Harpers Ferry Raid

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Harpers Ferry Raid

Synopsis

On Sunday evening, 16 October 1859, the abolitionist John Brown and a band of supporters raided the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's purpose was to strike a decisive blow against slavery and to embolden slaves to rise up and revolt. The raiders managed to seize control of the arsenal, but on Tuesday morning federal troops stormed it and captured several prisoners, including Brown. Later that month he was tried and convicted of treason, and on 2 December he was hanged. The notoriety of the Harpers Ferry raid further polarized the nation over the slavery issue and propelled the North and South closer to civil war.

Timeline

1839: England launches the First Opium War against China. The war, which lasts three years, results in the British gaining a free hand to conduct a lucrative opium trade, despite opposition by the Chinese government.
1844: American artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse successfully sends the first message via telegraph: a series of dots and dashes that conveys the phrase, "What hath God wrought?," across a circuit between Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
1849: Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery in Maryland. Over the next eight years, she will undertake at least 20 secret missions into Maryland and Virginia to free more than 300 slaves through the so-called Underground Railroad.
1852: Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, though far from a literary masterpiece, is a great commercial success, with over half a million sales on both sides of the Atlantic. More important, it has an enormous influence on British sentiments with regard to slavery and the brewing American conflict between North and South.
1855: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman is published.
1859: Building of the Suez Canal begins.
1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, sparking enormous controversy with an account of humankind's origins that differs markedly from the Bible.
1859: Retired American railroad conductor Edwin L. Drake drills the first successful oil well in the United States, at Titusville, Pennsylvania.
1861: Within weeks of Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, the U.S. Civil War begins with the shelling of Fort Sumter. Six states secede from the Union, joining South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America (later joined by four other states) and electing Jefferson Davis as president. The first major battle of the war, at Bull Run or Manassas in Virginia, is a Confederate victory.
1865: U.S. Civil War ends with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. More than 600,000 men have died and the South is in ruins, but the Union has been restored.
1869: The first U.S. transcontinental railway is completed.

Event and Its Context

The Development of an Abolitionist

John Brown was born in Connecticut on 9 May 1800, and during his childhood and early manhood he developed a deep and abiding hatred of slavery. By the 1830s he was a successful tanner, but the depression of 1837 wiped out his modest wealth, which he had intended to use to finance an antislavery campaign. Throughout the 1840s his attitude toward slavery hardened, and he came to believe that only armed resistance—not speeches, protests, and petitions—would bring down the institution of slavery.

A turning point in Brown's life was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Plans to organize Nebraska as a territory met with opposition from the South because under the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Nebraska would be a free state. Accordingly, the area was organized as two territories, Nebraska and Kansas, and each would determine whether it wanted to be a free or a slave state—in effect repealing the Missouri Compromise. Kansas immediately turned into a battleground over slavery. Proslavery settlers were rushing into Kansas, while northern abolitionist groups were financing the settlement of "free-soilers." In 1855 a proslavery legislature was elected, but free-soilers refused to recognize it and established their own shadow government. Meanwhile, border ruffians from Missouri were launching raids into Kansas, where they burned homes and murdered antislavery settlers.

In the midst of this chaos, Brown arrived in Kansas on 6 October 1855. Convinced that decisive action had to be taken, particularly after a force of 2,000 Missourians sacked and burned Lawrence, the free-state capital of Kansas, he organized a small troop of men, including four of his sons who had settled in Kansas. On the night of 24 May 1856, Brown led them to Pottawotamie Creek, where he directed the execution of five leaders of raids on free-staters. His actions helped plunge the state into a bloody conflict that ended only with the intervention of federal troops. Brown escaped to spend the next three years collecting money from abolitionists to aid runaway slaves. To accomplish his aims, however, he needed weapons such as those produced at the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Preparation and Plans

Some historians have described Brown as a "madman," and the popular conception of the Harpers Ferry raid was that it was little more than a desperate, ragtag effort to lash out at the slave system. In many respects, though, the raid was carefully planned and became the first step in a strategic campaign to bring about the collapse of slavery. Brown needed a dramatic way to galvanize a response both from slaves, who he believed would flee their plantations and join him, and from northern abolitionists, who he was convinced would send men and arms in the belief that an attack on slavery had begun in earnest. Using the Virginia mountains as a base, he planned to send small bands of men to local plantations to persuade slaves to join him. Once slavery collapsed locally, slave owners in surrounding counties would feel increasingly insecure about their ability to defend their "property" and would sell their slaves farther south. This process would repeat itself throughout Virginia, then throughout an ever-expanding area of the South, with Brown and his men following. Eventually, Brown believed, the nation's nearly four million slaves would be freed by an orderly, disciplined revolution—one governed not by a thirst for blood but by a "Provisional Constitution" written to ensure honorable and restrained conduct by his supporters.

