Brown · 1859
John Brown at Harpers Ferry
On the night of Sunday the sixteenth of October 1859, John Brown, fifty-nine years old, the Connecticut-born, Ohio-raised abolitionist of the Scots-Irish Brown family of New England (descended on the male side from a Cromwellian-Scots Brown emigrant of the 1660s to Connecticut), led a raiding party of twenty-one men (sixteen white, five Black) down from a rented farmhouse at Kennedy Farm on the Maryland-Virginia border into the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in western Virginia, on the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers. The plan was to seize the armoury arsenal (the US Army's principal weapons depot in the Upper South, containing about a hundred thousand muskets and rifles), to distribute the arms to the local enslaved Black population of the surrounding plantations of Loudoun and Jefferson counties, and to provoke a general slave rebellion that would, on Brown's theological reading, sweep south through the Appalachian Mountains and end the institution of slavery in the United States. The raid was militarily a failure within thirty-six hours: the Virginia and Maryland militia gathered through the afternoon of the seventeenth and surrounded the armoury engine-house in which Brown and the surviving raiders were holding hostages; the federal force under Colonel Robert E. Lee of the US Army (the future Confederate commander, then a serving US Army officer) arrived overnight and took the engine-house at dawn on the eighteenth with a twelve-marine assault under Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. Ten of Brown's party were killed; Brown himself was wounded but taken alive. The political consequence of the raid was, by every careful judgment of US Civil War historiography, the trigger of the eighteen-month sequence of political events (the 1860 election of Lincoln on a free-soil platform; the December 1860 secession of South Carolina; the formation of the Confederacy in the February 1861 Montgomery convention) that produced the American Civil War of April 1861. Brown was tried at Charles Town, Virginia, on the twenty-fifth of October 1859 for treason, murder and conspiracy to incite insurrection. He was convicted on the second of November and hanged at Charles Town on the second of December 1859.
It is twenty past ten on the night of Sunday the sixteenth of October 1859, on the wooden porch of the rented Kennedy Farm farmhouse near Sharpsburg, Maryland, about five miles north of Harpers Ferry on the southern Maryland side of the Potomac, in cold late-October air with a rain coming in off the Blue Ridge to the west. He is fifty-nine years old. He is John Brown, born at Torrington, Connecticut, on the ninth of May 1800, son of Owen Brown the Calvinist tanner-and-shoemaker (a senior officer of the Connecticut Underground Railroad of the 1820s) and Ruth Mills, in his twenty-second year of organised abolitionist activism, the father (by his two wives) of twenty children and the leader of the eighteen-man volunteer abolitionist guerrilla band that he has been training at the Kennedy Farm since June.
On the porch with him are: his son Owen Brown junior (thirty-five, second-in-command); the free-Black abolitionist Dangerfield Newby (forty-four, born enslaved in Virginia, freed in 1858, with his wife and seven children still enslaved on a Loudoun County plantation thirty miles south of where they are standing); the free-Black abolitionist Lewis Sheridan Leary (twenty-four, of Fayetteville, North Carolina); and a fifteen-man party of the twenty-one who will, in about ten minutes, walk down the Maryland Heights road to the Potomac bridge and into the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, leaving six of the twenty-one men as the rear-guard at Kennedy Farm.
He thinks: the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry contains, by the 1858 US War Department inventory, one hundred thousand muskets and rifles. The armoury is, in plain reading, the weapon-store of the Upper South.
He thinks: the enslaved population of the surrounding country (Loudoun, Jefferson, Frederick counties of Virginia, plus the Maryland Eastern Shore) is, by my pre-raid scouting, about eighteen thousand. If half of them come out for the arms within the first week of the raid, the Virginia militia cannot contain the rising.
He thinks: the rising will move south down the Blue Ridge into the southern Appalachian counties of Virginia, the Tennessee mountains, the North Carolina mountains. The terrain is, on the Appalachian topography, the impossible-terrain for the militia. The rising will, on the biblical-and-providential reading I have been making for the past five years, be the historic event that breaks the institution of slavery in the United States.
He thinks: the government will respond. The government will send the federal troops. The federal troops will engage the rising. The engagement will, on the providential reading, be the occasion of the war that ends the slavery in the country.
He thinks: I am, on the personal-providential reading, the instrument by which the rising is to begin. I am fifty-nine years old. I have been preparing for the twenty-two years. The twenty-one men with me are the band. The band is enough.
He says, to the twenty-one men on the porch and inside the parlour, in the voice he uses for the prayer-leading: men, get on your arms, we will proceed to the Ferry. The party loads the wagon with the pikes and the rifles. They walk down the Maryland Heights road at the eleven o'clock. They reach the Potomac bridge at the midnight. The federal armoury watchman is taken at the armoury-gate without resistance at the twelve-fifteen.
The armoury and the armoury rifle-works (the two separate federal facilities on the Harpers Ferry confluence) were under the control of Brown's band by the one in the morning of the seventeenth. The bridge over the Potomac was held by Newby and Leary. The bridge over the Shenandoah was held by Stewart Taylor and William Thompson. Brown himself, with the main body of about ten men, was inside the armoury engine-house with about forty civilian-and-armoury-worker hostages (including the great-grandnephew of George Washington, Colonel Lewis Washington, who Brown had specifically intended to take as a hostage because of the symbolic-Washington connection).
The rising of the local-enslaved population did not happen. The scouting that Brown had done in the previous summer had not produced the network of local-Black-contacts that would have been the pre-condition for the rising. The armoury was under attack by the local-Virginia-militia from the morning of the seventeenth; the bridge-guards were overwhelmed by midday (Newby was the first of Brown's party killed, at the bridge of the Potomac at about eleven in the morning); the engine-house was surrounded by the evening of the seventeenth; the federal force under Colonel Robert E. Lee of the US Army (then a serving US Army officer; the Confederate commander of the Civil War to come) arrived overnight; the engine-house was taken at dawn on the eighteenth by a twelve-marine assault led by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart (the Confederate cavalry commander of the Civil War to come), with Brown wounded and taken alive.
Ten of Brown's twenty-one men were killed in the raid (including two of his sons, Watson and Oliver). Five escaped. Seven, including Brown, were taken alive. Two civilians were killed (one of them the free-Black baggage-master Heyward Shepherd of the Baltimore-and-Ohio Railroad, killed at the station at midnight on the sixteenth, the first death of the raid, a irony Brown himself remarked on in the jail). One marine was killed. Brown was tried at Charles Town in the Virginia county-seat of Jefferson County, on the twenty-fifth of October 1859, for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and conspiracy to incite insurrection. He was convicted on the second of November 1859 and sentenced to death by hanging.
He was hanged at Charles Town at twenty past eleven on the morning of the second of December 1859. His last public statement (the note he handed his jailer at the gallows) was: 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. He was sixty.
The Civil War broke out at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on the twelfth of April 1861, sixteen months and ten days after Brown's hanging. The Union Army marched south to the tune of the 1861-Boston-popular-song John Brown's Body Lies a-Mouldering in the Grave (But His Soul Goes Marching On). Julia Ward Howe wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic (1862) to the same melody. The institution of slavery in the United States was formally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified on the sixth of December 1865, six years and four days after Brown's hanging at Charles Town. By every careful judgment of US Civil War historiography (David S. Reynolds, Tony Horwitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr), the Harpers Ferry raid was the political trigger of the eighteen-month sequence of events that produced the Civil War. John Brown is buried at his North Elba farm at Lake Placid in the Adirondacks of New York. The engine-house at Harpers Ferry is preserved as the John Brown's Fort, a brick building on the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah, now part of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.