October 17, 1859: John Brown Seizes Harper’s Ferry
You are there: All hope for compromise between the North and South ends with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.
The assault is over a decade in the making and is funded mainly by a “Secret Six” cabal headed by philanthropist Gerrit Smith. It is known in advance by Frederick Douglass and, most likely, Harriet Tubman. It represents the South’s worst nightmare: an army of black slaves, led by a northern white “general,” taking revenge on plantation owners.
Brown arrives at night with his initial band of 22 men, 17 white and 5 black, and quickly meets his initial objectives: controlling the B&O RR line, capturing the U.S. Arsenal and Hall’s Rifle Works, gathering up six local slaves and eleven prominent white hostages. By 1:00AM, all is well. But when Brown tries to arm the slaves with the 6 foot long pikes he has brought along, they refuse to pick them up in fear of reprisals. This changes the entire hit and run scheme, and Brown decides to make his last stand in the town itself.
At 10:30AM, Governor Henry Wise learns of the raid and calls out the Virginia Militia under Col. Robert E. Lee. Meanwhile fighting between town residents and the raiders is already taking its toll in dead and wounded. By 11:00PM, when Lee arrives with 90 troopers, Brown has retreated to the town’s Firehouse. Inside he has two dead sons, one other corpse, four able bodied defenders, and his remaining hostages.
At dawn on Monday, Lee learns for the first time that it is the notorious John Brown who is trapped inside. After a surrender offer is rejected, the military assault quickly breeches the front door, bayonets two raiders to death, and captures a wounded Brown and two other companions. A total of thirteen men die during the day: ten of Brown’s men, a black porter on the B&O train, a local grocer and militia trooper, Private Luke Quinn.
After trials occur in Richmond, seven more raiders are hanged, including John Brown. Five of the plotters escape to tell of the tale. But it doesn’t end with Brown’s death. Instead, while he is vilified in the South, northern Transcendentalists campaign to transform him from madman to martyr in a worthy cause. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line is embraced:
His martyrdom…will make the gallows glorious like the cross.
For southerners the line is pouring salt into the wound and it cannot be forgiven. But there is actually much truth there, for in many ways John Brown stands above and apart from his fellow abolitionists. He has lived and worked among black people for most of his life and is convinced about their capacity to assimilate into white society. From 1837 onward he dedicates his daily life to freeing them. His final act pushes the southern moderates over the edge and triggers the war that will finally succeed.
