Brown and two others were captured, tried, and executed.Īlthough the outcome of the raid would undoubtedly have been the same, more blacks might have come to his aid had Brown’s timing been better. Several were killed, including two of Brown's sons. By morning Brown's men had been surrounded. But the slaves at Harpers Ferry stayed put they knew the differences between an army of liberation and a ship of fools. Little more than a year later slaves across the South began claiming their freedom by running in substantial numbers to armed white northerners invading the South, this time as Union soldiers. About twenty were brought into town by Brown's men, but they refused to join the fight, and most of them had the good sense to run for their lives. Then they sat back and waited for slaves from the surrounding countryside to join their rebellion. They had control of the arsenal, the armory, and the rifle factory. By midnight Brown's men had cut the telegraph wires and commandeered the railroad bridges leading into town. (By Matthew Pinsker)Īt dusk on the evening of October 16, 1859, acting on direct orders from the Lord God Himself, John Brown led a band of eighteen men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in western Virginia. The memory of John Brown's actions remains controversial and widely debated. Yet within a couple of years later, Union soldiers would sing "John Brown's Body" as they marched into battle. Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln even felt compelled to denounce Brown in order to separate himself from the violence.
The Commonwealth of Virginia executed Brown on December 2, 1859, but the man and his failed raid remained a subject of intense public debate throughout the 1860 presidential campaign.
Raid of harpers ferry timelime trial#
And Brown's behavior during his subsequent trial at Charlestown, Virginia (later West Virginia) captivated public attention, thrilling anti-slavery audiences in the North and horrifying many pro-slavery southerners. Others, including Brown himself, who was wounded in the final assault at the arsenal's engine house, were captured. Several of Brown's men were killed in the attack which lasted nearly 36 hours. Despite initial success on Sunday evening in capturing rifles at the arsenal and in rounding up prominent local hostages, Brown's forces soon got separated and surrounded without any hope of reinforcements. Yet he was also a charismatic leader whose courage impressed everyone from former slaves to New England intellectuals (some of whom funded the raid) and even to some southern journalists and politicians who later encountered him in prison. Partly because of these sweeping and grandiose schemes, and partly because the tactical planning for the actual raid at Harpers Ferry later seemed so inadequate to those purposes, Brown gained a reputation as crazed. But during this time, Brown and his Provisional Army, as they called themselves, also seemed to be hatching wild plans for a revolution, what a Virginia court would later declare as a treasonous attempt to launch a slave insurrection. They had also helped nearly a dozen slaves, including a pregnant woman, escape from Missouri in December 1858, escorting them safely to Detroit by March 1859 in what might have been a dress rehearsal for another "slave-stealing" raid into Virginia later that year. For example, Brown and some of his sons had participated in the small-scale wars over slavery that had ripped apart the Kansas territory and had mudered at least five pro-slavery settlers in a notorious incident in 1856. He hated slavery and had spent much of his adult life fighting against the institution with words and deeds, sometimes quite violent deeds. John Brown had been an agent in the Underground Railroad helping slaves escape to freedom for decades before he came to Harpers Ferry. What the raiders planned to do with the federal rifles, and the hundreds of menacing pikes that Brown had ordered in advance of the attack, remains a subject of some dispute.
Three others from the group stayed behind and guarded their headquarters. On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, John Brown and eighteen other men walked from a farmhouse in western Maryland a few miles into the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia in order to seize weapons from the largely unguarded federal arsenal. John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry in October 1859 has long been regarded as one of the pivotal events in the coming of the Civil War, but both the nature of the attack and its impact on American society were more complicated than most people or some textbooks acknowledge.
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