why is john brown important essay

Prologue Magazine

A Look Back at John Brown

Spring 2011, Vol. 43, No. 1

By Paul Finkelman

For Southerners, Brown was the embodiment of all their fear—a white man willing to die to end slavery. For many Northerners, he was a prophet of righteousness. (111-BA-1101)

As we celebrate the beginning of the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, it is worthwhile to remember, and contemplate, the most important figure in the struggle against slavery immediately before the war: John Brown.

When Brown was hanged in 1859 for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, many saw him as the harbinger of the future. For Southerners, he was the embodiment of all their fears—a white man willing to die to end slavery—and the most potent symbol yet of aggressive Northern antislavery sentiment. For many Northerners, he was a prophet of righteousness, bringing down a terrible swift sword against the immorality of slavery and the haughtiness of the Southern master class.

In 2000, the United States marked the bicentennial of Brown's birth. At that time, domestic terrorism was a growing problem. Bombings, ambushes, and assassinations had been directed at women's clinics and physicians in a number of places; a bomb planted in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 summer Olympics had killed one person and wounded more than a hundred people; in 1995 a pair of right-wing extremists had planted a bomb at the Alfred A. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680 others.

During that bicentennial year, a number of historians and others talked about whether John Brown was America's first terrorist. Was he a model for the cowards who planted bombs at clinics, in public parks, or in buildings? Significantly, at least one modern terrorist, Paul Hill, compared himself to John Brown after he was arrested for murdering two people who worked at a women's clinic in Florida.

A year after Brown's bicentennial, the United States was faced with multiple terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The meaning of terrorism had changed. It was no longer the result of random attacks by an individual or two. Now it was tied to a worldwide conspiracy, coordinated overseas and meticulously planned. The American response was a "war on terror." In an age of rising incidents of terrorism, numerous scholars, and more important, much of the general public, have again asked if John Brown was America's "first terrorist."

Some Definitions of Terrorism

There are no complete or certain definitions of terrorism. Terrorists seek to "terrify" people and strike fear in the minds of those at whom their terror is directed. This, however, is not a complete definition. After all, few would consider soldiers in warfare terrorists, yet surely they try to make their enemy "fearful" of them. Starting with World War II, large-scale bombing has been a fact of modern warfare, but bombing of military targets is surely not an act of terrorism, even though the civilian population may be harmed or terrorized.

This aspect of warfare is hardly new. Siege warfare of the ancient and medieval world surely terrorized those inside castles or towns. Similarly, the long sieges of the Civil War, as well as decisions by both sides to strike at civilian targets that aided the war effort, surely terrorized populations. The trench warfare and artillery duels of World War I terrorized millions of civilians, but this was not essentially terrorism.

So, what beyond scaring or frightening people constitutes terrorism? How do we define the "terrorist?"

For terrorists, the "terror" itself, the act of violence, is the goal rather than simply the means to an end. Terrorists may hope for political change, but what they often want is to simply strike back at and harm those they oppose. The act of terror becomes the goal, with no expectation that anything else will follow.

This makes terrorism different from other kinds of illegal activity or violence. A kidnapper wants a ransom; a hostage taker usually has "demands" that should be met; a robber simply wants money or goods and might be willing to kill for them. But the terrorist often has no demands and no goals other than to terrorize. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols made no demands; they wanted nothing other than to kill and destroy. Those who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon only wanted to kill, destroy, and terrorize. They made no demands, asked for nothing, and by their own design would not have even been alive to negotiate for whatever they might have wanted.

Learn more about:

• The exhibit Discovering the Civil War .
• Selected online records relating to the Civil War .

Another hallmark of terrorists is indiscriminate killing; it helps spread terror. Terrorists generally do not care who they kill—adults, children, old people, women, men—although sometimes assassinations are an exception to this.

Terrorists are not concerned about collateral damage. Planting a bomb or shooting indiscriminately is a key indicator of terrorism. It does not even matter if some of those who die are sympathetic to the terrorists or of their own ethnic group. A number of American Muslims died in the attack on the World Trade Center because that is where they worked, but these collateral deaths were of no consequence to those who planned the attack. For terrorists, indiscriminate killing helps spread terror. Similarly, for terrorist killers there is no reason to spare lives or minimize death—every life is a legitimate target.

Terrorists usually attack nonmilitary targets and those who are unable to defend themselves. Often their victims are what might be called noncombatants in whatever ongoing struggle there is. One common aspect of terrorists is that they avoid direct contact and confrontation with those who are armed, especially the military. Tied to this, most terrorists plan their actions to have the greatest impact and to kill the most people.

Terrorists also act in secret and try to avoid anyone knowing who they are. They often wear masks and in other ways try to hide their identity. The classic American terrorist is the sheeted Klansman, with his face covered, killing, beating, mutilating, burning, and raping, to terrorize those who supported racial equality and black suffrage. Because they are violent and seek to kill, maim, or destroy property, terrorists naturally must be secretive. After their acts, however, they are likely to openly (but anonymously) brag about their crimes.

Terrorism also has a political context. This is particularly important to see when we try to make the distinction between terrorism and revolution. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson set out a series of principles that justified violent overthrow of the government. One was a "long train of abuses."

Even more important for Jefferson and his colleagues was the lack of access to the political process to change things peacefully. From the American perspective, in 1776, there was not a political solution to the crisis because Americans had no voice in the British government. In addition, the American Revolution was a response to attacks initiated by the British.

Thus, where there are no political avenues for change, violence—such as the American troops firing at the British—becomes revolution. But where the political processes are open, violence becomes terrorism. This was even true for the 9-11 terrorists. Nothing prevented them from politically organizing, demonstrating, and educating the American public about the changes they wanted. Their choice was to short-circuit the political options in favor of violence and terrorism.

With these general understandings, let us turn to John Brown, first to understand what he did, and second to see if it fits in the context of terrorism.

What Brown Did

Brown is connected to terrorism for two events in his life: the Pottawatomie raid in the Kansas Territory in 1856 and his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1859. Both involved violence and killing. Both have led some people to claim Brown was a terrorist.

On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown led a raiding party of four of his sons, his son-in-law, and two other men to Pottawatomie Creek. For the most part, this raid was unplanned and almost spontaneous. Brown acted in retaliation for a raid on the free state settlement at Lawrence, the killings of free state settlers in Kansas, and persistent threats by the proslavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek. Brown and his men entered three cabins, interrogated a number of men, and eventually killed five of them, all with swords and knives. Some were killed quickly, while others, who resisted, were cut in many places. Brown and his men then departed.

Significantly, although Brown and his men killed five proslavery settlers, they did not kill all the Southern settlers they encountered. They spared the life of the wife and teenage son of one of the men they killed, even though these people could have identified the raiders. At another cabin, they interrogated two men and let them go, convinced they had not threatened free state settlers or been involved in violent actions against the free state settlers. At a third house they also spared the wife of one man, even while they killed him.

Three and a half years later, on the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and 18 "soldiers" seized the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's plans were fantastic—some would say insane. He would use the arms in the arsenal—as well as old-fashioned pikes he had had specially manufactured—to begin a guerrilla war against slavery. The core of his army would be the mostly white band of raiders who seized the arsenal. But soon, he hoped—he believed—he just knew—that hundreds or even thousands of slaves would join him in the fight against the "peculiar institution." He predicted that once word of his raid got out, slaves from throughout the region would appear at his side, as bees "swarm to the hive."

During his raid, Brown and his men had captured a number of slave owners in the area, including Lewis Washington, the great-grand-nephew of President George Washington. Brown did not kill any of these captured men, and he went out of his way to protect them and make sure they were not harmed.

While in Harpers Ferry, the raiders killed a railroad baggage handler, who ironically was a free black, when he refused their orders to halt. In a firefight they killed a few townsmen, including the mayor. At one point Brown stopped a passenger train, held it for a while, and then released it. The train continued on to Washington, DC, where the crew dutifully reported to officials that Brown had seized Harpers Ferry. The next day, October 18, U.S. marines, under the command of Army Brevet Col. Robert E. Lee, captured Brown in the engine house on the armory grounds. By this time, most of the raiders were either dead or wounded.

Brown's trial in Charlestown, Virginia, began in October 1859. He was charged with and convicted of treason, murder, and conspiring with slaves to revolt. Severely wounded during his capture, Brown had to be carried into court and lay on a stretcher. (Harpers Ferry National Park)

Ten days later, Brown's trial began in Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia). He was charged with treason, murder, and conspiring with slaves to rebel. He was convicted on November 2 and sentenced to death. Before his sentencing, Brown told the court that his actions against slavery were consistent with God's commandments.

"I believe," he said in a speech that electrified many Northerners who later read it, "that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say 'let it be done.'"

In the month between his sentencing on November 2 and his execution on December 2, Brown wrote brilliant letters that helped to create, in the minds of many Northerners, his image as a Christ-like martyr who gave his life so that the slaves might be free. Indeed, Frederick Douglass would later say that he lived for the slave, but John Brown was willing to "die for the slave." Brown welcomed his end, declaring: "I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose."

For abolitionists and antislavery activists, black and white, Brown emerged as a hero, a martyr, and ultimately, a harbinger of the end of slavery. Most Northern whites, especially those not committed to abolition, were aghast at the violence of his action. Yet there was also widespread support for him in the region. Northerners variously came to see Brown as an antislavery saint, a brave but foolish extremist, a lunatic, and a threat to the Union.

The future Republican governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, summed up the feelings of many Northerners when he refused to endorse Brown's tactics or the wisdom of the raid, but declared that "John Brown himself is right." But most Republican politicians worried that they would be tarred by his extremism and lose the next election. Democrats and what remained of the Whigs (who would become Constitutional Unionists), by contrast, feared that Brown's raid would polarize the nation, put the Republicans in power, and chase the South out of the Union.

For white Southerners, Brown was the worst possible nightmare: a fearless, committed abolitionist, armed, accompanied by blacks, and willing to die to end slavery. Indeed, in the minds of Southerners, Brown was the greatest threat to slavery the South had ever witnessed. Most Southerners had at least a vague fear of slave rebellions. But Southerners had convinced themselves that most slaves were content with their status and that, in any event, blacks were incapable of anything worse than sporadic violence. Brown, however, raised the ominous possibility of armed black slaves, led by whites, who together would destroy Southern white society.

Who was this lunatic, this mad man, this abolitionist hero, this saint, this martyr to freedom? Was he America's first terrorist?

Who Was John Brown?

In many ways Brown was a typical 19th-century American. He was born in Torrington, Connecticut, into a family of deeply religious Congregationalists who were Puritan in their heritage and overtly antislavery in their views. When he was five, the family moved to what was then the "West." They migrated to Hudson, Ohio, which was in the Western Reserve between Akron and Cleveland. The region was full of New Englanders, especially from Connecticut.

Brown grew up in an atmosphere in which everyone despised slavery. Both Brown and his father were early supporters of the new abolitionism that emerged in the 1830s. Brown's father, a prominent businessman with a large tannery, was involved in trying to make Western Reserve College into an antislavery stronghold. When that failed, the elder Brown supported the creation of Oberlin College as a racially integrated coeducational institution of higher learning with an antislavery bent.

Despite his father's association with colleges, Brown had little formal education. Early in his life he considered becoming a clergyman, and he returned to Connecticut to attend a preparatory school as a prelude to going to a seminary. But that possibility ended when he flunked out of the school. By age 20 he was married and a foreman in his father's tannery. His bride, Dianthe Lusk, gave birth to seven children before she died in 1832. Five of those children lived until adulthood. In 1833 he married Mary Ann Day, an uneducated 16-year-old, half his age. She would have 13 children, but only six would survive to adulthood.

In 1825 Brown moved to western Pennsylvania, where he was a successful tanner and a postmaster (under President John Quincy Adams). Despite his own poor education and struggles with schooling, he helped start a local school. A proper burgher of the community, he became a church leader and joined the Masons. In 1834 his business went bad, and he moved back to Ohio, starting a tannery in Kent. There he speculated in land and won a contract to build a canal from Kent (then called Franklin Mills) to Akron. He formed the Franklin Land Company with 700 acres for building houses.

As we recall Brown's future activities, it is fascinating to also contemplate the image of John Brown as a suburban developer. But the panic of 1837 changed everything. By the end of the year, Brown was bankrupt. For the next five years he dodged creditors before finally declaring bankruptcy in 1842 and losing almost everything he owned.

Up to this point in his life, Brown had done nothing to indicate he was particularly political or unusually antislavery. He was, in fact, a fairly conventional Jacksonian, trying to increase his status and wealth and always looking for the next opportunity: tanner, canal builder, suburban developer, and in the wake of the panic, bankrupt.

By 1844, Brown was back in the business world, raising sheep with a wealthy business partner in Akron. But his inept business skills did him in again, especially an attempt to sell 200,000 pounds of wool in England, which was an exporter of wool. Oddly, while his creditors sued him, no one accused him of dishonesty or lacking integrity. Even people whose finances were almost ruined by his behavior liked him.

John Brown in the 1850s. He had tried to succeed as a tanner, sheep rancher, suburban developer, and canal builder but was undone by failing economic conditions and his inept business skills. (127-N-521396)

View in National Archives Catalog

In 1854—at age 54—Brown was a failed businessman, an impoverished farmer with a few head of cattle in Ohio and some land in Upstate New York—at North Elba—that he had not yet paid for. That year five of his sons and his son-in-law moved to Kansas. In part they went to improve their economic status and find new, virgin soil for farming. But they also went to spread freedom in the West.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had organized the new Kansas Territory without banning slavery. Under that law, the settlers themselves would decide the issue of slavery by popular sovereignty. Thus, when the Browns moved to Kansas, they were making a political statement to help ensure that Kansas would be a free state.

During this period, Brown had gradually emerged as an unyielding opponent of slavery. He participated in the underground railroad and in 1851 helped found the League of Gileadites, an organization of whites, free blacks, and runaway slaves dedicated to protecting fugitive slaves from slave catchers.

In the 1840s Brown was in contact with such antislavery leaders as Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass. Yet as late as 1855 Brown remained a marginal figure in the antislavery movement and in all other ways historically insignificant. In 1855 Brown joined his sons and son-in-law in Kansas, settling along the Osawatomie River. In December 1855 he helped defend Lawrence, the center of antislavery settlers, from an armed attack by proslavery forces.

On May 21, 1856, though, when Brown was elsewhere, proslavery men sacked and burned the free-soil town, destroying the printing press there, burning buildings, and terrorizing the residents. Three days later, Brown and his band of free-state guerrillas killed five Southern settlers along the Pottawatomie River, decapitating some of them with swords. Later that summer, a proslavery minister, working as a scout for the U.S. Army, murdered Brown's unarmed son Frederick, shooting him in the heart at close range. His body, when discovered, was riddled with bullets.

Throughout the rest of 1856, Brown and his remaining sons fought in Kansas and Missouri. Some of these encounters were pitched battles between Brown's small army and proslavery forces, which were sometimes abetted by the U.S. Army.

By the end of 1856, Brown was one of the most renowned (and either hated or adored) figures in "bleeding Kansas," and in the East he became known as "Osawatomie Brown" or "Old Osawatomie." For some New England abolitionists he was approaching the status of a cult figure. Taciturn, blunt, gruff—and armed—Brown had become a symbol of the emerging holy crusade against slavery. Those in the East knew he fought against slavery, but few were aware of the exact nature of his role in the gory events at Pottawatomie.

