John Brown (1800-1859) was an abolitionist who took direct action to free slaves by force. Following his raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in mid-October 1859, he was convicted of treason, conspiracy, and murder. One of the most controversial abolitionists, Brown was regarded by some as a martyr and by others as a common assassin. Brown's dignified bearing in prison and at his trial moved
many spectators. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Brown's death would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross." This image shows a heroic Brown being adored by a slave mother and child as he walks to his execution on December 2, 1859.
Late on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one armed followers stole into the town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept. The men--among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave--hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an "army of emancipation" to overturn the institution of
slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Col. Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town's United States arsenal and
its rifle works.
The upper hand which nighttime surprise had afforded the raiders quickly eroded, and by the evening of October 17, the conspirators who were still alive were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on October 18 to storm the building. (The arrest of John Brown by Union General Robert E. Lee)
Brown and most of his men were veteran foes of slavery. In 1849, he and his family had settled at a black community at North Elba in New York state. Brown had become increasingly militant during the 1850s in his quest to eradicate slavery. In 1855, he had migrated to the Kansas Territory to become the leader of a band of anti-slavery guerrillas. He lead a nighttime raid in retaliation for the
sack of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces and helped to liberate slaves and to safely transport them to Canada.
In 1858, Brown drafted a constitiution for a provisional United States government of which he was elected president with which he intended to establish an effective means of freeing the slaves of Maryland and Virginia. Most of his raiders held comissions in the government's army. Apparently, only the black conspirators held no comissions. Even the ill-concieved plan for the raid had been
germinating in Brown's thoughts for some time; he had moved to nearby Kennedy Farm in preparation in July.
Brown claimed he, "knew the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they would never consent to give up their slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads," and that a slave-holding community was, by its nature, in a state of war and, thus drastic actions were necessary and justified. His supporters felt they had a moral imperative to take action:
Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man's, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.Jeramiah Goldsmith Anderson
July 5, 1859.
In his account of the raid for Century Magazine, Alexander Boteler pointed out that, "…the usages of ordinary warfare had been more than once disregarded, during the day, by the belligerents on both sides." Harper's Ferry mayor Fountain Beckham was clearly unarmed and his hands were in his pockets when he was shot by the insurgents; raider Dangerfield Newby's ears were cut off as
trophies; and Jeramiah Anderson was tortured and beaten as he lay dying. Some considered the Harper's Ferry raid to have been the first skirmish of the Civil War:
then and there the first shot was fired and the first blood was shed-the blood of an unoffending
free negro…there and then occurred the first forcible seizure of public property; the first attempt to "hold, occupy, and possess" a military post of the Government; the first outrage perpetrated on the old flag; the first armed resistance
to national troops; the first organized effort to establish a Provisional Government at the South, in opposition to that of the United States; the first overt movements to subvert the authority of the constitution and to destroy the integrity of the Union.Alexander Boteler
"Recollections of the John Brown Raid by a Virginian Who Witnessed the Fight"
Century Magazine
26: 399-411
July 1883.
The raid enflamed the emotions of parties on both sides of the conflict while Northern and Southern press fanned the flames that had been smoldering hotter and hotter with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Dred Scott decision, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Fear and anger had now totally eclipsed any other motivations which had been
factors in the battle over slavery.
Fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized in Brown an unparallelled devotion, "I could live for the slave, but he could die for him." Brown had lost two sons in the raid. Another son had already sacrificed his life for the anti-slavery cause in the Osawatomie raid.
Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life, for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this Slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,--I say LET IT BE DONE.For his actions, Brown was quickly tried and convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and sentenced to death by hanging. The simplicity and sincerity of Brown's address after his sentencing astounded listeners on both sides of the issue. While awaiting his fate in the Harper's Ferry jail, he received a sympathetic letter from Massachusetts writer and abolitionist
Lydia Maria Child. "I think of you night and day," she wrote, "bleeding in prison, surrounded by hostile faces, sustained only by trust in God and your own heart. I long to nurse you--to speak to you sisterly words of sympathy and consolation."
Brown declined her offer, asking instead that she contribute to the financial support of his surviving family which included two daughters-in-law whose husbands had been killed in the raid. "Would you not," he wrote, "as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children
with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?"
Child's support of Brown occasioned a bitter exchange of letters which reveals the depth of animosity between abolitionists and Southern slaveholders in the wake of Brown's raid. "I and thousands of others," Child wrote Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, "feel a natural impulse of sympathy for the brave and suffering man. Perhaps God, who sees the inmost of our souls, perceives some such
sentiment in your heart also."
"I could not permit an insult even to woman in her walk of charity among us," Governor Wise responded, "though it to be to one who whetted knives of butchery for our mothers, sisters, daughters and babes. We have no sympathy with your sentiments of sympathy with Brown."
His actions made John Brown a martyr to abolitionists. Of the five conspirators who escaped from the engine house and were never caught, four served in the Union Army during the Civil War (only Brown's son Owen did not.) The Harper's Ferry raid remains one of the more controversial events of the country's history. Frederick Douglass sums up his assessment of his friend's actions:
Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harper's Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harper's Ferry to save his life. The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? and to this I
answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause.