To accomplish his goals, Brown needed arms and money. Much of the money came from the so-called Secret Six, a group that included some of New England's foremost abolitionists: Gerrit Smith, a millionaire philanthropist and a member of Congress from New York; Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister who hid runaway slaves in his Boston home; Franklin B. Sanborn, an educator and later Brown's biographer; Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, coeditor of an abolitionist newspaper with his wife, Julia Ward Howe; George Luther Steams, a wealthy businessman; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, also a Unitarian minister. Even Henry David Thoreau contributed money to Brown's cause, though no evidence shows that he knew of the raid. The arms, Brown concluded, would come from the Harpers Ferry Arsenal, which had been created by George Washington in 1794 and continued to produce weapons until it was destroyed at the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Raid on Harpers Ferry

In the summer of 1859, Brown took up residence on a Maryland farm near Harpers Ferry, where he trained a group of 21 men in military maneuvers; among them were his sons, Oliver, Owen, and Watson. There he tried to maintain an air of normalcy to allay the growing suspicions of neighbors. Originally the raid was scheduled for 24 October, but Brown feared exposure of his plans, so on the night of 16 October the men launched their assault on the arsenal and took a number of watchmen prisoner, including Lewis Washington, the great-grandnephew of George Washington. In spite of his planning, though, Brown made two serious tactical errors. One was to allow a train that had stopped at Harpers Ferry to proceed to Baltimore; Brown expressed concern both for the passengers and for those awaiting them. When the train arrived in Baltimore, those aboard notified the authorities of what they had seen, and the government dispatched federal troops from Washington, D.C. The other mistake was to await the arrival of a wagonful of guns that two of the raiders were to bring from Brown's Maryland farmhouse. The men were delayed, but Brown insisted on waiting for them rather than taking the opportunity to flee.

By the morning of 17 October, local militia had surrounded the arsenal. During the day, at least three citizens, including the mayor of Harpers Ferry, were killed in sporadic gunfire. Brown, his escape routes cut off, selected nine prisoners and moved with them to the arsenal's fire-engine house, later known as John Brown's Fort. From this position he tried to negotiate the release of the prisoners in exchange for the freedom of the raiders, but without success. By this time, townspeople were enjoying an unofficial holiday, much of it spent in the saloons. When Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived with federal troops, his first action was to close the saloons and restore some order. Then at 6:30 on the morning of 18 October, Lee's troops stormed the engine house, and the raid ended as quickly as it had begun. Among Brown's men, 10 were killed, including two of Brown's sons; two escaped but were caught and brought back for trial; five escaped and were never caught; and five, including Brown, were captured and imprisoned.

Reactions to the Harpers Ferry Raid

Many Northerners were deeply disturbed by Brown's execution. They had been impressed by his dignity and eloquence during his trial, his almost quiet insistence that slavery was an evil that had to be ended. In cities throughout the North, people held memorials and gathered in churches to pay tribute to Brown as a fallen martyr and to condemn his hanging. The city of Albany, New York, fired a hundred-gun salute in his honor; businesses and government offices were closed on 2 December in Akron, Ohio. An outpouring of songs, poems, essays, and public addresses flowed from sympathizers. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his journal that day, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution—quite as much needed as the old one."

Reaction was markedly different through much of the South. The South had long feared a slave revolt, and those fears were enflamed by the Harpers Ferry raid, led, many felt, by a dangerous fanatic. In the weeks and months that followed the raid, the South was rife with rumor and speculation. The governor of Virginia received letters and telegrams claiming that bands of antislavery marauders were invading the state; reports circulated that armed men from Kansas were on their way to Virginia to rescue Brown. Crowds publicly burned books that were critical of the South; suspicious people were jailed or run out of town; anytime a house caught fire, rumors flew that the slave revolt had begun. Calls for secession from the Union grew louder.

Brown's raid fostered a new militancy among abolitionists. Many abandoned the belief that slavery could be ended by moral suasion. Pacifists were fired by determination and anger and began to accept that force was the only solution. As Frederick Douglass wrote in the November 1859 issue of the Liberator, "Moral considerations have long since been exhausted upon Slaveholders. It is in vain to reason with them. … Slavery is a system of brute force. It shields itself behind might, rather than right. It must be met with its own weapons."

After the Civil War, Storer College, a school for African Americans, was established at Harpers Ferry. Later, the college became the site of the Second Niagara Movement, a precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. John Brown's Fort stands now in the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, near where it originally stood.

Key Players

Douglass, Frederick (1817-1895): Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland, Douglass later was able to buy his freedom and became the leading African American spokesman against slavery, both as a lecturer and as editor of abolitionist newspapers. In 1845 he published his autobiography, later titled Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823-1911): Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Higginson was a Unitarian minister and an active abolitionist. During the Civil War he commanded an African American regiment of the Union Army. He is most remembered for inspiring and supporting Emily Dickinson, and he edited a collection of her poetry after her death.

Howe, Samuel Gridley (1801-1876): Born in Boston, Howe was a physician and active social reformer, lending his support to education for the blind, humane treatment for the mentally ill, prison reform, abolition, and the Underground Railroad. With his wife, Julia Ward Howe, he edited the abolitionist newspaper Commonwealth.

Lee, Robert E. (1807-1870): Lee was born in Westmoreland Country, Virginia, and attended West Point. He opposed secession but resigned from the U.S. Army to join the Confederate Army. He commanded troops at Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg before surrendering to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Smith, Gerrit (1797-1874): Born in Utica, New York, Smith managed an inherited family fortune. He opposed the Fugitive Slave Act, and after 1835 his house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1853-1855). After the Civil War, he opposed voting rights for African Americans.