Within two weeks after the incident, the play Osawatomie Brown appeared on Broadway. The play accused Brown's enemies of the massacre at Pottawatomie and suggested that the real killers had blamed Brown in order to discredit him. Moreover, ever since the massacre, James Redpath, an English journalist who later wrote Brown's biography, had been assuring readers that Brown was not responsible for the murders. Thus, when Brown went on a fund-raising trip to Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1857, no one saw him as a killer. At the time, he denied any role in the Pottawatomie murders, and his abolitionist supporters in the East gladly accepted his disavowal at face value. Brown's eastern contacts thought their donations to him would go to support the war against slavery in Kansas. Actually, Brown was already planning a raid on Harpers Ferry.

As early as 1854, Brown had been thinking, and talking, about an organized war against slavery in Virginia. His focus, from the beginning, seems to have been on Harpers Ferry, the site of a federal arsenal and armory. By 1857 his plans were beginning to take shape. In March 1857 he hired a Connecticut forgemaster to make a thousand pikes, allegedly for use in Kansas but actually to be given to slaves who he believed would flock to his guerrilla army once he invaded the South.

In 1858 Brown wrote a constitution for the revolutionary state he hoped to create. (Records of the Adjutant General s Office, 1780's-1917)

In January and February 1858 he spent a month at the home of Frederick Douglass, planning his raid and writing a provisional constitution for the revolutionary state Brown hoped to create. Brown begged Douglass to join him. Douglass was sympathetic to Brown's goals but believed the plan was suicidal: "You're walking into a perfect steel-trap and you will never get out alive," he told Brown. Nevertheless, Douglass introduced Brown to Shields Green, a fugitive slave from South Carolina who joined Brown—and whom Virginia authorities hanged after the raid.

In the early spring of 1858, Brown began raising large amounts of money for his raid, writing potential backers that he was planning some "[underground] Rail Road business on a somewhat extended scale." However, in person he made it clear that he intended to do more than merely help large numbers of slaves to escape. On February 22, 1858, Brown revealed his general plans—and his provisional constitution—to Gerrit Smith and Franklin Sanborn. Brown also contacted black leaders to help recruit free blacks. In March 1858 Brown met in Boston with the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Stearns, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Franklin Sanborn. These five, along with Smith, made up the "Secret Six," Brown's primary financial backers. In June 1858, traveling as "Shubel Morgan," Brown headed west, raising more money and recruiting more raiders in Cleveland. While Brown continued on to Kansas, John E. Cook, one of his raiders, moved to Harpers Ferry, where he found work and learned what he could about the community, the armory, and the lay of the land. He also fathered a child and married a local woman.

In December 1858 Brown once again made headlines for his exploits in the West. He invaded Missouri, where he killed a slave owner, liberated 11 slaves, and brilliantly evaded law enforcement officers as he led the freed blacks to Canada. There Brown met a black printer, Osborne Perry Anderson, who would later take part in the Harpers Ferry raid. Although a wanted man with a price of $250 on his head, Brown returned to the United States, traveling and speaking in Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Brown also contacted the "Secret Six" who were financing him.

In June 1859 Brown visited his home in North Elba, New York, for the last time, where he said good-bye to his wife and daughters. Brown probably knew that he was unlikely to see his family again, something he stoically accepted as a cost of his crusade against slavery. He was less accepting of his son Salmon, however, who decided he would not join his father on an apparently suicidal mission into Virginia.

Brown and his sons Oliver and Owen arrived in Harpers Ferry on July 3, 1859, and Brown rented a farm in Maryland, about seven miles from Harpers Ferry. He expected large numbers of men to enlist in his "army," but by September only 18 had arrived, including another of Brown's sons, Watson. By mid-October, a few more arrived.

On Sunday, October 16, Brown and his men began their raid. They made a strange assortment: veterans of the struggles in Kansas, fugitive slaves, free blacks, transcendental idealists, Oberlin College men, and youthful abolitionists on their first foray into the world. The youngest was 18. The oldest, Dangerfield Newby, was a 44-year-old fugitive slave from Virginia who hoped to rescue his wife from bondage. But most of the raiders were in their 20s, half the age of their leader, the 59-year-old Brown. Brown left three of his recruits to guard their supplies and arms at the farmhouse in Maryland. The remaining 18 raiders, 13 whites and five blacks, marched with John Brown to Harpers Ferry.

Brown's small army arrived in Harpers Ferry at night and quickly secured the federal armory and arsenal and later Hall's Rifle Works, which manufactured weapons for the national government. With the telegraph wires cut, Brown might have easily seized the weapons in the town, liberated slaves in the neighborhood, and then taken to the hills. Or he might have destroyed the armory and literally blown up the town.

Inexplicably, though, he remained in the armory, waiting for slaves to flock to his standard. They never came. Instead, townsmen and farmers surrounded the armory. These civilians were probably not strong enough to dislodge Brown, but they kept him pinned down. Although Brown tried to negotiate with the civilians, his emissaries, including his son Watson, were shot while under a white flag. By the morning of October 18, eight of Brown's men were dead or captured, and that same day militia from Virginia and Maryland arrived. President James Buchanan had dispatched U.S. marines and soldiers to Harpers Ferry, with Brevet Colonel Lee in command. Directly under Lee was another Virginian, Lt. J.E.B. Stuart.

That morning, marines stormed the engine house of the armory, capturing Brown and a few of his raiders and killing the rest. By the end of the raid, of the 22 who had been involved in the plot, 10 of Brown's men, including his sons Watson and Oliver, were dead or mortally wounded; five, including Brown, had been captured. Seven escaped, but two were later captured in Pennsylvania and returned to Virginia for trial and execution. The other five, including Brown's son Owen, made their way to safe havens in Canada and remote parts of the North. All but Owen Brown later served in the Union Army.

Brown's grave at his family farm in North Elba, New York, became a pilgrimage site. (Library of Congress)

Brown's capture on October 18 set the stage for his trial and execution. Severely wounded, Brown had to be carried into court on October 25 for a preliminary hearing and on October 27 for his trial. The judge would not even delay the proceedings a day to allow Brown's lawyer to arrive. The trial was speedy. On November 2 Brown was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed on December 2, and on December 8 he was buried at the family farm in North Elba, near Lake Placid. Many Northerners interpreted the hasty actions of the Virginia authorities in trying and executing Brown as another example of Southern injustice. The apparent lack of due process in his trial thus contributed to the Northern perception that Brown was a martyr. The most absurd aspect of the trial was the charge against Brown. He was indicted and convicted of "treason" against the state of Virginia. But as Brown pointed out, he had never lived in Virginia, never owed loyalty to the state, and therefore could not have committed treason against the state. Most Southerners, however, saw Virginia's actions as a properly swift response to the unspeakable acts of a dangerous man whose goal was to destroy their entire society.

By the time of his execution, the entire nation was fixated on this bearded man who spoke and looked like a biblical prophet and whose deeds thrilled—whether with fear or admiration or both—an entire generation.

Indicative of this fixation is a shared aspect in the otherwise divergent responses of Wendell Phillips and Edmund Ruffin—the great abolitionist orator and the fire-eating Virginia secessionist. In the year following the raid, each of them prominently carried and displayed a "John Brown pike" that Brown had ordered from the Connecticut foundry. For Phillips the pike symbolized the glory, and for Ruffin the horror, of a servile insurrection led by a resurrected Puritan willing to die to overthrow slavery.

Terrorist, Guerrilla Fighter, Revolutionary?

Brown's actions in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry were clearly violent. He killed people or at least supervised their death. But was he a terrorist? At neither place do his actions comport with what we know about modern terrorists.

The Harpers Ferry raid was his most famous act. Brown held Harpers Ferry from late Sunday night, October 16, until he was captured on the 18th. He was in possession of almost unlimited amounts of gunpowder and weapons. He had captured prominent citizens, most famously Colonel Washington. He stopped a train full of passengers and freight.

What would modern terrorists have done in such circumstances? They might have let the train go, only after they had robbed all the passengers to fund further acts of terror, and then blown up the bridge as the train crossed from Virginia to Maryland. They might have planted explosives on the train and let it proceed, as terrorists did in Spain a few years ago. What did Brown do? He boarded the train, let people know who he was, and was seen by people who might later have identified him. Then he let the train continue on to Washington. These were not the actions of a terrorist.

While in Harpers Ferry, Brown might have blown up the federal armory (or indeed most of the town) after taking as much powder and weapons as his men could carry. He might have broken into homes of prominent people and slaughtered them. Brown did none of these things. He waited, foolishly for sure, for the slaves in the area to flock to him. He was caught in a firefight with local citizens, and he was captured by the U.S. forces. He proved to be a disastrous military leader and a failed "captain" of his brave and idealistic troops. But he never acted like a terrorist. He ordered no killings; he did not wantonly destroy property; and he cared for his hostages. This is simply not how terrorists act.

The events at Kansas are similar. Brown targeted a number of individuals who had been leading—violently leading—proslavery forces in the area.

At the home of James Doyle, the raiders did not kill his 16-year-old son or his wife, Mahala, even though both could have identified Brown and his men. Brown's men killed Allen Wilkinson, but not his wife, Louisa, who recognized one of Brown's sons from his voice. Mrs. Wilkinson was ill at the time, and after killing her husband, Brown asked her if there would be neighbors who could help care for her.

Surely, as Robert McGlone notes, it might seem "bizarre" that Brown was concerned about her health after he had just killed her husband. But her husband was guilty of attacking free state men and threatening the Browns, and so he was (in John Brown's mind) justly executed. But his wife was innocent and not punished. This was not the behavior of a terrorist.

Kansas—Bleeding Kansas as it is known—was in the midst of a civil war. Between 1855 and 1860 about 200 men would be killed in Kansas. Not all were politically motivated, and historians disagree on what constitutes a "political" killing. But even the most conservative scholar of this violence finds 56 killings that were tied to slavery and politics. I think this number is low, and that most of the 200 deaths were actually politically motivated and tied to slavery and Bleeding Kansas. But the actual number of political killings is less important than the understanding that in Kansas there was a violent civil war being fought over slavery; men on both sides were killed. Brown's actions are most famous because there were five killings, and he strategically used swords, rather than guns, which would have alerted neighbors. This is the nature of guerrilla warfare. It is brutal and bloody, but it is not terrorism.

There is also a political context. In Kansas there was no democratic government. Elections were notoriously fraudulent and violent. The majority of the settlers were from the free states, but the national government recognized a minority government that was proslavery. That legislature made it a crime to publicly oppose slavery. There was, at least under the formal law, no free speech in Kansas for abolitionists. This was also true in Virginia, when John Brown raided Harpers Ferry. He could not have gone to Virginia to denounce slavery or even urge Virginians to give up slavery. Thus, in this sense Brown was not fighting against democratic institutions in a free society; rather he was fighting against an unfree society that denied him basic civil liberties and, in Kansas, even the right to have a fair election.

Remembering, Honoring, John Brown

So, what in the end can we make of John Brown? If he was not a terrorist—what was he? He might be seen as revolutionary, trying to start a revolution to end slavery and fulfill the goals of the Declaration of Independence. As proslavery border ruffians tried to prevent democracy in Kansas, and were willing to murder and assault supporters of freedom, John Brown surely had a right to defend his settlement and his side. Brown did not carefully plan the Pottawatomie raid the way Terry Nicholas and Timothy McVeigh planned the Oklahoma City bombing. He reacted to specific threats and the sacking of Lawrence by a proslavery mob. This was not terrorism, but a fact of warfare in Bleeding Kansas. Nevertheless, modern Americans are uncomfortable endorsing his vengeful violence in Kansas, however necessary it may have been.

Similarly, no one, not even the slaveholders, could deny that slaves might legitimately fight for their own liberty. If slaves could fight for their liberty, then surely a white man like Brown was not morally wrong for joining in the fight against bondage. Thus Harpers Ferry is in the end a blow for freedom, against slavery. Who can deny the legitimacy of such a venture, however foolish, poorly designed, and incompetently implemented? But in a society of democratic traditions, Americans recoil at the idea of violent revolution and raids on government armories, even when, as was the case in Virginia in 1859, democracy was something of a sham, and there was neither free speech nor free political institutions.

In the end, we properly view Brown with mixed emotions: admiring him for his dedication to the cause of human freedom, marveling at his willingness to die for the liberty of others, yet uncertain about his methods, and certainly troubled by his incompetent tactics at Harpers Ferry.

Perhaps we end up accepting the argument of the abolitionist lawyer and later governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, who declared "whether the enterprise of John Brown and his associates in Virginia was wise or foolish, right or wrong; I only know that, whether the enterprise itself was the one or the other, John Brown himself is right."

Paul Finkelman received his B.A. from Syracuse University and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. He is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School. He is the author or editor of more than 25 books and over 150 scholarly articles. His legal history scholarship has been cited by numerous courts, including the United States Supreme Court.

Note on Sources

The very best discussion of Brown in Kansas is found in Robert E. McGlone, John Brown's War Against Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

The quotation from Brown's speech in court is from Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia, ed. Franklin B. Sanborn (1885), p. 585. Quotations of Frederick Douglass and Brown are from Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown, 2nd ed. (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), p. 335. For more on Brown's self-created martyrdom, see Paul Finkelman, His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), pp. 41–66.

For the conservative estimate of the number of political killings in Kansas, see Dale E. Watts, "How Bloody was Bleeding Kansas? Political Killings in the Kansas Territory, 1854–1861," Kansas History, 18 (1995): 116–129.

John Andrew's declaration that "John Brown himself is right" is quoted in Owald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years Later (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), p. 557.  

(1800-1859)

Who Was John Brown?

John Brown was born in a Calvinist household and would go on to have a large family of his own. Facing much financial difficulty throughout his life, he was also an ardent abolitionist who worked with the Underground Railroad and the League of Gileadites, among other endeavors. He believed in using violent means to end slavery and, with the intent of inspiring a slave insurrection, eventually led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry federal armory. Brown went to trial and was executed on December 2, 1859.

John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, to Ruth Mills and Owen Brown. Owen, who was a Calvinist and worked as a tanner, ardently believed that slavery was wrong. As a 12-year-old boy traveling through Michigan, Brown witnessed an enslaved African American boy being beaten, which haunted him for years to come and informed his own abolitionism.

Though the younger Brown initially studied to work in the ministry, he instead decided to take up his father's trade. Brown wed Dianthe Lusk in 1820, and the couple had several children before her death in the early 1830s. He remarried in 1833, and he and wife Mary Ann Day would have many more children.

Ardent Abolitionist

Brown worked in a number of vocations and moved around quite a bit from the 1820s to the 1850s, experiencing great financial difficulties. Brown also took part in the Underground Railroad, gave land to free African Americans and eventually established the League of Gileadites, a group formed with the intention of protecting Black citizens from slave hunters.

Brown met with renowned orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1847 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Then, in 1849, Brown moved and settled in the Black community of North Elba, New York, which was created on land provided by philanthropist Gerrit Smith.

In 1855, Brown moved to Kansas, where five of his sons had relocated as well. With the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, there was conflict over whether the territory would be a free or slave state. Brown, who believed in using violent means to end slavery, became involved in the conflict; in 1856, he and several of his men killed five pro-slavery settlers in a retaliatory attack at Pottawatomie Creek.

Harpers Ferry Attack

In 1858, Brown liberated a group of enslaved people from a Missouri homestead and helped guide them to freedom in Canada. It was also in Canada that Brown spoke of plans to form a free Black community in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia.

