John Brown's Harpers Ferry Raid

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.  I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done." 

                                       John Brown, December 2, 1859, the morning of his hanging.

Who was John Brown?

John Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised by moderate evangelical parents in Ohio from the age of 5.  Brown married in 1820 and moved to Pennsylvania, then back to Ohio.  Brown had several ups and downs as a farmer and tanner, and in 1833 his wife died.  He married a teenager and they had 15 children.  John Brown became an abolitionist because of the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy.

In 1836, Brown moved to Springfield, Massachusetts and joined the abolitionists in the community.  He heard lectures by Sojourner Truth and FrederickDouglass.  After speaking with Brown one evening, Douglass wrote: "In 1847, after speaking at the Free Church, Douglass spent a night speaking with Brown, after which he wrote, "From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man's strong impressions."  Brown helped transform Springfield into a major center for abolitionism and one of the most important stops on the underground railroad.

In response to the fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Brown founded a militant group to prevent slaves' capture—the League of Gileadites.  In the Bible, Mount Gilead was the place where only the bravest of Israelites would gather together to face an invading enemy.  Brown founded the League with these words, 

 "Nothing so charmes the American people as personal bravery. [Blacks] would have ten times the number [of white friends than] they now have were they but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white neighbors, and to indulge in idle show, in ease, and in luxury."

Upon leaving Springfield in 1850, Brown instructed the League to act "quickly, quietly, and efficiently" to protect slaves that escaped to Springfield.  From Brown's founding of the League of Gileadites onward, not one person was ever taken back into slavery from Springfield.

In 1855, Brown learned from his adult sons in the Kansas territory that their families were completely unprepared to face attack, and that pro-slavery forces there were militant.  Determined to protect his family and oppose the advances of slavery supporters, Brown left for Kansas, enlisting a son-in-law and making several stops just to collect funds and weapons. 

Several people provided Brown some solicited financial support, knowing he was going to participate in the violence in Kansas.  As he went westward, however, Brown found more militant support in his home state of Ohio.  Once in Kansas, Brown and others murdered 5 pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie creek and battled other pro-slavery groups.


Preparing for the Harper's Ferry Raid

By November 1856, Brown had returned to the New England to raise funds.  Amos Adams Lawrence, a prominent Boston merchant, secretly gave Brown a large amount of cash.  William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker and George Luther Stearns, and Samuel Gridley Howe also supported Brown.  A group of six wealthy abolitionists – Sanborn, Higginson, Parker, Stearns, Howe, and Gerrit Smith – agreed to offer Brown financial support for his antislavery activities; they would eventually provide most of the financial backing for the raid on Harpers Ferry, and would come to be known as the Secret Six (or the Committee of Six).  Brown often requested help from them with "no questions asked" and it remains unclear of how much of Brown's scheme the Secret Six were aware.

On January 7, 1858, the Massachusetts Committee pledged to provide 200 Sharps Rifles and ammunition, which were being stored at Tabor, Iowa.  In March, Brown contracted Charles Blair of Collinsville, Connecticut for 1,000 pikes.  

Brown was introduced to Hugh Forbes, an English mercenary, who had experience as a military tactician that he gained while fighting with Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy in 1848.  Over several weeks, the two men put together a "Well-Matured Plan" for fighting slavery in the South. The men quarreled over many of the details. In November, their troops left for Kansas.  Forbes had not received his salary and was still feuding with Brown, so he returned to the East instead of venturing into Kansas.  He threatened to expose the plot to the government.

As the October elections saw a free-state victory, Kansas was quiet.  Brown made his men return to Iowa, where he fed them tidbits of his Virginia scheme.  In January 1858, Brown went to visit Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. There he discussed his plans with Douglass, and reconsidered Forbes' criticisms.  Brown wrote a Provisional Constitution that would create a government for a new state in the region of his invasion.  Brown then met the Secret Six.  He indicated that, along with recruits, he would go into the South equipped with weapons to do "Kansas work".

In early 1859, Brown traveled through Ohio, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts to draw up more support for the cause.  On May 9, he delivered a lecture in Concord, Massachusetts.  In attendance were Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  Brown reconnoitered with the Secret Six.  In June he paid his last visit to his family in North Elba, N.Y. before he departed for Harpers Ferry.


The Raid - October 16, 1859

In late September, the 950 pikes arrived from Charles Blair.  Kagi's draft plan called for a brigade of 4,500 men, but Brown had only 21 men (16 white and 5 black: three free blacks, one freed slave, and a fugitive slave).  They ranged in age from 21 to 49.  Twelve had been with Brown in Kansas raids.  On the way, Brown met with Douglass in Pennsylvania who warned Brown that his mission would fail.  Nevertheless, Brown continued to Harper's Ferry.

On October 16, 1859, Brown (leaving three men behind as a rear guard) led 18 men in an attack on the Harpers Ferry Armory.  The armory was a large complex of buildings that contained 100,000 muskets and rifles, which Brown planned to seize and use to arm local slaves.  They would then head south, drawing off more and more slaves from plantations, and fighting only in self-defense.  As Frederick Douglass and Brown's family testified, his strategy was essentially to deplete Virginia of its slaves, causing the institution to collapse in one county after another, until the movement spread into the South, essentially wreaking havoc on the economic viability of the pro-slavery states.

Initially, the raid went well, and they met no resistance entering the town.  They cut the telegraph wires and easily captured the armory, which was being defended by a single watchman.   They next rounded up hostages from nearby farms, including Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington.  They also spread the news to the local slaves that their liberation was at hand. 

Things started to go wrong when an eastbound Baltimore & Ohio train approached the town.  The train's baggage master tried to warn the passengers.  Brown's men yelled for him to halt and then opened fire. The baggage master, Hayward Shepherd, became the first casualty of Brown's war against slavery.  Ironically,Shepherd was a free black man.  Two of the hostages' slaves also died in the raid.  For some reason, after the shooting of Shepherd, Brown allowed the train to continue on its way.

