Militant abolitionist who attacked Harpers Ferry hoping to spark a broader slave uprising.
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John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, and raised in Ohio by a father who taught him that slavery was a sin against God. He tried tanning, sheep farming, and the wool trade, failed at all of them, went bankrupt, and moved his large family from state to state, but his hatred of slavery never wavered. In 1837, after a mob murdered the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, Brown stood up in church and vowed to devote his life to destroying slavery. He befriended Frederick Douglass, sheltered fugitives, and by the 1850s had decided that speeches would never end slavery and only force would.
Kansas gave him his war. When pro-slavery raiders sacked the free-state town of Lawrence in May 1856, Brown led a party that dragged five pro-slavery settlers from their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek and killed them with broadswords. The killings shocked even many abolitionists, though Brown never expressed regret, and they helped turn Bleeding Kansas into open guerrilla warfare. He fought at Osawatomie later that year, where one of his sons was killed, and in 1858 he led a raid into Missouri that freed eleven enslaved people and carried them a thousand miles to Canada.
His great plan was to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, arm enslaved people from the surrounding countryside, and spread a rebellion through the mountains. Douglass warned him it was a steel trap and refused to join. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and twenty-one men took the armory; by the next morning they were surrounded, and on October 18 Marines under Robert E. Lee stormed the engine house. Ten of Brown's men died, including two of his sons. Wounded and in chains, he turned his trial into a sermon, telling the court that he had acted for God's despised poor, and he was hanged at Charles Town on December 2, 1859. His last written note said the crimes of the guilty land would never be purged away except with blood. The South saw a terrorist, much of the North a martyr, and within two years Union soldiers were marching to a song about his body lying in the grave while his soul went marching on. Follow the raid and its consequences through the Civil War journey.
Further reading
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