On the evening of October 16, 1859, Brown led 21 men on a raid of the federal armory of Harpers Ferry in Virginia (now West Virginia), holding dozens of men hostage with the plan of inspiring a slave insurrection. Brown's forces held out for two days; they were eventually defeated by military forces led by Robert E. Lee . Many of Brown's men were killed, including two of his sons, and he was captured. Brown's case went to trial quickly, and on November 2 he was sentenced to death.

In a speech to the court before his sentencing, Brown stated his actions to be just and God-sanctioned. Debate ensued over how Brown should be viewed, deepening the divide between North and South and having profound implications for the direction of the country. Several of his colleagues also petitioned that the courts should look at Brown's questionable mental state when it came to his actions. Brown was executed on December 2, 1859.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: John Brown
• Birth Year: 1800
• Birth date: May 9, 1800
• Birth State: Connecticut
• Birth City: Torrington
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: John Brown was a 19th-century militant abolitionist known for his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.
• U.S. Politics
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• Death Year: 1859
• Death date: December 2, 1859
• Death State: West Virginia
• Death City: Charles Town
• Death Country: United States

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• ...I believe to have interfered as I have done...in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.

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Born in Torrington, Connecticut, John Brown belonged to a devout family with extreme anti-slavery views.  He married twice and fathered twenty children. The expanding family moved with Brown throughout his travels, residing in Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York.

Brown failed at several business ventures before declaring bankruptcy in 1842.  Still, he was able to support the abolitionist cause by becoming a conductor on the Underground Railroad and by establishing the League of Gileadites, an organization established to help runaway slaves escape to Canada.  In 1849, Brown moved to the free black farming community of North Elba, New York. 

At the age of 55, Brown moved with his sons to Kansas Territory.  In response to the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown led a small band of men to Pottawatomie Creek on May 24, 1856.   The men dragged five unarmed men and boys, believed to be slavery proponents, from their homes and brutally murdered them.  Afterwards, Brown raided Missouri – freeing eleven slaves and killing the slave owner. 

Following the events in Kansas, Brown spent two and a half years traveling throughout New England, raising money to bring his anti-slavery war to the South.  In 1859, John Brown, under the alias Isaac Smith, rented the Kennedy Farmhouse, four miles north of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).  At the farm Brown trained his 21 man army and planned their capture of the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Part of the plan included providing slaves in the area with weapons of pikes and rifles.  Brown believed that these armed slaves would then join his army and free even more slaves as they fanned southward along the Appalachian Mountains.  If the plan worked it would strike terror in the hearts of slave owners. 

On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his men raided the Federal Arsenal.  Unfortunately for Brown, nothing went as planned.  Slaves living in the area did not join the raid, local militia and the United States Marines, under Robert E. Lee, put down the raid, and most of John Brown’s men were either killed or captured, including two of his sons.  Ironically, the first man killed during the raid was Hayward Shepherd, a free black man working with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. 

Despite being seriously wounded, Brown was tried quickly and found guilty of murder, inciting slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia.  

Upon hearing his sentence, Brown said,

“…if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I submit; so let it be done!”

Brown told the court that he had hoped to carry out his plans “without the snapping of a gun on either side.”  But Brown’s vision of ending slavery was marred by the deaths of innocent civilians – both in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry.  The nation was divided over his actions.  Many abolitionists called him a hero.  Slaveholders called him a base villain.  People on both sides of the fence denounced Brown’s use of violence.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859.  Before he died, Brown issued these final, seemingly prophetic words in a note he handed to his jailer:

“Charlestown, Va, 2nd, December, 1859 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.”

Within one year, the first Southern state would secede from the Union.

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John Brown’s Youth

John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, but spent much of his youth in Ohio. His parents instilled in him a strong belief in the Bible and a strong hatred of slavery, and his father taught him the family trade of tanning animal skins. He was foreman in the family’s tannery before moving to Massachusetts, in hopes of becoming a minister. After he married Dianthe Lusk, they moved to Pennsylvania, where he established a tannery of his own. The couple wed in 1820; before Dianthe’s death in 1831, she bore him seven children. Less than a year after her passing, he married a 16-year-old named Mary Anne Day. That union produced 13 more offspring.

Brown was not a particularly good businessman, and what skills he had declined as his thinking became more metaphysical. He bought and sold several tanneries, engaged in land speculation, raised sheep, and established a brokerage for wool producers, but his financial situation deteriorated. His thoughts turned more and more to people he considered oppressed; had he lived in a later era, he might have become a socialist.

Abolitionist John Brown In The Underground Railroad

Often seeking the company of blacks, he even lived in a freedman’s community in North Elba, New York, for two years. He became a conductor in the Underground Railroad and organized a self-protection league for freemen of color and fugitive slaves.

By the time he was 50 years old, Brown was convinced God had selected him as the champion to lead slaves into freedom, and if that required the use of force, well, that was God’s will, too. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave citizens of those two territories the right to choose for themselves whether the territories would permit or prohibit slavery, Brown, like many abolitionists, moved to Kansas, taking five of his sons with him. Fervent members of the abolition movement were determined that when the territory was ready to enter the Union as a state, it would do so as a free state. On the other side, many defenders of slavery were also pouring into Kansas, in order to secure it for the pro-slavery faction.

On May 21, 1856, Missouri “border ruffians” attacked the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, pillaging and burning. Two days later, Charles Sumner, a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, was severely beaten with a cane on the Senate floor by Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina because of verbal attacks the virulently anti-slavery Sumner had made on another South Carolinian.

John Brown’s Cause Turns To Violence

Rumors spread that the border ruffians intended to attack the anti-slavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas; Brown and his family were among the abolitionists in this sharply divided area. On the night of May 24, Brown, with four of his sons and two other men, rode to the homes of three pro-slavery settlers near Dutch Henry’s crossing on Pottawatomie Creek; Brown intended to “Sweep the Pottawatomie of all pro-slavery men living on it.” They dragged James Doyle and two of his sons, William and Drury, from their farmhouse. When the trio tried to escape, James Doyle was shot down and his sons hacked to death with short sabers. Doyle’s wife, daughter and 14-year-old son John were spared. At the home of Allen Wilkinson, the avengers ignored the pleas of his sick wife and two children and took Wilkinson away as a prisoner. He was soon dispatched with one of the swords.

At the third home they visited, Brown’s band killed William Sherman with their swords and threw his body into a creek. Other men and a woman found at Sherman’s home were not harmed. Through it all, Brown had decided, god-like, who would die and who would be spared, though according to his followers he did not actively participate in the executions. Whenever he was questioned about the events of that night, he was evasive.

The events at Lawrence and Pottawatomie caused the territory to erupt in guerrilla warfare, giving it the name “Bleeding Kansas.” Brown’s name became known to the nation, a Christian warrior to many who opposed slavery and a demented murderer to many other people.

John Brown’s Raid On Harper’s Ferry

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led 21 followers—five black men and 16 white ones, including two of Brown’s sons—on a raid to seize the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), where the Shenandoah River joins the North Branch of the Potomac. More than one version exists of what his plans were for the weapons he hoped to make off with. Some say he intended to create a state of free blacks in the mountains of western Virginia and Maryland. Others say he hoped to create an army of former slaves and freemen to march through Dixie, forcing slave owners to free their slaves. Brown himself may not have been entirely clear on what the next step would be, but he had convinced a number of Northern abolitionists to provide financial support for his actions, here and elsewhere.

Brown’s raiders captured a number of prisoners, including George Washington’s great-grand-nephew, Lewis Washington. Local militia trapped Brown and his men inside the arsenal’s firehouse. During the short siege, three citizens of Harpers Ferry, including Mayor Fontaine Beckham. were killed. The first person to die in John Brown’s raid, however, had been, ironically, a black railroad baggage handler named Hayward Shepherd, who confronted the raiders on the night they attacked the town. On October 18, a company of U.S. Marines, under the command of Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee, broke into the building. Ten raiders were killed outright and seven others, including a wounded Brown, were captured.

Read more about John Brown’s Raid On Harpers Ferry

Brown Sentenced To Death

He was tried and convicted for murder, conspiracy to incite a slave uprising, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was hanged at Charles Town, the county seat near Harpers Ferry, on December 2. Among those watching the execution, “with unlimited, undeniable contempt” for Brown, was the future assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth.

Brown had denied any plan “to excite or incite the slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.” He never intended to commit murder or treason or to destroy property, he claimed—though earlier that year he had purchased several hundred pikes and some firearms.

“Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done,” he said.

The “unjust enactments” included the Constitution, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

John Brown’s Legacy

Initial reports of the raid on Harpers Ferry in Southern newspapers tended to view it as an isolated incident, the work of a mad fanatic and his followers. But when information began to surface that Brown had discussed his plans—to what extent is not known—with Northern abolitionists and had received moral and financial assistance, Southern attitudes turned sour. Many in the abolition movement painted Brown as a martyr, convincing many Southerners that abolitionists wished to commit genocide on white slave owners. Among abolitionists, Brown served as an inspiration to strive ever harder to abolish “the peculiar institution.”

North and South drew even farther apart from each other. John Brown and his Harpers Ferry raid are often referred to as the match that lit the fuse on the powder keg of secession and civil war. Even today, debate continues on how Brown should be remembered: as a martyr to freedom, as a well-intended but misguided individual, or as a terrorist who hoped for revolution and, perhaps, murder on a grand scale.

Articles Featuring John Brown From History Net Magazines

John brown featured article, the madness of john brown.

By Robert E. McGlone

Old John Brown’s failed attempt to launch a “war” against slavery ended just after dawn on October 18 in a bloody rout on the grounds of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown himself was wounded when a squad of Marines picked from a force of 86 sent by President James Buchanan—all the force he could muster despite widening panic over the rumored slave uprising—overwhelmed the remnant of Brown’s tiny force at dawn on the second day of the “invasion.”

After a six-day trial, a Virginia court convicted Brown of three capital offenses—murder, treason and conspiracy to incite a slave uprising. Judge Richard Parker sentenced him to hang 30 days later.

Brown’s raid sent shock waves through the nation and found few outright apologists. Nonresistant abolitionists praised Brown’s ends, but many of them deplored his means. The raid reverberated throughout the political season. The 1860 platform of the Republican Party officially “denounced the lawless invasion of armed forces of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext….” Listed among the causes of South Carolina’s secession from the Union in December 1860 was the refusal of the states of Ohio and Iowa to “surrender to justice fugitives” from Brown’s raid, who were “charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.”

At his sentencing, Brown reaffirmed his commitment to his cause and accepted his sentence with memorable words. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,” Brown told the court, “I say, let it be done.” While awaiting the date of what Brown insisted in widely published letters to friends in the North was to be his “public murder,” he pleaded eloquently—not for himself but for the slaves. He insisted that he was “worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.” In thus embracing martyrdom, Brown himself became a cause among reformers and intellectuals in the North.

Southerners, on the other hand, were convinced that if Brown’s raid had succeeded, the slaves he incited to rebel would have slain their masters. Worse, Brown’s captured correspondence seemed to prove he had the confidential support of influential Northerners. Widespread popu­lar protests in the North on the day of his execution infuriated Southerners such as Virginia Governor Henry Wise, who admired Brown’s courage and forthrightness but condemned “those who sent him.” Despite appeals for clemency, Wise staunchly refused to commute Brown’s sentence.

Southern partisans carried their hatred of Brown to the grave. Six years after Harpers Ferry, as John Wilkes Booth fled authorities following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he remembered witnessing Brown’s hanging. “I looked at the traitor and terroriser,” Booth wrote to a friend, “with unlimited, undeniable contempt.” If abolitionists praised Brown’s compassion for the “poor slave,” to white Southerners he was anarchy incarnate.

Despite Brown’s undeniable impact on American history, Brown scholarship has progressed sporadically, and he has inspired only about two dozen scholarly biographies in the 150 years since his capture at Harpers Ferry. Questions about Brown’s readiness to use violence, the roots of his “fanaticism” and his sanity have plagued researchers. The belief that Brown suffered from mental illness distances us from him.

Indeed, as Brown himself understood, the claim that he was “insane” threatened the very meaning of his life. Thus at his trial he emphatically rejected an insanity plea to spare him from the hangman. When an Akron newspaperman telegraphed Brown’s court-appointed attorneys in Richmond that insanity was prevalent in Brown’s maternal family, Brown declared in court that he was “perfectly unconscious of insanity” in himself.

As Brown understood it, the “greatest and principal object” of his life—his quest to destroy slavery—would be seen as delusional if he were declared insane. The sacrifices he and his supporters had made would count for nothing. The deaths of his men and the bereavement of his wife would be doubly tragic and the attack on Harpers Ferry robbed of heroism, its purpose discredited.

In letters to his wife and children, Brown acknowledged that his raid had ended in a “calamity” or a “seeming disaster.” But he urged them all to have faith and to feel no shame over his impending fate.

While his half brother Jeremiah helped gather affidavits supposedly attesting to Brown’s “monomania,” or-single minded fixation on eradicating slavery, John’s brother Frederick went on a lecture tour in his support. Neither Jeremiah nor anyone else in John Brown’s large family renounced the raid.

When it comes to Brown’s war against slavery, the question of his mental balance must nevertheless be addressed. By the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, some of his contemporaries had already begun to question his sanity. As they insisted, was not the raid itself evidence of an “unhinged” mind? Wasn’t Brown “crazy” to suppose he could overthrow American slavery by commencing a movement on so grand a scale with just 21 active fighters?

No one can doubt that Brown sought to elevate the status of African Americans. Throughout his adult life, he conceived projects to help them gain entry into the privileged world of whites. As a youth he helped fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad; as a prospering farmer and town builder, he proposed adopting black children and founding schools for them. In 1849 he moved his family to North Elba, N.Y., to teach fugitives how to maintain a farm.

He held a two-day convention in Canada to secure the participation of fugitive American blacks in his planned war on slavery. He wrote a declaration of independence on their behalf. He respected and raised money for “General” Harriet Tubman and called his friend Frederick Douglass “the first great national Negro leader.” Yet to the extent that in his projects he envisioned himself as a mentor, leader or commander in chief, Brown’s embrace of egalitarianism was, paradoxically, paternalistic. He solicited support from blacks for the war against slavery but not their counsel in shaping it.

Despite that, his black allies never called seizing Harpers Ferry crazy. Although Brown had been hanged for his actions, Douglass insisted the raid had lit the fire that consumed slavery. Brown chose to open his war against slavery at Harpers Ferry, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1909, because the capture of a U.S. arsenal would create a “dramatic climax to the inception of his plan” and because it was the “safest natural entrance to the Great Black Way” through the mountains from slavery to freedom in the North.

Harpers Ferry wasn’t Brown’s first foray onto the national stage. In 1857 his band of men had killed several proslavery settlers in “Bleeding Kansas,” hacking to death five men along Pottawatomie Creek with short, heavy swords. Scholars differ on whether the killings should be considered murders or acts of war following the proslavery sack of Lawrence just days before. I have found evidence that Brown and his sons saw their attack as a kind of preemptive strike against men who had threatened violence against freestaters. But to understand is not necessarily to justify or excuse. How a deeply religious man could commit such an act is a question one cannot ignore in assessing Brown’s mind.

Du Bois understood that Brown’s recourse to violence in killing “border ruffians” in Kansas and his attempt to seize the armory at Harpers Ferry in order to arm slaves had caused “bitter debate as to how far force and violence can bring peace and good will.”

