Remembering John Brown
by Sarah Badawi
Just over 160 years ago, radical abolitionist leader John Brown launched a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in what was then Virginia (now West Virginia). Eighteen men fought with “Captain” Brown. Five of them were black; of the 13 white men, two were Brown’s sons. Their aim was to seize the armory in Harpers Ferry and use the weapons there to equip a guerrilla army of liberated slaves that would then free the rest of the slaves in Virginia and, Brown believed, send such a shock wave through the nation that it would ultimately force an end to the institution of slavery.
John Brown’s famous raid on Harpers Ferry did not end slavery. In fact, it would take a devastating and bloody Civil War to abolish legal human bondage in the United States. But Brown’s raid was a crucial moment that helped to set the stage for the larger conflagration of the Civil War.
Yet the way that John Brown is remembered, especially in textbooks, is often as a wild-eyed extremist, even a madman. One high school textbook contrasts him with Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in a representative passage: “Both Lincoln and Douglas believed the slavery crisis had to be resolved within the framework of the nation’s laws. Abolitionist John Brown felt no such constraints. Brown viewed himself as an angel of God, avenging the evil of slavery.”
The Sectional Period
John Brown’s engagement with the times in which he lived was profoundly shaped by his upbringing. He was raised in a household rooted in the old
Puritan tradition. His father’s religious convictions included a fundamental opposition to slavery. This upbringing and John’s friendship when he was 12 years-old with an enslaved boy of the same age only cemented his passionate abolitionism born out of strict religious faith.
With this background, it is not surprising that John Brown would emerge as a critical figure during the sectional period in U.S. history, marked by the question of whether or where slavery would continue or expand. As the nation acquired and populated new territory through conquest, annexation, and settlement, relations between the competing Northern and Southern sections of the country grew ever more tense.
After the murder in 1837 of abolitionist minister and newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy by a mob in Illinois, John Brown publicly vowed to fight slavery. At a prayer meeting in Hudson, Ohio, he stood, raised his right hand, and said, “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!”
But policy makers remained unwilling to tackle the fundamental question of slavery head on. In 1820, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state in order to maintain a balance between free and slave states in the U.S. Senate. The Compromise of 1850 included an expanded Fugitive Slave Law, a major concession to Southerners in Congress and their proslavery supporters.
‘Bleeding Kansas’
Sectional violence escalated after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Signed by President Franklin Pierce, this law stipulated that the newly created territories of Kansas and Nebraska could decide for themselves whether they would seek to join the Union as slave or free states.
As soon as the law was passed, men known as “Border Ruffians” streamed into Kansas from the neighboring slave state of Missouri to promote a proslavery agenda. They used voter fraud, intimidation, and violence.
The proslavery faction’s opponents in the fight for Kansas were known as “Free State” or “Free Soil” settlers. They didn’t want to see slavery extend into Kansas, but with few exceptions, they were not abolitionists. They had come to Kansas for economic opportunity but did not want to compete with black labor. Their deep-seated racism led them to include a clause in their 1855 constitution that prohibited all black people — slave or free — from coming to Kansas.
But the Free Soilers’ reasons mattered little to proslavery forces in Kansas who, with their Border Ruffian supporters, carried out countless acts of violence. They committed murder and wholesale attacks on Free Soil towns. The majority of the people murdered during this period lost their lives to proslavery forces.
In May 1856, Border Ruffians stormed the town of Lawrence. They destroyed the offices of two antislavery newspapers, looted and torched homes, and leveled a hotel with cannon fire.
In reaction, Brown’s supporters killed five men near Pottawatomie Creek. All five were leaders in the proslavery community. However, four men, two women, and one teenage boy whose lives were spared that night were not. The victims were taken from cabins late at night, questioned about their position on slavery, led a couple of hundred yards away, and killed with large, heavy swords by stabbing and slashing.
By all accounts, Brown directed the gruesome killings but did not carry them out himself. When confronted the following day by his son Jason who called the murders an “uncalled for, wicked act,” Brown answered: “God is my judge. We were justified under the circumstances.”
Brown was reacting to the sack of Lawrence and to direct threats against himself and his family by those targeted at Pottawatomie. These events and other brutal murders of Free Soil settlers combined to convince Brown that an institution as inherently violent as slavery could only be overthrown by violence.
The Raid on Harpers Ferry
Since at least 1847, well before his time in Kansas, Brown had been devising a bold plan for liberating slaves throughout the South. But it was after the battles in the territory that he headed back east and obtained financial backing for his mission to strike at slavery in the heart of the region where it was strongest. In 1858, he secured a commitment from a small group of prominent abolitionist leaders in Boston and New York known as the “Secret Six.” They used their social, economic, and political connections to provide support for Brown’s mission.
