up as a Christian martyr. Although Republican poli-
ticians deliberately denounced the raid, the fear generated by events at Harpers
Ferry rendered southern whites unable to distinguish between the moderate anti-
slavery principles of a man like Abraham Lincoln and the radicalism of John
Brown. The election of Lincoln, just over a year after the Harpers Ferry Raid,
420 Harpers Fer ry Raid (1859)
proved too much for Deep South states to bear. The causes of secession, and the
Civil War that followed from it, are deeply linked to the events of October 1859.
—Paul E. Teed
See also all entries under Bleeding Kansas (1854–1858).
Further Reading
Earle, Jonathan. John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief Histo ry with Documents.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008.
Fellman, Michael. This Terrible War: The Civil War and Its Aftermath.NewYork:
Longman, 2003.
Finkelman, Paul. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers
Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
Harrold, Stanley. The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
McKivigan, Joh n R. , and Harrold, Stanley, eds. Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial,
and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1999.
Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York:
Harper and Row, 1970.
Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitioni sts and the Transformation of
Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Trodd, Zoe , and Sta uffer, John. Meteor of War: The John Brown Story. Maplecrest, NY:
Brandywine Press, 20 04.
Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) 421
Brown, John (1800–1859)
John Brown was born on May 9, 180 0, in Torrington, Connecticut. His father,
Owen Brown, was an intensely religious man who saw God as an angry sovereign
demanding repentance and atonement from guilty sinners. From earliest child-
hood, Owen Brown instilled in John a hatred for sin in all its forms, but he
reserved his most powerful denunciations for the system of slavery. When the
Brown family moved to the Western Reserve of Ohio in 1805, moreover, they
found themselves in one of the most antislavery regions of the United States. Hud-
son, Ohio, where the family farm was located, was an early center of Underground
Railroad activity, and the Browns were among the founders of the Western
Reserve Antislavery Society. Along with his father’s influence, Brown’s passion-
ate, even violent opposition to s lavery stemmed from a childhood incident in
which he had wi tness ed a young slave boy around his own age bea ten vicious ly
by his master with a fireplace shovel.
As an adult, John Brown was an ambitious but totally unsuccessful entrepre-
neur. He had learned tanning, shoemaking, and farming skills from his father,
but despite an endless capacity for hard work, his busi ness failures and his debts
ranged across four states by the late 1840s. Instead of dampening his ardor for abo-
litionism, however, historian John Stauffer has shown that Brown’s failures in the
marketplace only deepened his identification with the outcast and oppressed peo-
ples. In the late 1840s, he moved his large family to North Elba, New York, a
remote l ocati on in the A diron dack Mountains wh ere a small community of free
black people had been granted land by G errit Smith, a radical abolitionist and
one of New York’s largest landowners. Brown not only interacted freely and
equally with his black neighbors, but he also used his North Elba farm as a station
on the Underground Railroad. Working closely with Gerrit Smith and black
abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Brown began to conceive of a larger slave exodus
out of the South along a route he called the “Subterranean Pass Way.” The idea of
establishing such a route, and of defending it by force, was formed in the context
of North Elba’s biracial antislavery alliance, but it would ultimately help to define
the objectives of the Harpers Ferry Raid.
During the mid-1850s, however, Brown focused much of his energy on defend-
ing freedom in the Kansas Territory, where antislavery and proslavery settlers
fought t o control the future of the region. Believing th at the inevitable war over
slavery in America had already begun in Kansas, he moved to the territory in
1855 along with his five sons. Enraged when proslavery vigilantes attacked the
free-soil capital at Lawrence, Kansas , i n May 1856, Brown led a small party of
antislavery militants against a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek in
423
eastern Kansas. The res ult was grisly as Brown and his men brutally hacked fi ve
men to death with broadswords. Over the next two years, Brown remained in
Kansas, where he esta blished a reputation as a tough guerilla fighte r. Although
the actual events were turne d to legend by admiring journalists like James
Redpath, Brown’s spirited defense of the antislavery settlement of Osawatomie
in 1857 won him adulation among eastern reformers.
Brown’s raid on Harpers F erry, then, must be understood in the context of his
lifelong opposition to slavery, his experience in forming biracial alliances against
it, and his growing belief in the use of violence to end entrenched oppression. With
the financial backing of six well-known northern abolitionists, Brown planned to
capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. With the rifles and ammuni-
tion confiscated from the arsenal, Brown intended to equip a slave army capable of
defeating any force sent out against it. Using the mountains as places of conceal-
ment and bases of operation, Brown’s slave army would invade the South and lead
a ma ssive slave exodus out of bondage. Twenty-one men joined Brown’s raid on
October 16, 1859, including three of his sons and five African Americans. Brown’s
424 Harpers Fer ry Raid (1859)
The execution of John Brown and two of his men who took part in the Harpers Ferry Raid.
After he was convicted of treason, murder, and insurrection, Brown was hanged in
Charles Town, Virginia, and quickly became a martyr in the North. (Library of Congress)
men seized the armory and engine house, but when the buildings were stormed by
the U.S. Marines, 10 of the raiders were killed, and Brown himself was wounded.
Brought to trial in Charles Town, Virginia, Brown told the court that he was com-
mitted to ending slavery even if it meant losing his life and that of his children. On
his way to the scaffold on December 2, 1859, he handed his jailer a brief note stat-
ing his belief that the sin of slavery in America would require blood atonement.
—Paul E. Teed
Further Reading
Oates, Steven B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York:
Harper and Row, 1970.
Reynold s, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the
Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Russo, Peggy A., and Paul Finkelman. Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005.
Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitioni sts and the Transformation of
Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Causes of the Civil War
John Brown’s raid on Ha rpers Ferry in 1859 highlight s the role of slavery in the
coming of the Civil War. Indeed, slavery was the most important source of sec-
tional tension before the war and generated conflict on moral, economic, and
political grounds. In the years following the American Revolution, northern states
had abolished slavery either by court decisions, as in the 1783 Quok Walker case
in Massachusetts, or by gradual emancipation laws that emancipated slaves when
they reached adulthood. But at the same time that slavery was draining out of the
North, southern states were experiencing an economic revolution based on cotton
production tha t made slavery more profitable than ever before. The invention of
the cotton gin in 1793 made it possi ble for planters to l everage their land and
slaves to produce a high volume of short staple cotton for textile producers in
Great Britain and in the North. If slavery had been a national inst itution in the
United States in 1776, it had become an almost exclusively southern one by 1850.
As slavery grew in the South in the early 19th century, moral reformers in the
North organized to abolish it. The abolitionist movement, led by white activists like
W illiam Lloyd Garrison and black leaders like Frederick Douglass, argued that slav-
ery was a sinful institution that robbed slaves of their basic humanity. They called for
its immediate abolition, and some, like John Brown, called for violent opposition to
Harpers Ferry Raid (1859) 425