But Du Bois, a co-founder of the NAACP, did not think slavery could have been ended without the Civil War. He concluded that “the violence which John Brown led made Kansas a free state” and his plan to put arms in the hands of slaves hastened the end of slavery. Du Bois’ book John Brown was a “tribute to the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” African-American historians, artists and activists have long eulogized Brown as an archetype of self-sacrifice. “If you are for me and my problems,” Malcolm X declared in 1965, “then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.”

Blacks’ reverence for the memory of Brown has not inspired those mainstream historians uncomfortable with Brown’s reliance on violence. The belief that he may have suffered from a degree of “madness” has echoed down through the decades in Brown biographical literature. In his popular 1959 narrative The Road to Harpers Ferry, J.C. Furnas argued that Brown was consumed by a widespread “Spartacus complex.”

But Furnas also found that “certain details of Old Brown’s career” and writings evidenced psychiatric illness. Brown might have been “intermittently ‘in­sane’…for years before Harpers Ferry,” Furnas specu- ­­lated, “sometimes able to cope with practicalities but eventually betrayed by his strange inconsistencies leading up to and during the raid—his disease then progressing into the egocentric exaltation that so edified millions between his capture and death.”

Careful historians like David M. Potter reaffirmed the centrality of the slavery issue in his posthumously published synthesis The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, but even Potter conceded that Brown “was not a well-adjusted man”—despite the fact many abolitionists shared his belief that the slaves were restive. In 1970 historian Stephen B. Oates sought to bridge the rival biographical traditions by depicting Brown as a religious obsessive in an era of intense political conflict. Oates’ Brown was not the Cromwellian warrior of early legend builders. Nor was he the greedy, self-deluded soldier of fortune of debunkers.

He was a curious, somewhat schizoid amalgam of the legend builders’ martyr and his evil doppelganger. This Brown possessed courage, energy, compassion and indomitable faith in his call to free the slaves. He was also egotistical, inept, cruel, intolerant and self-righteous, “always exhibit[ing] a puritanical obsession with the wrongs of others.”

Oates was doubtful that historians might ever persuasively identify psychosis in a subject they studied. He repudiated historian Allan Nevins’ belief that Brown suffered from “reasoning insanity” and “ambitious paranoia,” but he declared that Brown was not “normal,” “well adjusted” or “sane” either (later dismissing these terms as meaningless).

But reference to Brown’s “glittering eye”—a telltale mark of insanity in 19th-century popular culture—invited Oates’ readers to conclude that Brown was touched with madness after all. Finding in Brown an “angry, messianic mind,” Oates straddled the two biographical traditions. For three decades, his portrait of Brown has perpetuated the image of mental instability.

To get to the roots of Brown’s mental state, we must turn to those closest to him for help. Analysis of the scores of letters written by members of both Brown’s immediate family and the extended family he referred to as the “connection” reveal a John Brown quite different from the self-absorbed, humorless, rigid, imperious, driven fanatic portrayed by some biographers.

Letters Brown exchanged with his father, his wife and his dependent and grown children over several decades reveal a warmer, more engaged father than heretofore pictured. Although he moved his family frequently, he was not a “wanderer” or a “loner.” Brown and his father, “Squire” Owen, remained fast friends despite the latter’s exacting standards of piety and worldly success for his eldest son. Owen’s home in Hudson, Ohio, remained a vital part of his son’s emotional universe to the end.

John Brown asked forgiveness of his wife for his long absences while driving cattle to market or selling prize sheep, and he often complained of homesickness. He loved to hold his children and sing to them; he regularly brought the little ones presents, and he often teased his adolescent sons about their preoccupation with girls.

In 1846 Brown met the tragic death of daughter Amelia—“little Kitty”—and the loss of other children soon after, despite his own grief, with words of encouragement and reaffirmations of faith in a compassionate God to his bereaved second wife, Mary Ann, who bore him 13 offspring. Indeed, he was resilient in the face of God’s “afflictive Providences” and was apparently sel­dom “blue” for long periods. The only time in his adult life of which we have any record when he was genuinely depressed for months or even weeks was while mourning the death of his beloved first wife, Dianthe, in 1832.

A Calvinist who believed that earthly life was a time of testing and trial, Brown accepted reversals with courage and renewed hope. Even after the failure of speculative enterprises he entered into with his father or his neighbors, Brown was resilient. After a variety of disappointments, Brown faced starting over in collaboration with his adult sons with fortitude and optimism.

Although he later despaired of his sons’ religious apostasy, Brown defended his faith in the Bible and his belief in “the God of my fathers” to them and also to his teenage daughter, Annie. The dissenters all remained close to their father despite their rejection of his biblical Christianity.

Even though he preached serious-mindedness, Brown’s temperament was neither solitary nor morose. His habits were not rigid, and he adapted easily to conditions in the field. Brown clearly possessed a sense of humor; in fact, he once tried to win the open support of the Rev. Theodore Parker by writing to him in a comic Irish brogue!

Brown’s medical history explains much that has been mistaken for mental illness in his record. Like others in his family, Brown suffered from repeated bouts with “fever and ague”—malaria—and was often bedridden  during his last years. Yet even when he had to travel prone in the bed of a wagon, his energy drained by the illness, he never despaired of his project.

The “terrible gathering in my head” of which he complained for several weeks, and which some writers have mistaken as evidence of mental illness, proves to have been a prolonged infection in his sinuses and ear.

Even after staying awake two nights in succession during the raid, Brown was able to respond for more than an hour to questions from authorities. With Senator Mason and Governor Wise leading this questioning, he knew his raid had not altogether failed to win an audience. He also managed to fashion brief speeches for the assembled correspondents.

His apparent elation at his questioning was due in part to their presence; he knew he would reach readers of the “penny dailies” who were sympathetic to the cause. His war on slavery had long been in part a propaganda campaign in what were called the “prints.”

But what about the record of mental illness in Brown’s family? A number of John Brown’s maternal relations were at times committed to mental asylums, but we do not know what illnesses they may have suffered from. The youngest son of Brown’s first marriage, Frederick, began in his late teens to suffer frequent episodes of a mood disorder sufficiently severe that his father took him to a “celebrated” physician for treatment; Frederick was never institutionalized, but the family kept him indoors when his “spells” became severe.

Brown’s eldest son, John Jr., suffered a psychotic episode in Kansas. He too did not receive treatment, and for more than a year his illness resulted in symptoms like those we associate today with post-traumatic stress disorder. John Jr. later attributed the episode to the strain of losing command of his militia company after the Pottawatomie killings, in which he had no hand, and to his being arrested and held in chains for “treason” by the territorial authorities as a free-state legislator. John Jr. went on to fight in the Union Army during the war. We also know that late in life, Brown’s eldest daughter, Ruth, experienced major depression that lasted for nearly a decade.

Altogether, these illnesses suggest that perhaps either John or Dianthe carried a hereditary predisposition to affective disorder. Yet before Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid no one in his wide circle of friends and relations ever suggested that he ought to be committed or to commit himself for treatment at a county institution or to seek the help of an “alienist.”

If friends and former associates petitioned the court for commutation of his death sentence after the raid, their affidavits (now located in the Wise Collection at the Library of Congress) show at best a range of “symptoms” far short of modern diagnostic standards for a major psychiatric disorder.

To be sure, Brown became excited when acquaintances in Ohio made light of slavery or suggested that time would eventually eradicate it. He was pledged to destroy slavery, and indifference to it deeply offended him. But at the time when several of the affiants reported such “agitated” incidents, Brown had recently sought them out to raise money for his war against slavery. He was then traveling with heavily armed young “volunteer regulars.”

He had recently left Kansas, where he had fought in a number of skirmishes and won celebrity as a champion of the free-state cause. In that context, much of what the affiants attested lost its punch.

No one ever suggested that Brown’s anger or high-decibel talk went on for long. If Brown suffered from undiagnosed mental illness in that era before the rise of psychiatry, he displayed few signs or symptoms that modern psychiatrists could identify as being linked to mental disorder.

Was it right, then, to carry the “war into Africa”? The men who petitioned the Virginia court to have Brown committed insisted he must be mad to have been raising a force to resume the fighting that had torn up Kansas. To admit otherwise was to concede that for rational people the sin of slavery might be great enough to override lifelong understandings about the rule of law, tolerance for differing opinions, the efficacy of demo­cratic processes and the immorality of killing. If Brown was perfectly sane, conscientious men and women had to consider and perhaps reassess their own values. Was the perpetual bondage of millions of greater importance than the lives of slave owners and their allies?

Harpers Ferry answered that question in the affirmative. Implicitly it presupposed a hierarchy of values that, if widely adopted, would threaten the end of the slave regime. In a sense, then, Brown’s contribution to history was at a minimum to make righteous violence in the name of freeing the slaves thinkable for many who might not otherwise have considered the question.

Thus Brown’s life—and his self-fashioned “martyrdom”—were a rebuke not only to his reluctant contemporaries but also to revisionist historians who deny that antebellum Americans felt the moral urgency of ending slavery sufficiently to kill over it. To “get right” with Old John Brown is to accept righteous violence as intrinsic to our heritage.

Robert E. McGlone, an associate professor of history at the University of Hawaii, has studied John Brown for decades. That research led to his new biography, John Brown’s War Against Slavery, published by Cambridge University Press in July 2009.

Moonlight March

John brown’s moonlight march.

By Tim Rowland

On a chill foggy autumn evening in 1859, abolitionist John Brown and a rough gang of 21 men with guns and pikes and revolt in their hearts quietly hiked five miles from a farm in Western Maryland to the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Va. Their ambitions were outrageous: surprise the guards at the armory, capture wagonloads of rifles and then flee, distributing the guns among slaves. Brown hoped for nothing less than a full uprising of servant against master.

He had spent four months living on the farm simply trying to fit in. The hike to Harpers Ferry had become routine. A new beard and a shock of Lyle Lovett hair kept

locals from recognizing him as the devil who had massacred slave owners in Kansas three years before. Soon the disguise would be irrelevant. “Men, get on your arms,” he famously declared on the night of October 16, “we will proceed to the Ferry.”

Now, 150 years later, walking in Brown’s footsteps remains an eerily timeless experience. Roads that were dirt are now paved, the bridge Brown used to cross the Potomac River has been replaced, and buildings in Harpers Ferry throw off electric light. But most of the route remains pitch-black after sunset; trees that witnessed that night are still there, and woodstoves continue to scent the air.

Civil War buffs have been making this pilgrimage for better than three decades. In 1979—the 120th anniversary of John Brown’s raid—National Park Service historian Dennis Frye and 20 re-enactors, decked out in period clothing and shouldering period weapons, hiked from the Ken­nedy Farm in Washington County to the Harpers Ferry armory. They read from 1850s newspapers to get into character.

“We tried to transport ourselves back in time,” Frye said. “It was very respectful.”

Perhaps the most memorable part of the trek occurred midway, when an approaching car flashed its high beams and slowed. The lights belonged to a squad car from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. Staying in character, the soldiers sauntered on—there were no squad cars in 1859. Once past, the deputy turned around and re-approached at the same slow speed, high beams blazing. As he neared, “I expected the red and blue lights to come on,” Frye said.

Instead, the deputy drew even with the procession, took one last gander, and then peeled out at full speed, apparently wanting no part of the apparition.

Unlike those earlier cultish marches, the hike planned for this fall’s 150th anniversary will be publicized and well attended. Organizers expect hundreds of enthusiasts.

The path is mostly downhill to the Potomac and flat after that, as the road hugs the riverbank on its way downstream to the confluence with the Shenandoah River. The relative ease of the hike will not diminish the experience. “It’s still sparsely settled,” Frye said, “and still quite dark”—as dark as when John Brown hitched up his team, shouted words of encouragement and set off on a mission to change the world.

“It’s been debated over the last century and a half when the Civil War began,” Frye said. “The conventional wisdom says Fort Sumter. I disagree with that. John Brown invoked a fear that communities had not experienced before.”

Brown intended to raid the federal armory and use the weapons to establish a series of forts where fleeing slaves could join his army of marauders. At a time when the going rate for an 18-year-old male slave was $1,200, a plantation that lost most of its slaves would be equivalent to a modern farm stripped of all its tractors, harvesters, plows and irrigation equipment. Further, Brown hoped that a slave rebellion in the midst of the harvest season would damage plantations even more.

The Maryland staging area for this ambitious plan was a small, two-story farmhouse that Brown rented under the name of Isaac Smith. The most notable feature is a small attic where 20 men lived in a room the size of a garage. “It must have been hotter than the hinges of hell up there,” said local historian Tom Clemens. “That’s commitment.”

Staying out of sight was essential. Brown pretended to be a humble prospector. If any of his neighbors thought it curious that there wasn’t anything worth prospecting in that neck of the woods, or that any self-respecting prospector had already been lured west, they kept their suspicions to themselves.

The prospector story was good cover for crates of pikes and guns that could be explained away as mining tools. Clemens said the blacks in Brown’s band were armed with pikes until they could be taught how to use firearms. Brown used his daughter and daughter-in-law to add to the delusion. To all eyes, Brown was what he said he was: a good family man scratching out a living from the land.

In 1859, Harpers Ferry was “a bustling industrial town of 3,000,” Clemens said. It remains unbelievably scenic, carved out of cliffs that put the squeeze on the gushing Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. Today, people from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., drive for an hour to picnic on the shore, rafters and kayakers pirouette through challenging rapids, and fishermen hope for bass, but often reel in carp.

The lower town is one of the National Park Service’s better accomplishments. Subtract the tourist with the Hawaiian shirt, and it’s easy to be transported back in time, among restored buildings, period actors and cobblestone streets. The fire engine house Brown used as a refuge during his raid, now in its fourth location, is neatly preserved, mostly. In 1892, it was disassembled, transported to the Chicago World’s Fair, reassembled, disassembled and reassembled in Harpers Ferry as a mirror image of itself; tradesmen based their work on a photographic impression that was a negative.

One of the many floods that have ravaged Harpers Ferry since the raid washed away the bridge John Brown crossed to enter the town. In its place today is a high pedestrian bridge that accommodates Appalachian Trail hikers.

Fifteen decades ago, Harpers Ferry had one of two national armories, yet there was no militia garrisoned on site because no one anticipated a raid, much less a war. The night Brown arrived, weapons were guarded only by a snoozing night watchman. A baggage man for the B&O railroad named Hayward Shepherd proved more problematic.

When Shepherd saw a band of armed men trundling across the bridge into town at 1:30 a.m., he apparently thought they were bandits planning to rob the mail train from Wheeling. Shepherd hustled up the tracks to flag it down. In the darkness, Brown’s men couldn’t have known Shepherd was a free black man. They leveled their guns and fired.

A century and a half later, some historians speculate that Shepherd was in on the raid but got cold feet. And some suggest he was asked to join in, but refused. Arguments have led to what Clemens called Harpers Ferry’s “dueling monuments.”

In 1931 the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans dedicated a monument to Shepherd, celebrating him as a black man who did not flee or take up arms against whites. But purported racists objected that blacks deserved no recognition in history, let alone a monument.

For decades, however, prominent African-Americans—including W.E.B. DuBois—have objected to the notion that Shepherd be revered for an ambivalence, real or imagined, toward slavery.

The monument was removed from display during a park construction project in the mid-1970s. And as opposing factions quibbled over whether it should be returned, “for years the monument sat in a warehouse with a tarp over it,” Clemens said. It was returned to its location in 1981, but was covered up until 1995, when the park service added a plaque to explain everything.

Back on the bridge, Brown and his men stopped the train, then let it steam off down the tracks. A reasonable person might consider that Brown should have focused on seizing the armory’s guns and getting out of town before releasing the train.