A.J. Phelps, the Through Express passenger train conductor, sent a telegram to W.P. Smith, Master of Transportation of the B. & O. R. R., Baltimore:

Monocacy, 7.05 A. M., October 17, 1859.    Express train bound east, under my charge, was stopped this morning at Harper's Ferry by armed abolitionists.  They have possession of the bridge and the arms and armory of the United States.   Myself and Baggage Master have been fired at, and Hayward, the colored porter, is wounded very severely, being shot through the body, the ball entering the body below the left shoulder blade and coming out under the left side.  

News of the raid reached Baltimore early that morning and then on to Washington by late morning.  In the meantime, local farmers, shopkeepers, and militia pinned down the raiders in the armory by firing from the heights behind the town.  Some of the local men were shot by Brown's men.  At noon, a company of militia seized the bridge, blocking the only escape route.  Brown then moved his prisoners and remaining raiders into the engine house, a small brick building atthe entrance to the armory.  He had the doors and windows barred and loopholes were cut through the brick walls.  The surrounding forces barraged the engine house, and the men inside fired back with occasional fury.  Brown sent his son Watson and another supporter out under a white flag, but the angry crowd shot them.  Intermittent shooting then broke out, and Brown's son Oliver was wounded.  His son begged his father to kill him and end his suffering, but Brown said "If you must die, die like a man."  A few minutes later, Oliver was dead.  The exchanges lasted throughout the day.
 

By the morning of October 18 the engine house  was surrounded by a company of U.S. Marines under the command of First Lieutenant Israel Greene, USMC, with Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army in overall command.  Army First Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart approached under a white flag and told the raiders that their lives would be spared if they surrendered.  Brown refused, saying, "No, I prefer to die here."  Stuart then gave a signal.  The Marines used sledge hammers and a makeshift battering-ram to break down the engine room door.  Brown was struck him several times, wounding his head.  In three minutes Brown and the survivors were captives. 

Altogether Brown's men killed four people, and wounded nine.  Ten of Brown's men were killed (including his sons Watson and Oliver).  Five of Brown's men escaped (including his son Owen), andseven were captured along with Brown.   Among the raiders killed were John Henry Kagi, Lewis Sheridan Leary and Dangerfield Newby. 

The Trial  (original newspaper report of the trial)  

The Commonwealth of Virginian charged Brown with murder, inciting a slave rebellion, and treason against the Virginia government and hurried him to trial. A Virginia lawyer was initially appointed to represent Brown and tried to get the trial held up until lawyers from the North could get their. The judge denied the request but lawyers began arriving on the second day of trial. Subpoena requests for character witnesses were not delivered by the court. The defense tried to get Brown declared insane, but Brown argued he wasn't and demanded to be heard. Over the course of the trial Brown put slavery on trial as reporters printed stories from the courtroom.  

Brown was convicted on all three charges.  After his conviction, Brown stated:  

" [...] had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.  This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God.  I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament.  That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them."  I endeavored to act up to that instruction.  I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons.  I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.  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 submit; so let it be done!"  
 

 Brown was hung on December 2, 1859.  His coffin was then put on a train to take it away from Virginia to his family homestead in New York for burial.    John Anthony Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green were hanged after a subsequent trial.

Effects of the events

On December 14, 1859, the U.S. Senate appointed a bipartisan committee to investigate the Harpers Ferry raid and to determine whether any citizens contributed arms, ammunition or money to John Brown's men.  The Democrats attempted to implicate the Republicans in the raid; the Republicans tried to disassociate themselves from Brown and his acts.

The Senate committee heard testimony from 32 witnesses.  The report, authored by chairman James Murray Mason, a pro-slavery Democrat from Virginia, was published in June 1860.  It found no direct evidence of a conspiracy, but implied that the raid was a result of Republican doctrines.  The two committee Republicans published a minority report, but were apparently more concerned about denying Northern culpability than clarifying the nature of Brown's efforts.

The investigation was performed in a tense environment in both houses of Congress.  One senator wrote to his wife that "The members on both sides are mostly armed with deadly weapons and it is said that the friends of each are armed in the galleries."  After a heated exchange of insults, a Mississippian attacked Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania with a Bowie knife in the House of Representatives.  Stevens' friends prevented a fight.

Southern slave owners, hearing initial reports that hundreds of abolitionists were involved, were relieved the effort was so small.  Yet they feared other abolitionists would emulate Brown and attempt to lead slave rebellions.  Therefore, the South reorganized the decrepit militia system.  These militias, well-established by 1861, became a ready-made Confederate army, making the South better prepared for war.

Southern Democrats charged that Brown's raid was an inevitable consequence of the Republican Party's political platform, which they associated with abolitionism.

  

Many abolitionists in the North viewed Brown as a martyr, sacrificed for the sins of the nation. In the North immediately after the raid, large memorial meetings took place, church bells rang, minute guns were fired, and famous writers such as Emerson and Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown.  William Lloyd Garrison published a column in The Liberator, judging Brown's raid as "well-intended but sadly misguided" and "an enterprise so wild and futile as this."  However, he defended Brown's character from detractors in the Northern and Southern press, and argued that those who supported the principles of the American Revolution could not consistently oppose Brown's raid.  On the day Brown was hanged, Garrison reiterated the point in Boston: "whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections."

 
After the Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote, "His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him."
 
In light of the upcoming elections in November 1860, the Republicans tried to distance themselves as much as possible from Brown, condemning the raid and dismissing its leader as an insane fanatic.

 
Abraham Lincoln distancing the Republican Party from John Brown's actions  (Feb. 27, 1860)