In the meantime, Brown and a small group of men crossed into Missouri from Kansas in December 1858 and freed 11 slaves from three small plantations. Deeds like this helped 18 men decide to join John Brown in the planned attack on Harpers Ferry. Without their support, the backing of the Secret Six would have meant little. John Brown’s single-mindedness proved essential in inspiring these men to take what would likely be deadly risks, especially for the black men who joined his cause.
The details of the events of the raid itself are well-documented. Brown and his men headed straight for the armory, captured its watchman, and took control of its weapons, as well as the town’s bridges and railroad lines. They cut telegraph lines and took as prisoners many of the town’s most prominent citizens, including the mayor and a slave-owning descendent of George Washington. They gathered and armed about 50 slaves. Four townspeople were killed during the raid, as were ten of Brown’s men. The raiders hunkered down with their hostages in the armory’s engine house, which they held for over 30 hours.
When word got to the federal government that the armory had been seized by “armed abolitionists,” the closest federal troops were 90 marines in Washington, D.C., who were quickly dispatched to Harpers Ferry. There, they were put under the command of U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee, who arrived with his aide, Lieutenant Jeb Stuart. Lee planned, and Stuart helped, to storm the engine house and capture Brown and his surviving comrades-in-arms.
Brown was gravely injured in the marines’ taking of the engine house, and the officials who took him into custody feared he might not survive to be prosecuted. In an 1881 speech looking back on the raid and its impact, Frederick Douglass recalled Brown’s final days: “his captors hurried him to Charlestown . . . , placed him in prison strongly guarded by troops, and before his wounds were healed he was brought into court, subjected to a nominal trial, convicted of high treason and inciting slaves to insurrection, and was executed.”
John Brown’s Impact
The raid on Harpers Ferry did not have the result Brown hoped for, but it was still a pivotal moment in U.S. history. This was partly due to the fact that it did not succeed. Because he was captured alive, he had multiple, public opportunities to explain his aims and his actions. He had a public (and closely followed) trial ending with his execution, which made people in the United States hear from him and about him in great detail.
Southerners pointed to the raid as evidence that Northerners were, in fact, conspiring to invade the region, steal their slaves, and force an end to the institution of slavery. Free and enslaved black people, as well as white Northerners, became targets of violence throughout the South. Newspapers reported countless people being whipped; tarred and feathered; and lynched.
In a speech to his Senate colleagues, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee — who would later become Lincoln’s vice president and successor after Lincoln’s assassination — charged that “old man Brown was nothing more than a murderer, a robber, a thief, and a traitor.”
The raid also fueled secessionist feeling that had already been building. The election of Abraham Lincoln the following year pushed that to another level.
Lincoln, for his part and like many Northerners, distanced himself (and the Republican Party) from Brown’s use of violence. But many other Northerners — especially abolitionists who had previously been divided across a number of factions — rallied around Brown, especially in the wake of his execution. Henry David Thoreau spoke of him as a hero and a martyr who personified “transcendent moral greatness.”
In his 1881 speech, Frederick Douglass recalled the aftermath of Brown’s capture and how the wounded fighter challenged those who would hold him to account. Douglass stressed the impact of Brown’s words under interrogation and during his perfunctory trial, as well as his forceful articulation of his opposition to slavery: “They could kill him, but they could not answer him.”
Brown had long maintained that ending slavery would require bloodshed. We cannot know if he fathomed that it would take place on a scale far greater than his attacks at Pottawatomie and Harpers Ferry, much less that it would be carried out by the U.S. government and states that would secede from the Union. Though we may question his methods, we cannot argue with his warning to his interrogators in 1859: “You had better . . . prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up. . . . You may dispose of me very easily . . . but this question is still to be settled — this Negro question I mean — the end of that is not yet.”
Lewis Sheridan Leary escaped from slavery in North Carolina and was living in northeast Ohio when he joined John Brown’s efforts in early 1859. Leary was killed during the raid on Harpers Ferry. His widow, Mary Patterson Leary, later remarried and moved to Kansas, where she helped to raise her grandson and told him “long, beautiful stories about people who wanted to make the Negroes free.” That grandson was poet Langston Hughes, who remembered those stories in this 1931 poem.
October 16: The Raid
by Langston Hughes
Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.
John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another —
And died
For your sake.
Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground —
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town —
Perhaps
You will recall
This article was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of Bill of Rights in Action (BRIA), the quarterly curricular magazine of Constitutional Rights Foundation. Click here for a classroom activity on this article, plus writing and discussion questions for use with high school students. You can also subscribe to BRIA for free here.