Instead Brown lingered—shooting at townsfolk, taking prisoners and raising hell—knowing trouble would be on the way as soon as the B&O reached its next stop. Perhaps Brown was truly daft. Perhaps he wanted to be captured, despite the obvious penalties.

“That’s the critical question,” Clemens observed. “Is he crazy, or is he a shrewd manipulator of public opinion?” Brown had a family history of mental infirmities, yet Clemens thinks “it’s too easy to write him off as crazy.”

Frye believes Brown must have realized that if he held the train, people at the next station would come to investigate. Whether he held the train or not made no difference…word would get out either way. Besides, Brown’s plan was too involved to be fulfilled with one small, deadly statement. Brown believed he was “a man of God, called by God to rid the nation of slavery,” Frye said. So he stayed put, the consequences be damned.

Brown’s true undoing, however, had little to do with the train: It was trying to save Shepherd. Gunshots had awakened physician John Starry, who ran out to see what the commotion was about.

Taking advantage, Brown hurried the doctor to the porter’s side. After Starry pronounced the wounds fatal, Brown let him go.

“Starry is the Paul Revere of Harpers Ferry,” Frye said. The doctor threw himself onto his horse and headed for the militia in Charles Town, seven miles away.

The militia kept Brown corralled until Col. Robert E. Lee arrived to break down the door of the fire engine house where Brown and his raiders had holed up. Ten, including two of his sons, were killed. Six were captured and five escaped. The raiders killed four—including Harpers Ferry Mayor Fontaine Beckham—and wounded nine. Within days Brown was charged with treason for taking up arms against Virginia.

Brown’s attorneys begged him to plead insanity to avoid the gallows. But Brown worried that if he were declared insane his cause might be seen that way as well. With little defense to offer, Brown was convicted by a jury on November 2, and hanged on December 2.

Although slaves did not revolt because of Brown’s actions, the effect on the rest of the population was immense. “The fear that gripped the country after that October was like the fear that gripped America after September 11,” Frye said. “Before, people avoided talking about slavery; after John Brown, no one stopped talking about it.”

Brown had appeared to be an everyman on his rented farm. In the South, people began to look at every nearby everyman and wonder. In 1860, there were 5 million whites and 4 million slaves in the South. Might that quiet, pleasant next-door neighbor be planning a revolt?

“He was living among people under an assumed name under peaceful circumstances. It was every slaveholder’s nightmare,” Clemens said.

In the North, people were against slavery in theory, but still largely racist. The thought of millions of slaves roaming the streets as free men and women competing for jobs was frightening.

Following his execution, Brown was buried near a small farm he owned in Lake Placid, N.Y. A hapless preacher from Vermont presided at Brown’s funeral. His parishioners did not see it as the Christian thing to do; soon he was out of a job.

Abolitionists remained a fringe group, yet Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry was eventually seen, at least in the North, as the exploit of a martyr, and even a hero.

Newspaper columnist and history junkie Tim Rowland loves to hike, but supports his habits by writing. His latest book, Maryland’s Appalachian Highlands: Massacres, Moonshine and Mountaineering, was released by The History Press in June.

John Brown’s Blood Oath

The excerpt below traces Brown’s first campaigns of war and terror, three years before Harpers Ferry, when he and his family formed a Northern army to fight proslavery forces in Kansas.

At about 11 o’clock on the brightly moonlit night of May 24, 1856, James Doyle, his wife, Mahala, and their five children were in bed when they heard a noise in the yard. Then came a rap at the door of their cabin on Mosquito Creek, a tributary of Pottawatomie Creek. A voice outside asked the way to a neighbor’s home. When Doyle opened the door, several men burst in, armed with pistols and large knives. They said they were from the “Northern army” and had come to take Doyle and three of his sons prisoner.

The Doyles, a poor family from Tennessee, owned no slaves. But since moving to Kansas the preceding autumn, James and his two oldest sons had joined a proslavery party and strongly supported the Southern cause. Two of the Doyles had served on the court convened the month before at Dutch Henry’s Crossing on the Pottawatomie to charge the Browns with violating proslavery laws.

Mahala Doyle pleaded tearfully with the intruders to release their youngest captive, her 16-year-old son, John. They let him go and then led the others out of the cabin and into the night. “My husband and two boys, my sons, did not come back,” Mahala later testified. She and John didn’t know the identity of the men who came to their door, but they’d glimpsed their faces in the candlelight. “An old man commanded the party,” John Doyle testified. “His face was slim.” He added: “These men talked exactly like Eastern men and Northern men talk.”

Before leaving, the strangers asked the Doyles about a neighbor, Allen Wilkinson, who lived about half a mile away with his wife, Louisa Jane, and two children. Like Doyle, Wilkinson had come from Tennessee and owned no slaves. Unlike Doyle, Wilkinson could read and write. He was a member of Kansas’s proslavery legislature, and his cabin served as the local post office.

After midnight, Louisa Jane, who was sick with measles, heard a dog barking and woke her husband. He said it was nothing and went back to sleep. Then the dog began barking furiously and Louisa Jane heard footsteps and a knock. She woke her husband again; he called out, asking who was there.

“I want you to tell me the way to Dutch Henry’s,” a voice replied. When Wilkinson began to give directions, the man said, “Come out and show us.” His wife wouldn’t let him. The stranger then asked if Wilkinson was an opponent of the Free State cause. “I am,” he said.

“You are our prisoner,” came the reply. Four armed men poured into the cabin, took Wilkinson’s gun, and told him to get dressed. Louisa Jane begged the men to let her husband stay: She was sick and helpless, with two small children.

“You have neighbors?” asked an older man who appeared to be in command. He wore soiled clothes and a straw hat pulled down over his narrow face. Louisa Jane told him she had neighbors, but couldn’t go for them. “It matters not,” he said. Unshod, her husband was led outside. Louisa Jane thought she heard her husband’s voice a moment later “in complaint,” but then all was still.

Dutch Henry’s Crossing was named for Henry Sherman, a German immigrant who had settled the ford. He traded cattle to westward pioneers and ran a tavern and store that served as a gathering place for proslavery men. He and his brother, William, were feared by Free State families for their drunkenness and threatening behavior.

On the night of the Northern army’s visit to the Pottawatomie, Dutch Henry was out on the prairie looking for stray cattle. But one of his employees who lived at the Crossing, James Harris, was asleep with his wife and child when men burst in carrying swords and revolvers. They demanded the surrender of Harris and three other men who were spending the night in his one-room cabin. Two were travelers who had come to buy a cow; the third was Dutch Henry’s brother, William.

Harris and the two travelers were questioned individually outside the cabin, and then returned inside, having been found innocent of aiding the proslavery cause. Then William Sherman was escorted from the cabin. About 15 minutes later, Harris heard a pistol shot; the men who had been guarding him left, having taken a horse, a saddle, and weapons. It was now Sunday morning, about 2 or 3 a.m. The terrified settlers along the Pottawatomie waited until dawn to venture outside. At the Doyles’, the first house visited in the night, 16-year-old John found his father, James, and his oldest brother, 22-year-old William, lying dead in the road about 200 yards from their cabin.

Both men had multiple wounds; William’s head was cut open and his jaw and side slashed. John found his other brother, 20-year-old Drury, lying dead nearby.

“His fingers were cut off, and his arms were cut off,” John said in an affidavit. “His head was cut open; there was a hole in his breast.” Mahala Doyle, having glanced at the bodies of her husband and older son, could not look at Drury. “I was so much overcome that I went to the house,” she said.

Down the creek, locals who went to the Wilkinsons’ cabin to collect their mail found Louisa Jane Wilkinson in tears. She had heard about the Doyles and could not bring herself to go outside, for fear of what she might find. Neighbors discovered Allen Wilkinson lying dead in brush about 150 yards from the cabin, his head and side gashed, his throat cut.

At Dutch Henry’s Crossing, James Harris had also gone looking for his overnight guest, William Sherman. He found him lying in the creek.

“Sherman’s skull was split open in two places and some of his brains was washed out by the water,” Harris testified. “A large hole was cut in his breast, and his left hand was cut off except a little piece of skin on one side.”

News of the murders along the Pottawatomie spread quickly through the district. A day after the killings, John Brown was confronted by his son Jason. A gentle man known as the “tenderfoot” of the Brown clan, Jason had stayed behind with his brother John Junior while the others headed to Dutch Henry’s.

“Did you have anything to do with the killing of those men on the Pottawatomie?” Jason demanded of his father.

“I did not do it, but I approved of it,” Brown answered.

“I think it was an uncalled for, wicked act,” Jason said.

“God is my judge,” his father replied. “We were justified under the circumstances.”

This was about as clear a statement as Brown would ever make about what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre. He spoke of it rarely, and then only in vague terms that suggested he was culpable without having personally shed any blood. His family hewed to this line. “Father never had any thing to do with the killing but he run the whole business,” said Sal­mon, the most talkative of the four sons at the massacre. “The work was so hot, and so absorbing, that I did not at the time know where each actor was, exactly, or exactly what each man was doing.”

The Browns and their allies cast the killings as an act of self-defense: a preemptive strike against proslavery zealots who had threatened their Free State neighbors and intended to harm them. The Browns’ defenders also denied any intent on their part to mutilate the Kansans. Broadswords had been used to avoid making noise and raising an alarm; the gruesome wounds resulted from the victims’ attempts to ward off sword blows.

But this version of events didn’t accord with evidence gathered after the killings. Mahala Doyle and James Harris both testified that they heard shots in the night. And “old man Doyle” was found with a bullet hole in his forehead, to go with a stab wound to his chest.

The most plausible account of Brown’s actions came from a family member who wasn’t there: John Junior. Though initially opposed to his father’s mission, he later wrote a lengthy defense of it. Until late May 1856, proslavery forces in Kansas had committed almost all the violence, killing six Free State men without reprisal. As the Browns and their Free State allies stewed, John Junior said, they realized the enemy needed shock treatment—“death for death.”

But the Pottawatomie attack wasn’t simply a matter of evening the score in Kansas. Those sentenced to die must be slain “in such manner as should be likely to cause a restraining fear,” John Junior wrote. In other words, the killing should so terrorize the proslavery camp as to deter future violence.

In this light, the massacre made grisly sense. Like Nat Turner, the most haunting figure in Southern imagination, Brown came in the night and, with his Northern army, dragged whites from their beds, hacking open heads and lopping off limbs. The killers wore no masks, plainly stated their allegiance, and left maimed victims lying in the road or creek. Pottawatomie was, in essence, a public execution, and the message it sent was chilling.

“I left for fear of my life,” Louisa Jane Wilkinson testified in Missouri, where she took refuge after her husband’s killing. The Doyles also fled a day after the slaughter.

So did many of their neighbors. And news that five proslavery men had been, as one settler said, “taken from their beds and almost litterly heived to peices with broad swords,” spread like prairie fire across Kansas. “I never lie down without taking the precaution to fasten my door,” a settler from South Carolina wrote his sister soon after the killings. “I have my rifle, revolver, and old home-stocked pistol where I can lay my hand on them in an instant, besides a hatchet & axe. I take this precaution to guard against the midnight attacks of the Abolitionists, who never make an attack in open daylight.”

Pottawatomie had clearly succeeded in sowing terror. But it failed to produce the “restraining fear” that John Junior believed to be its intent. Instead of deterring violence, the massacre incited it.

LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR! read the headline in a Missouri border paper, reporting on the deaths. Up to that point, the Kansas conflict had generated a great deal of heat but relatively little bloodshed. Now, in a single stroke, Brown had almost doubled the body count and whipped up his already rabid foes, who needed little spur to violence.

Not for the last time, Brown acted as an accelerant, igniting a much broader and bloodier conflict than had flared before. “He wanted to hurry up the fight, always,” Salmon Brown observed of his father. “We struck merely to begin the fight that we saw was being forced upon us.”

The number of killings escalated dramatically in the months that followed, earning the territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” In early June, 10 days after Pottawatomie, Brown struck again, joining his band with other Free State fighters in a bold dawn attack on a much larger force of proslavery men. This marked the first open-field combat in Kansas, and the first instance of organized units of white men fighting over slavery, five years before the Civil War. The Battle of Black Jack, as it became known, was a confused half-day clash involving about a hundred combatants. It ended with the surrender of the proslavery men, who were fooled into believing they were outnumbered. “I went to take Old Brown, and Old Brown took me,” the proslavery commander later conceded. He surrendered not only his men but also a valuable store of guns, horses, and provisions.

Black Jack also brought greater attention to Brown, who kept the Northern press abreast of his campaign, sometimes taking antislavery journalists with him in the field. One of these was William Phillips, a New York Tribune correspondent who rode with Brown after the battle. “He is not a man to be trifled with,” Phillips wrote, “and there is no one for whom the border ruffians entertain a more wholesome dread than Captain Brown.”

“He is a strange, resolute, repulsive, iron-willed inexorable old man,” Phillips added, possessing “a fiery nature and a cold temper, and a cool head—a volcano beneath a covering of snow.”

Brown’s growing renown came at great cost to his family. His son-in-law, Henry Thompson, was shot in the side at Black Jack, and 19-year-old Salmon Brown sustained a gunshot to the shoulder soon after the battle. Life on the run, subsisting on gooseberries, bran flour, and creek water flavored with a little molasses and ginger, wore down the outlaw band. “We have, like David of old, had our dwelling with the serpents of the rocks and wild beasts of the wilderness,” Brown wrote his wife in June. Three of his sons became so debilitated by illness that in August he escorted them to Nebraska to recover in safety.

By then, conflict raged across eastern Kansas. Partisans on both sides spent the summer raiding, robbing, burning, and murdering, while federal troops struggled to contain the anarchy. The violence climaxed in late August, when several hundred proslavery fighters, armed with cannons, descended on the Free State settlement at Osawatomie, where Brown’s sister and other family members lived. With just 40 men, Brown led a spirited defense of Osawatomie. Though he was ultimately forced to retreat, Brown scored another propaganda victory by fearlessly battling a much larger and better-armed foe.

“This has proven most unmistakably that ‘Yankees’ will fight,” John Junior wrote of the reaction to Osawatomie. His father, slightly wounded in the combat, was initially reported dead, a mistake that only enhanced his aura. The battle also gave the Captain a new title. As a noted guerrilla and wanted man, he would adopt a number of aliases over the next three years. But the nom de guerre that stuck in public imagination was “Osawatomie Brown,” a tribute to his Kansas stand.

The name also evoked his family’s continued sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Early in the morning before the battle at Osawatomie, proslavery scouts riding into the settlement encountered Frederick Brown on his way to feed horses. Believing himself on friendly ground, Frederick evidently identified himself to the riders. One of them was a proslavery preacher who blamed the Browns for attacks on his property, and he replied by shooting Frederick in the chest. The 25-year-old died in the road.

His father learned of the slaying while rallying his small force to repel Osawatomie’s invaders. Frederick’s older brother Jason took part in the battle, and at its end, he stood with his father on the bank of the Osage River, watching smoke and flames rise in the distance as their foes torched the Free State settlement they’d fought so hard to defend.

“God sees it,” Brown told Jason. “I will die fighting for this cause.” He had made similar pledges before. But this time Brown was in tears, and he mentioned a new field of battle to his son.

“I will carry the war into Africa,” he said. This cryptic phrase spoke clearly to Jason, who knew “Africa” was his father’s code for the slaveholding South.

Excerpted from Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War , by Tony Horwitz. Copyright © 2011 by Tony Horwitz. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Interpreting John Brown: Infusing Historical Thinking into the Classroom

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Bruce A. Lesh, Interpreting John Brown: Infusing Historical Thinking into the Classroom, OAH Magazine of History , Volume 25, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages 46–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/oahmag/oar003

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John Brown has been subject to constant reinterpretation in the century and half since he led the 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. In this photograph by John H. Tarbell, an unnamed African American man in Ashville, North Carolina is holding a copy of Joseph Barry's The Strange Story of Harper's Ferry , published a year earlier. Judging by the man's age, he was alive in 1859, and quite possibly enslaved. One can only wonder at his interpretation of John Brown. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

On the cusp of his December 1859 execution for treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, John Brown handed a note to his guard which read, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.” Although the institution of slavery was purged in the crucible of the American Civil War, John Brown's determination to expose and end chattel slavery still resonates. The multiple legacies of slavery and questions about the efficacy of violence as a tool for change in a democratic society continually bring historians and teachers back to the complicated life of John Brown. When students consider Brown's contributions to the American narrative, lines between advocacy and criminality, contrasts between intensity and obsession, and differences between democratic ideals and harsh reality are brought to the surface. To this day, artists, authors, historians, political activists, and creators of popular culture maintain a fascination with the antebellum rights-warrior and his death.

This continuing interest in John Brown presents a great teaching opportunity. Not only can we help to situate John Brown within the context of his era, but we can explore how historical interpretations of the man and his actions have changed over time. The lesson I describe in this article asks students to consider Brown's biography, multiple artistic representations of the abolitionist, as well as historical and contemporary viewpoints in order to develop an evidence-based interpretation of how this controversial historical figure should be commemorated. Students conduct an analysis of the diverse, and often conflicting, historical sources, and then apply their interpretations to the development of a historical marker that would be placed at the Harper's Ferry National Historical Park. In this sense, Brown provides a unique opportunity for students to examine a figure whose actions, and their attendant meanings, tell us as much about antebellum America and the origins of the Civil War as they do about our own time.

Challenging students to develop an interpretation of John Brown ties into my broader philosophy about history instruction. Research on history education, going back nearly a century, indicates that few students retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history ( 1 ). This dismal track record stems from a teaching method that relies primarily on the memorization of names and dates. To limit the study and assessment of history to a student's ability to regurgitate these facts hides the true nature of the discipline. History, at its core, is the study of questions and the analysis of evidence in an effort to develop and defend thoughtful responses. For students to truly be engaged with the past, they must be taught thinking skills that mirror those employed by historians. Recent research suggests that students are more capable of evaluating historical sources, using them to develop an interpretation, and articulating their interpretations in a variety of formats. When doing so, students become powerful thinkers rather than consumers of a predetermined narrative path ( 2 ).

Asking questions about causality, chronology, continuity and change over time , multiple perspectives , contingency , empathy , significance, and motivation enable students to use the substantive information to address essential historical issues. In addition, students must be taught to approach historical sources with the understanding that they are repositories of information that reflect a particular temporal, geographic, and socio-economic perspective. Analyzing a variety of historical sources—be they diaries, artifacts, music, images, or monographs—enables students to scrutinize the remnants of the past and apply this evidence to the task at hand. Employing these historical thinking skills in a classroom setting empowers students to use the names, dates, and events to develop, revise, and defend evidence-based interpretations of the questions that drive the study of history ( 3 ).

Given the path illuminated in the scholarship and my own experiences with teaching history to high school students for eighteen years, I planned the John Brown lesson with an emphasis on source work and student development of evidence-based explanations focused on a key historical question. At the conclusion of the lesson, my students are asked to determine how John Brown and his life should be commemorated. Engaging in many, though not all, of the considerations involved in public history, my students set out to interpret Brown's life for a twenty-first century audience. To do so, they must get to know the individual, his actions, and how Brown was seen by both his contemporaries and historians from his time to the present.

Born in the first year of the nineteenth century to a devoutly Calvinist family, John Brown credits witnessing a slave being beaten with a shovel as the origin of his devotion to the anti-slavery cause. Unlike most of the abolitionists that arose in the 1830s, Brown was dedicated to both the abolition of chattel slavery and racial equality. This commitment was exemplified in his 1838 decision to escort a free black to sit in his family pew. This bold act led to his family's expulsion from the church. In a fruitless attempt to become economically solvent, Brown moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 1846 to develop his wool business. In Springfield, Brown befriended, lived among, and attended church alongside African Americans. Brown's sincere empathy for the plight of the slave was reflected in a letter written by abolitionist Frederick Douglass after meeting Brown. Douglass, who made a trip to Springfield expressly to meet Brown, stated that Brown was “in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” During this meeting, Brown revealed what he called his “Subterranean Pass Way.” Using the Appalachian Mountains as a base, this plan envisioned a rebellion that would arm slaves, encourage their revolt, and direct people northward to freedom. It was in Springfield where Brown first revealed the elements of what would become the final act of his life: a raid on the South to promote a slave rebellion.

In 1849, Brown moved his family to North Elba, New York to live on a communal farm created by abolitionist Gerrit Smith ( Figure 2 ). Living with black families was a clear indication of Brown's commitment to a biracial society. In 1851, reacting to the Fugitive Slave provisions of the Compromise of 1850, Brown returned to Springfield and established the League of Gileadites. Dedicated to protecting escaped slaves from slave catchers, the League was a concrete expression of Brown's visceral distaste for federal complicity with the institution of slavery. Brown vehemently expressed his passion for equality in May of 1858, when he presented his “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” to an anti-slavery convention in Ontario, Canada. Essentially a new constitution for a slavery-free United States, the document stated that:

In 1848, John Brown learned of abolitionist Gerrit Smith's offer of free land to blacks in the Adirondacks. The next year, Brown moved his family to North Elba, New York to join this experiment. Though he soon left for “Bloody” Kansas, he considered North Elba his home and asked to be buried there. In 1935, the John Brown Memorial Association dedicated this statue, designed by Joseph P. Pollia, just north of the gravesite, now part of the John Brown Farm State Historic Site: < http://nysparks.state.ny.us/historic-sites/29/details.aspx > (Courtesy of photographer David Blakie, < http://davidblaikie.ca/ >)

Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion-the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination-in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence:

Therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, [The Dred Scott Decisions] are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions ( 4 ).

This was a clear statement of Brown's opposition to slavery and his dedication to equality. Yet for Brown, it was not words, but actions, that seared his name into the pantheon of American history. Speaking to the community of former slaves in Canada, Brown announced his plan to invade the American South and foment a slave rebellion using the mountains of western Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama to provide cover for his uprising. It would be this uprising that occupied much of his travel, speaking, and fundraising between 1858 and his death in 1859.

Brown's first overt public action took place in May of 1856. In Kansas, Brown led a group of men on a raid that killed five proslavery men along the Pottawatomie Creek. Though Brown claimed not to have participated in the actual murders, the brutality of the act has come to symbolize the violence that struck Kansas territory as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Violence as a tool for change was again employed by Brown in 1858 in Missouri. Brown entered Vernon County, just across the Kansas border, and attacked several proslavery farmers, stole horses and wagons, and secured the freedom of eleven enslaved persons. His raid led to the deaths of several farmers, and consequently a bounty of $250 was placed on his head by President James Buchanan and his name was splashed over newspapers across the nation. After traveling more than a thousand miles over eighty-plus days, Brown delivered the newly liberated former-slaves into the hands of Canada and freedom.

Secretly funded by six abolitionists from Massachusetts, armed with thousands of pikes purchased in Connecticut, driven by his deep disdain for slavery, and supported by twenty-one other men, Brown headed to western Maryland to reconnoiter for his final attempt to foment a rebellion aimed at destroying the institution of slavery. The raid on the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia was initiated on the evening of October 16, 1859. In what quickly developed into a rout, more than half of Brown's followers were killed and the remaining eight, including Brown, were captured the following day. Indicted, found guilty, and sentenced to die, John Brown was hanged in Charlestown, Virginia on December 2, 1859 ( 5 ).

John Brown of Osawatomie spake on his dying day: ‘I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery's pay; But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free, With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me!’ John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die; And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh: Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old harsh face grew mild, As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro's child! The shadows of his stormy life that moment fell apart, And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart; That kiss from all its guilty means redeemed the good intent, And round the grisly fighter's hair the martyr's aureole bent! ( 6 )

The notion of Brown consecrating his sacrifice for slaves with a kiss to the cheek of a slave child found visual form in the 1860 painting, John Brown on His Way to Execution by Louis Ransom. It was further popularized by an 1863 Currier and Ives colored lithograph entitled John Brown , and subtitled Meeting the slave-mother and her child on the steps of Charlestown jail on his way to execution. Thomas Noble's John Brown's Blessing appeared in 1867, a redrawn Currier and Ives, John Brown—The Martyr debuted in 1870. Finally, in 1884, Thomas Hovenden painted his memorialization of the mythical kiss in his Last Moments of John Brown (See cover image) ( 7 ). This introductory element of the lesson fertilizes the pedagogical ground for growing a deep and meaningful investigation of Brown.

Based on an 1859 painting by Louis Ransom, this Currier & Ives lithograph is entitled John Brown. Meeting the slave-mother and her child on the steps of Charlestown jail on his way to execution . A precursor of Thomas Hovenden's 1884 painting on the cover of this issue, it offers a darker, more symbolic depiction of the mythical event. To Brown's left, we see his elderly jailer, a wealthy slaveholder, and a militia member dressed in an aristocratic uniform. To his right stands the embodied spirit of the American Revolution somberly assessing the scene and a soldier pushing back an enslaved woman who suckles her light-skinned child, perhaps the product of a rape by her master. Behind her stands a broken and neglected statue of Justice. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

A one-page biographical reading, assigned for homework, is used to structure class discussion of Brown's upbringing, his early efforts to address slavery in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the events leading up to his attack on the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry. Emphasis is drawn to Brown's religious beliefs, his role in “Bleeding Kansas,” his raid into Missouri, and finally the ill-fated Harper's Ferry Raid. To firmly place Brown's actions within the growing sectional mentality of the 1850s, I discuss with students the various sectional reactions to Brown's failed raid. With the contrasting images of Brown fresh in their minds, I inform students that it is their task to determine how Brown should be memorialized historically.

To deepen their analysis of Brown, students are assigned one of several readings. Selected to represent contrasting interpretations of the man and his actions, these readings are intended to complicate students’ investigation. I traditionally select six sources from the list of “Further Readings” located at the end of the article, but I have provided all of the potential sources on the online version of the lesson materials. Historiographically, the discussion of Brown has evolved from the hero-worship of James Redpath and Oswald Garrison Villard to critical analysis of his mental state as found in the work of Bruce Catton and James C. Malin.

Students are organized so that all of the six sources are represented within a group. Each student then presents the interpretation of John Brown expounded by their source. Next, to assist students in better understanding each perspective, I identify some relevant background information of the various authors and the time period in which they wrote. It is important to ensure that students consider authorship, context, and subtext as they derive information from a historical source. By confronting the milieu in which Malcolm X spoke about Brown, or how personal biography impacts Villard's telling of the Brown story, students are forced to consider the sources not as words, but as a perspective informed by and reflecting the social, cultural, economic, and political background of the author and the time period of its construction. Exposing the subtext of each source illuminates for students how John Brown has been interpreted differently and empowers them to develop their own evidence-based interpretations of the past.

Since I teach a forty-five minute class period, my lesson usually breaks in the midst of students sharing the evidence provided by their sources. At times, I will ask students, as homework between day one and two of the lesson, to consult one Northern and one Southern editorial found at < http://history.furman.edu/editorials/see.py >. These articles, and the context and subtext that influence their perspectives, help complicate, but also deepen, our final discussion on how to commemorate John Brown.

After sharing and taking notes, students are asked to consider how they feel John Brown and his actions should be commemorated. Small group discussions of the topic eventually become a large group debate. It is key to this phase of the lesson that students base their interpretations on the evidence they have confronted. Issues of authorship and context add to our discussion about what John Brown means to the telling of American history and how his efforts should be memorialized.

At the conclusion of the lesson, students are asked to apply the evidence they have examined to one of two assessments. The first option is to complete a historical marker that is to be placed at the entrance of the Harper's Ferry National Historic Park. The second is to select five items that would be displayed in the museum at the same park, explain why they were selected, and how these items help to describe John Brown and account for his actions. These assessments place students in a position where they must adhere to the basic historical facts in order to develop and defend an interpretation of the choice they made about commemorating John Brown. Either iteration of the assessment requires students to identify what historical sources informed their decisions and how these sources influenced their choices.

Students have a hard time wrapping their minds around John Brown. Go figure, so do historians. Brown has been the subject of hundreds of books, articles, documentaries, and other forms of historical interpretation. My students, just as historians, are drawn into the complexities of Brown's personality and the actions he takes over the course of his life.

When crafting their interpretations for the historical marker, students tend to run in one of three directions. A large number take a middle of the road approach. After examining the multiple images and textual viewpoints of Brown, they stick to what they see as the pertinent facts. Gone are incendiary adjectives or overt ideological typecasting of Brown and his actions. In many ways, their markers are reminiscent of those produced by the National Park Service for many historical figures and events. The second third stress Brown's actions in both Missouri and Harper's Ferry, but do not address his beliefs. They reflect in their analysis that they are unwilling or unable to determine if he was crazy, obsessively focused, or simply devoted to his cause. The final third interpret and represent Brown as a madman whose actions intentionally set the nation barreling towards civil discord.

What strikes me about this lesson is that students come to see history as alive and interpretive, rather than inert and handed down from some central authoritative body. Most instruments that measure student achievement in history would simply ask students to select the response in a multiple choice question that correctly identifies the impact of Brown's actions. This is achieved within the first five minutes of my lesson. Instead, it is the pastness of Brown that captures their interest and generates in-depth analysis, far beyond a discussion that establishes the basis for an answer to a multiple-choice question. The power and depth of the discussion generated about Brown has been the impetus for me to apply this structure to other historical figures and events. Individuals such as Nat Turner, Daniel Shays, or Eugene Debs and events such as the Haymarket Affair, Busing in Boston, or the Tet Offensive become ripe for deep historical investigation once I realized that my students could do so. The depth of connection my students make with these watershed events and transitional figures far outweighs the time it takes to plan or execute such investigations.

At the same time, the power of images to quickly connect students to a topic is also readily evident when I teach this lesson. The images empower students to become more critical in their analysis of the textual sources they are asked to read. Because the images are so stark, both in contrast to one another as well as individually, students look for similar differences within the text. This transfer of critical reading from the more comfortable image analysis to the more difficult text is a key ingredient for students as they evolve their abilities to think historically. When students are taught to be aware that historical sources are not simply repositories of information, but instead vehicles for communicating an author's perspective on an individual, event, or historical idea, they are enabled to begin crossing the bridge from the “unnatural act of thinking historically” towards a mindset more parallel to that employed by historians.

Ultimately, what my students enjoy is the opportunity to examine the past rather than having it examined for them. The occasion to apply historical thinking skills to determine how to commemorate the life and actions of one of the most divisive figures in American History empowers students to examine multiple sources of historical evidence, develop, revise, and defend evidence-based interpretations, and grapple with key questions of the past. Just as John Brown taught us that challenging the norms of American society is a difficult endeavor, so too is challenging the manner in which we approach teaching history.

J. Carelton Bell and David F. McCollum, “A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History,” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917): 257–74; James P. Shaver, O.L. Davis, Jr., and Suzanne Helburn, “The Status of Social Studies Education: Impressions from Three NSF Studies,” Social Education (February 1979): 150–53; James B. Schick, “What do Students Really Think of History?” The History Teacher , 24 (May 1991): 331–42; T he Nation's Report Card: U.S. History 2006. National Assessment of Educational Progress at grades 4, 8, and 12 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, United States Department of Education, 2006); Anne Neal and Jerry Martin, Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 2000); Dale Whittington, “What Have 17-Year Olds Known in the Past?” American Educational Research Journal 28 (Winter 1991): 759–80.

Bruce VanSledright. The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy (New York: Routledge, 2010); Nikki Mandell and Bobbie Malone. Thinking Like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction, A Framework to Enhance and Improve Teaching and Learning (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007); Keith Barton. “Research on Students’ Historical Thinking and Learning.” AHA Perspectives Magazine , October 2004, 19–21.

Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Bruce VanSledright, I n Search of America's Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School (New York: Teacher's College Press, 2002); Suzanne M. Donovan and John D. Bransford, eds. How Students Learn: History in the Classroom (Washington DC: The National Academies Press, 2005); Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey.” Journal of American History , March 2006, 1358–1370.

“John Brown's Provisional Constitution,” University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, < http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/johnbrown/brownconstitution.html .>.

David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). Jonathan Earle, John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008).

John Greenleaf Whittier, “Brown of Ossawatomie,” The Lost Museum, < http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/144/ .>.

James C. Malin, “ The John Brown Legend in Pictures, Kissing the Negro Baby,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 8 (1939): 339–441, < www.kancoll.org/khq/1939/39_4_malin.htm .>.

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John Brown’s Harpers Ferry

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2023 | Original: March 4, 2010

In October 1859, the U.S. military arsenal at Harpers Ferry was the target of an assault by an armed band of abolitionists led by John Brown (1800-59). (Originally part of Virginia, Harpers Ferry is located in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia near the convergence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers.) The raid was intended to be the first stage in an elaborate plan to establish an independent stronghold of freed slaves in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia.

Brown was captured during the raid and later convicted of treason and hanged, but the raid inflamed white Southern fears of slave rebellions and increased the mounting tension between Northern and Southern states before the American Civil War (1861-65).

John Brown: Abolitionist Leader

Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio , John Brown came from a staunchly Calvinist and anti-slavery family. He spent much of his life failing at a variety of businesses–he declared bankruptcy in his early 40s and had more than 20 lawsuits filed against him. In 1837, his life changed irrevocably when he attended an abolition meeting in Cleveland, during which he was so moved that he publicly announced his dedication to destroying the institution of slavery. As early as 1848 he was formulating a plan to incite an insurrection.

Did you know? Author Henry David Thoreau was among those who spoke out in defense of John Brown after his arrest following the Harpers Ferry raid. Thoreau penned an essay, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in support of his fellow abolitionist.

In the 1850s, Brown traveled to Kansas with five of his sons to fight against the pro-slavery forces in the contest over that territory. After pro-slavery men raided the abolitionist town of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, Brown personally sought revenge. Several days later, he and his sons attacked a group of cabins along Pottawatomie Creek. They killed five men with broad swords and triggered a summer of guerilla warfare in the troubled territory. One of Brown’s sons was killed in the fighting.

By 1857, Brown returned to the East and began raising money to carry out his vision of a mass uprising of slaves. He secured the backing of six prominent abolitionists, known as the “Secret Six,” andassembled an invasion force. His “army” grew to include more than 20 men, including several black men and three of Brown’s sons. The group rented a Maryland farm near Harpers Ferry and prepared for the assault.

Harpers Ferry Raid: October 16-18, 1859

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and his band overran the federal arsenal. Some of his men rounded up a handful of hostages, including a few slaves. Word of the raid spread and by the following day Brown and his men were surrounded. On October 18, a company of U.S. Marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee (1808-70) and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart (1833-64), overran Brown and his followers. Brown was wounded and captured, while 10 of his men were killed, including two of his sons.

John Brown Executed: December 2, 1859

Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason and murder, and found guilty on November 2.The 59-year-old abolitionistwent to the gallows on December 2, 1859. Before his execution, he handed his guard a slip of paper that read, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

It was a prophetic statement. Although the raid failed, it inflamed sectional tensions and raised the stakes for the 1860 presidential election. Brown’s raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important impetus of the Civil War .

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Harpers Ferry Raid

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• UShistory.org - John Brown's Raid
• HistoryNet - Raid on Harpers Ferry
• National Park Service - John Brown's Raid
• PBS - American Experience - The Harpers Ferry Raid
• NPR - The Harpers Ferry 'Rising' That Hastened Civil War

Harpers Ferry Raid , (October 16–18, 1859), assault by an armed band of abolitionists led by John Brown on the federal armoury located at Harpers Ferry , Virginia (now in West Virginia). It was a main precipitating incident to the American Civil War .

The raid on Harpers Ferry was intended to be the first stage in an elaborate plan to establish an independent stronghold of freed slaves in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia—an enterprise that had won moral and financial support from several prominent Bostonians. Choosing Harpers Ferry because of its arsenal and because of its location as a convenient gateway to the South, John Brown and his band of 16 whites and five blacks seized the armoury on the night of October 16.

Sporadic fighting took place around the arsenal for two days. On October 18, combined state and federal troops (the latter commanded by Col. Robert E. Lee and including Lieut. Jeb Stuart ) subdued Brown and his collaborators. Seventeen men died in the fighting. Brown was indicted for treason on October 25. He and his six surviving followers were hanged before the end of the year.

Although the raid on Harpers Ferry was denounced by a majority of Northerners, it electrified the South—already fearful of slave rebellions —and convinced slaveholders that abolitionists would stop at nothing to eradicate slavery. It also created a martyr , John Brown, for the antislavery cause. When he learned that Brown had been executed, essayist, philospher, and dedicated abolitionist Henry David Thoreau said:

I heard, to be sure, that he had been hanged, but I did not know what that meant—and not after any number of days shall I believe it. Of all the men who are said to be my contemporaries, it seems to me that John Brown is the only one who has not died.

John Brown’s Day of Reckoning

The abolitionist’s bloody raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago set the stage for the Civil War

Fergus M. Bordewich

Harpers Ferry, Virginia, lay sleeping on the night of October 16, 1859, as 19 heavily armed men stole down mist-shrouded bluffs along the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah. Their leader was a rail-thin 59-year-old man with a shock of graying hair and penetrating steel-gray eyes. His name was John Brown. Some of those who strode across a covered railway bridge from Maryland into Virginia were callow farm boys; others were seasoned veterans of the guerrilla war in disputed Kansas. Among them were Brown's youngest sons, Watson and Oliver; a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina; an African-American student at Oberlin College; a pair of Quaker brothers from Iowa who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Brown; a former slave from Virginia; and men from Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana. They had come to Harpers Ferry to make war on slavery.

The raid that Sunday night would be the most daring instance on record of white men entering a Southern state to incite a slave rebellion. In military terms, it was barely a skirmish, but the incident electrified the nation. It also created, in John Brown, a figure who after a century and a half remains one of the most emotive touchstones of our racial history, lionized by some Americans and loathed by others: few are indifferent. Brown's mantle has been claimed by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Timothy McVeigh, Socialist leader Eugene Debs and abortion protesters espousing violence. "Americans do not deliberate about John Brown—they feel him," says Dennis Frye, the National Park Service's chief historian at Harpers Ferry. "He is still alive today in the American soul. He represents something for each of us, but none of us is in agreement about what he means."

"The impact of Harpers Ferry quite literally transformed the nation," says Harvard historian John Stauffer, author of The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race . The tide of anger that flowed from Harpers Ferry traumatized Americans of all persuasions, terrorizing Southerners with the fear of massive slave rebellions, and radicalizing countless Northerners, who had hoped that violent confrontation over slavery could be indefinitely postponed. Before Harpers Ferry, leading politicians believed that the widening division between North and South would eventually yield to compromise. After it, the chasm appeared unbridgeable. Harpers Ferry splintered the Democratic Party, scrambled the leadership of the Republicans and produced the conditions that enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to defeat two Democrats and a third-party candidate in the presidential election of 1860.

"Had John Brown's raid not occurred, it is very possible that the 1860 election would have been a regular two-party contest between antislavery Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats," says City University of New York historian David Reynolds, author of John Brown: Abolitionist . "The Democrats would probably have won, since Lincoln received just 40 percent of the popular vote, around one million votes less than his three opponents." While the Democrats split over slavery, Republican candidates such as William Seward were tarnished by their association with abolitionists; Lincoln, at the time, was regarded as one of his party's more conservative options. "John Brown was, in effect, a hammer that shattered Lincoln's opponents into fragments," says Reynolds. "Because Brown helped to disrupt the party system, Lincoln was carried to victory, which in turn led 11 states to secede from the Union. This in turn led to the Civil War."

Well into the 20th century, it was common to dismiss Brown as an irrational fanatic, or worse. In the rousing pro-Southern 1940 classic film Santa Fe Trail , actor Raymond Massey portrayed him as a wild-eyed madman. But the civil rights movement and a more thoughtful acknowledgment of the nation's racial problems have occasioned a more nuanced view. "Brown was thought mad because he crossed the line of permissible dissent," Stauffer says. "He was willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of blacks, and for this, in a culture that was simply marinated in racism, he was called mad."

Brown was a hard man, to be sure, "built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships," in the words of his close friend, the African-American orator Frederick Douglass. Brown felt a profound and lifelong empathy with the plight of slaves. "He stood apart from every other white in the historical record in his ability to burst free from the power of racism," says Stauffer. "Blacks were among his closest friends, and in some respects he felt more comfortable around blacks than he did around whites."

Brown was born with the century, in 1800, in Connecticut, and raised by loving if strict parents who believed (as did many, if not most, in that era) that righteous punishment was an instrument of the divine. When he was a small boy, the Browns moved west in an ox-drawn wagon to the raw wilderness of frontier Ohio, settling in the town of Hudson, where they became known as friends to the rapidly diminishing population of Native Americans, and as abolitionists who were always ready to help fugitive slaves. Like many restless 19th-century Americans, Brown tried many professions, failing at some and succeeding modestly at others: farmer, tanner, surveyor, wool merchant. He married twice—his first wife died from illness—and, in all, fathered 20 children, almost half of whom died in infancy; 3 more would die in the war against slavery. Brown, whose beliefs were rooted in strict Calvinism, was convinced that he had been predestined to bring an end to slavery, which he believed with burning certitude was a sin against God. In his youth, both he and his father, Owen Brown, had served as "conductors" on the Underground Railroad. He had denounced racism within his own church, where African-Americans were required to sit in the back, and shocked neighbors by dining with blacks and addressing them as "Mr." and "Mrs." Douglass once described Brown as a man who "though a white gentleman, is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery."

In 1848, the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith encouraged Brown and his family to live on land Smith had bestowed on black settlers in northern New York. Tucked away in the Adirondack Mountains, Brown concocted a plan to liberate slaves in numbers never before attempted: A "Subterranean Pass-Way"—the Underground Railroad writ large—would stretch south through the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains, linked by a chain of forts manned by armed abolitionists and free blacks. "These warriors would raid plantations and run fugitives north to Canada," says Stauffer. "The goal was to destroy the value of slave property." This scheme would form the template for the Harpers Ferry raid and, says Frye, under different circumstances "could have succeeded. [Brown] knew that he couldn't free four million people. But he understood economics and how much money was invested in slaves. There would be a panic—property values would dive. The slave economy would collapse."

Political events of the 1850s turned Brown from a fierce, if essentially garden-variety, abolitionist into a man willing to take up arms, even die, for his cause. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which imposed draconian penalties on anyone caught helping a runaway and required all citizens to cooperate in the capture of fugitive slaves, enraged Brown and other abolitionists. In 1854, another act of Congress pushed still more Northerners beyond their limits of tolerance. Under pressure from the South and its Democratic allies in the North, Congress opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery under a concept called "popular sovereignty." The more northerly Nebraska was in little danger of becoming a slave state. Kansas, however, was up for grabs. Pro-slavery advocates—"the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with Revolvers, Bowie Knives, Rifles & Cannon, while they are not only thoroughly organized, but under pay from Slaveholders," John Brown Jr. wrote to his father—poured into Kansas from Missouri. Antislavery settlers begged for guns and reinforcements. Among the thousands of abolitionists who left their farms, workshops or schools to respond to the call were John Brown and five of his sons. Brown himself arrived in Kansas in October 1855, driving a wagon loaded with rifles he had picked up in Ohio and Illinois, determined, he said, "to help defeat Satan and his legions."

In May 1856, pro-slavery raiders sacked Lawrence, Kansas, in an orgy of burning and looting. Almost simultaneously, Brown learned that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the most outspoken abolitionist in the U.S. Senate, had been beaten senseless on the floor of the chamber by a cane-wielding congressman from South Carolina. Brown raged at the North's apparent helplessness. Advised to act with restraint, he retorted, "Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice." A party of Free-Staters led by Brown dragged five pro-slavery men out of their isolated cabins on eastern Kansas' Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with cutlasses. The horrific nature of the murders disturbed even abolitionists. Brown was unrepentant. "God is my judge," he laconically replied when asked to account for his actions. Though he was a wanted man who hid out for a time, Brown eluded capture in the anarchic conditions that pervaded Kansas. Indeed, almost no one—pro-slavery or antislavery—was ever arraigned in a court for killings that took place during the guerrilla war there.

The murders, however, ignited reprisals. Pro-slavery "border ruffians" raided Free- Staters' homesteads. Abolitionists fought back. Hamlets were burned, farms abandoned. Brown's son Frederick, who had participated in the Pottawatomie Creek massacre, was shot dead by a pro-slavery man. Although Brown survived many brushes with opponents, he seemed to sense his own fate. In August 1856 he told his son Jason, "I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause."

By almost any definition, the Pottawatomie killings were a terrorist act, intended to sow fear in slavery's defenders. "Brown viewed slavery as a state of war against blacks—a system of torture, rape, oppression and murder—and saw himself as a soldier in the army of the Lord against slavery," says Reynolds. "Kansas was Brown's trial by fire, his initiation into violence, his preparation for real war," he says. "By 1859, when he raided Harpers Ferry, Brown was ready, in his own words, ‘to take the war into Africa'—that is, into the South."

In January 1858, Brown left Kansas to seek support for his planned Southern invasion. In April, he sought out a diminutive former slave, Harriet Tubman, who had made eight secret trips to Maryland's Eastern Shore to lead dozens of slaves north to freedom. Brown was so impressed that he began referring to her as "General Tubman." For her part, she embraced Brown as one of the few whites she had ever met who shared her belief that antislavery work was a life-and-death struggle. "Tubman thought Brown was the greatest white man who ever lived," says Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero .

Having secured financial backing from wealthy abolitionists known as the "Secret Six," Brown returned to Kansas in mid-1858. In December, he led 12 fugitive slaves on an epic journey eastward, dodging pro-slavery guerrillas and marshals' posses and fighting and defeating a force of United States troops. Upon reaching Detroit, they were ferried across the Detroit River to Canada. Brown had covered nearly 1,500 miles in 82 days, proof to doubters, he felt sure, that he was capable of making the Subterranean Pass-Way a reality.

With his "Secret Six" war chest, Brown purchased hundreds of Sharps carbines and thousands of pikes, with which he planned to arm the first wave of slaves he expected to flock to his banner once he occupied Harpers Ferry. Many thousands more could then be armed with rifles stored at the federal arsenal there. "When I strike, the bees will swarm," Brown assured Frederick Douglass, whom he urged to sign on as president of a "Provisional Government." Brown also expected Tubman to help him recruit young men for his revolutionary army, and, says Larson, "to help infiltrate the countryside before the raid, encourage local blacks to join Brown and when the time came, to be at his side—like a soldier." Ultimately, neither Tubman nor Douglass participated in the raid. Douglass was sure the venture would fail. He warned Brown that he was "going into a perfect steel trap, and that he would not get out alive." Tubman may have concluded that if Brown's plan failed, the Underground Railroad would be destroyed, its routes, methods and participants exposed.

Sixty-one miles northwest of Washington, D.C., at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, Harpers Ferry was the site of a major federal armory, including a musket factory and rifle works, an arsenal, several large mills and an important railroad junction. "It was one of the most heavily industrialized towns south of the Mason-Dixon line," says Frye. "It was also a cosmopolitan town, with a lot of Irish and German immigrants, and even Yankees who worked in the industrial facilities." The town and its environs' population of 3,000 included about 300 African-Americans, evenly divided between slave and free. But more than 18,000 slaves—the "bees" Brown expected to swarm—lived in the surrounding counties.

As his men stepped off the railway bridge into town that October night in 1859, Brown dispatched contingents to seize the musket factory, rifle works, arsenal and adjacent brick fire-engine house. (Three men remained in Maryland to guard weapons that Brown hoped to distribute to slaves who joined him.) "I want to free all the negroes in this state," he told one of his first hostages, a night watchman. "If the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood." Guards were posted at the bridges. Telegraph lines were cut. The railroad station was seized. It was there that the raid's first casualty occurred, when a porter, a free black man named Hayward Shepherd, challenged Brown's men and was shot dead in the dark. Once key locations had been secured, Brown sent a detachment to seize several prominent local slave owners, including Col. Lewis W. Washington, a great-grandnephew of the first president.

Early reports claimed that Harpers Ferry had been taken by 50, then 150, then 200 white "insurrectionists" and "six hundred runaway negroes." Brown expected to have 1,500 men under his command by midday Monday. He later said he believed that he would eventually have armed as many as 5,000 slaves. But the bees did not swarm. (Only a handful of slaves lent Brown assistance.) Instead, as Brown's band watched dawn break over the craggy ridges enclosing Harpers Ferry, local white militias—similar to today's National Guard—were hastening to arms.

First to arrive were the Jefferson Guards, from nearby Charles Town. Uniformed in blue, with tall black Mexican War-era shakos on their heads and brandishing .58-caliber rifles, they seized the railway bridge, killing a former slave named Dangerfield Newby and cutting Brown off from his route of escape. Newby had gone north in a failed attempt to earn enough money to buy freedom for his wife and six children. In his pocket was a letter from his wife: "It is said Master is in want of money," she had written. "I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted, for their [sic] has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you."

As the day progressed, armed units poured in from Frederick, Maryland; Martinsburg and Shepherdstown, Virginia; and elsewhere. Brown and his raiders were soon surrounded. He and a dozen of his men held out in the engine house, a small but formidable brick building, with stout oak doors in front. Other small groups remained holed up in the musket factory and rifle works. Acknowledging their increasingly dire predicament, Brown sent out New Yorker William Thompson, bearing a white flag, to propose a cease-fire. But Thompson was captured and held in the Galt House, a local hotel. Brown then dispatched his son, Watson, 24, and ex-cavalryman Aaron Stevens, also under a white flag, but the militiamen shot them down in the street. Watson, although fatally wounded, managed to crawl back to the engine house. Stevens, shot four times, was arrested.

When the militia stormed the rifle works, the three men inside dashed for the shallow Shenandoah, hoping to wade across. Two of them—John Kagi, vice president of Brown's provisional government, and Lewis Leary, an African-American—were shot dead in the water. The black Oberlin student, John Copeland, reached a rock in the middle of the river, where he threw down his gun and surrendered. Twenty-year-old William Leeman slipped out of the engine house, hoping to make contact with the three men Brown had left as backup in Maryland. Leeman plunged into the Potomac and swam for his life. Trapped on an islet, he was shot dead as he tried to surrender. Throughout the afternoon, bystanders took potshots at his body.

Through loopholes—small openings through which guns could be fired—that they had drilled in the engine house's thick doors, Brown's men tried to pick off their attackers, without much success. One of their shots, however, killed the town's mayor, Fontaine Beckham, enraging the local citizenry. "The anger at that moment was uncontrollable," says Frye. "A tornado of rage swept over them." A vengeful mob pushed its way into the Galt House, where William Thompson was being held prisoner. They dragged him onto the railroad trestle, shot him in the head as he begged for his life and tossed him over the railing into the Potomac.

By nightfall, conditions inside the engine house had grown desperate. Brown's men had not eaten for more than 24 hours. Only four remained unwounded. The bloody corpses of slain raiders, including Brown's 20-year-old son, Oliver, lay at their feet. They knew there was no hope of escape. Eleven white hostages and two or three of their slaves were pressed against the back wall, utterly terrified. Two pumpers and hose carts were pushed against the doors, to brace against an assault expected at any moment. Yet if Brown felt defeated, he didn't show it. As his son Watson writhed in agony, Brown told him to die "as becomes a man."

Soon perhaps a thousand men—many uniformed and disciplined, others drunk and brandishing weapons from shotguns to old muskets—would fill the narrow lanes of Harpers Ferry, surrounding Brown's tiny band. President James Buchanan had dispatched a company of Marines from Washington, under the command of one of the Army's most promising officers: Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee. Himself a slave owner, Lee had only disdain for abolitionists, who "he believed were exacerbating tensions by agitating among slaves and angering masters," says Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters . "He held that although slavery was regrettable, it was an institution sanctioned by God and as such would disappear only when God ordained it." Dressed in civilian clothes, Lee reached Harpers Ferry around midnight. He gathered the 90 Marines behind a nearby warehouse and worked out a plan of attack. In the predawn darkness, Lee's aide, a flamboyant young cavalry lieutenant, boldly approached the engine house, carrying a white flag. He was met at the door by Brown, who asked that he and his men be allowed to retreat across the river to Maryland, where they would free their hostages. The soldier promised only that the raiders would be protected from the mob and put on trial. "Well, lieutenant, I see we can't agree," replied Brown. The lieutenant stepped aside, and with his hand gave a prearranged signal to attack. Brown could have shot him dead—"just as easily as I could kill a musquito," he recalled later. Had he done so, the course of the Civil War might have been different. The lieutenant was J.E.B. Stuart, who would go on to serve brilliantly as Lee's cavalry commander.

Lee first sent several men crawling below the loopholes, to smash the door with sledgehammers. When that failed, a larger party charged the weakened door, using a ladder as a battering ram, punching through on their second try. Lt. Israel Green squirmed through the hole to find himself beneath one of the pumpers. According to Frye, as Green emerged into the darkened room, one of the hostages pointed at Brown. The abolitionist turned just as Green lunged forward with his saber, striking Brown in the gut with what should have been a death blow. Brown fell, stunned but astonishingly unharmed: the sword had struck a buckle and bent itself double. With the sword's hilt, Green then hammered Brown's skull until he passed out. Although severely injured, Brown would survive. "History may be a matter of a quarter of an inch," says Frye. "If the blade had struck a quarter inch to the left or right, up or down, Brown would have been a corpse, and there would have been no story for him to tell, and there would have been no martyr."

Meanwhile, the Marines poured through the breach. Brown's men were overwhelmed. One Marine impaled Indianan Jeremiah Anderson against a wall. Another bayoneted young Dauphin Thompson, where he lay under a fire engine. It was over in less than three minutes. Of the 19 men who strode into Harpers Ferry less than 36 hours before, five were now prisoners; ten had been killed or fatally injured. Four townspeople had also died; more than a dozen militiamen were wounded.

Only two of Brown's men escaped the siege. Amid the commotion, Osborne Anderson and Albert Hazlett slipped out the back of the armory, climbed a wall and scuttled behind the embankment of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the bank of the Potomac, where they found a boat and paddled to the Maryland shore. Hazlett and another of the men whom Brown had left behind to guard supplies were later captured in Pennsylvania and extradited to Virginia. Of the total, five members of the raiding party would eventually make their way to safety in the North or Canada.

Brown and his captured men were charged with treason, first-degree murder and "conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection." All of the charges carried the death penalty. The trial, held in Charles Town, Virginia, began on October 26; the verdict was guilty, and Brown was sentenced on November 2. Brown met his death stoically on the morning of December 2, 1859. He was led out of the Charles Town jail, where he had been held since his capture, and seated on a small wagon carrying a white pine coffin. He handed a note to one of his guards: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with blood." Escorted by six companies of infantry, he was transported to a scaffold where, at 11:15, a sack was placed over his head and a rope fitted around his neck. Brown told his guard, "Don't keep me waiting longer than necessary. Be quick." These were his last words. Among the witnesses to his death were Robert E. Lee and two other men whose lives would be irrevocably changed by the events at Harpers Ferry. One was a Presbyterian professor from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, who would earn the nickname "Stonewall" less than two years later at the Battle of Bull Run. The other was a young actor with seductive eyes and curly hair, already a fanatical believer in Southern nationalism: John Wilkes Booth. The remaining convicted raiders would be hanged, one by one.

Brown's death stirred blood in the North and the South for opposing reasons. "We shall be a thousand times more Anti-Slavery than we ever dared to think of being before," proclaimed the Newburyport (Massachusetts) Herald . "Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified," Henry David Thoreau opined in a speech in Concord on the day of Brown's execution, "This morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light." In 1861, Yankee soldiers would march to battle singing: "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on."

On the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, "this was the South's Pearl Harbor, its ground zero," says Frye. "There was a heightened sense of paranoia, a fear of more abolitionist attacks—that more Browns were coming any day, at any moment. The South's greatest fear was slave insurrection. They all knew that if you held four million people in bondage, you're vulnerable to attack." Militias sprang up across the South. In town after town, units organized, armed and drilled. When war broke out in 1861, they would provide the Confederacy with tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers. "In effect, 18 months before Fort Sumter, the South was already declaring war against the North," says Frye. "Brown gave them the unifying momentum they needed, a common cause based on preserving the chains of slavery."

Fergus M. Bordewich , a frequent contributor of articles on history, is profiled in the "From the Editor" column.

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History Resources

Who Was John Brown?

By fred freitas.

"Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic." —Frederick Douglass

The late 1840s and the 1850s were a turbulent and complex time in American history as the country ground inexorably toward civil war. Abolitionist and pro-slavery positions hardened both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line as events built toward a bloody confrontation. John Brown would be a catalyst that triggered the violent reaction. As he wrote just before his execution: "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." As David W. Blight says in his review of David S. Reynolds’s book John Brown, Abolitionist , "John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him - until he died on the gallows. Perhaps no other figure in American experience straddles the blurred line between myth and history, legend and reality, quite like the domineering, violent, Calvinist abolitionist who attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 and provided, in a way, the Pearl Harbor of the Civil War." "The Good Terrorist." Washington Post (4/24/05), p. TO1.

This lesson introduces middle school students to John Brown and attempts to separate history from myth and the man from the legend.  

Aim/Essential Question

Who was John Brown and what was his role in triggering the Civil War?  

This lesson should follow homework assignments and classroom discussions on the causes of the Civil War and events that led to the war.

• Lyrics and music for "John Brown’s Body"
• Extended Timeline Activity Sheet  (Word document)
• "Historic Character I Am" Poem - John Brown  (Word document)
• "The Road to War" by Chandra Manning, Gilder Lehrman Institute
• Address of John Brown to the Virginia Court , University of Missouri, Kansas City
• Semi-Annual Report of VMI [Virginia Military Institute] Superintendent Francis H. Smith Submitted to the Governor, 1860 January 16 , Virginia Military Institute
• John T. L. Preston letter to his wife describing John Brown’s execution, December 2, 1859 , Virginia Military Institute
• Letter from John Brown to his son, Owen , Gilder Lehrman Collection
• Newspaper articles printed at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid , Furman University
• "What Shall the South Do?" Wilmington, North Carolina, Daily Herald . December 5, 1859 , Furman University
• "Address" [excerpt from sermon] by J. Sella Martin, December 2, 1859 , George Mason University
• "The Fatal Friday" Chicago (Ill.) Press and Tribune , December 2, 1859 , Furman University
• Students will review the immediate causes of the Civil War.
• Students will analyze documents about John Brown from multiple perspectives of various people from America’s past.
• Students will assess John Brown’s role in this period of American history.

Choose one of the following activities:

• How does Frederick Douglass respond to the question he raised?
• Do you agree or disagree with him? Why?
• What is the song about?
• What details about John Brown does the song provide?
• Ask the students to record their responses in their journals.

Extended Timeline Activity (activity used with permission of Nancy Taylor): Children can learn a great deal by bringing a timeline to life. This activity can help them take ownership of the historical material they are studying, make relationships between facts and ideas, think critically, and develop empathy. Bringing a timeline to life can be accomplished by having the children play roles and use first-person narratives. The teacher may do this by using dates, facts and quotes. A student narrator reads the assigned facts from the timeline while the other students stand along the timeline or go up to it when it is their turn to speak. When a student hears a fact from the timeline that fits the quotes or facts that he or she has gathered, the student reads that material to the group. If time permits, the children can script their own dialogue to fit the facts on the timeline.

• On one classroom wall create a large timeline extending from 1760 to 1860.
• Cut out the dates and events from the Extended Timeline Activity Sheet and distribute randomly to students.
• Ask students to convert their events into first-person accounts. For example, a student might be given: "1800: John Brown is born in Torrington, Connecticut. Owen, his father, hated slavery and believed holding humans in bondage was a sin against God." The student might convert this to: "Today my son John was born. I hope and pray to God that he will grow up in a country where there will be no slaves."
• When all students are ready, the student narrator reads the first event and description. This is followed by the first student walking to the timeline and reading his or her first-person account. Continue until all events are finished.

Divide your class into mixed-ability groups of four. Provide each group with the essay "The Road to War" by Chandra Manning.

Each group reads and discusses the article. On a large sheet of poster paper, a recorder lists the main points of the article. The teacher then conducts a whole-class discussion of the article, recording each group’s responses on the blackboard. Groups should add any new facts to their lists.

Divide your class into eight groups. Provide each group with one of the eight primary source documents listed and a document-analysis sheet. This analysis sheet may be one that your school uses or you may use the National Archives Written Document-Analysis sheet. Each group reads its document, completes a document-analysis sheet, and gives an oral presentation of its findings to the whole class. Whole-class discussion should focus on the different perspectives on John Brown that were revealed in the document analyses.

Assessment: Write and share with the class a "Historic Character I Am" Poem - John Brown. (See "Historic Character I Am" Poem - John Brown sheet.)

Summary Questions

• Why is knowing about John Brown and the opposing views about him important in understanding the events leading to the Civil War?
• Respond to this question and explain your answer: Did the Civil War bring about the equality between races that John Brown gave his life for?

Extension Activities

• You have been chosen to design and create a new monument dedicated to abolitionism and John Brown. What will you design? How will you portray John Brown—as a hero or villain? What symbols will you use? Remember you must be historically accurate—meaning you must include only events that happened.
• You are either the chief prosecutor or chief defense attorney at John Brown’s trial. Prepare your closing statement to the jury.
• Interested students who wish to explore more about John Brown online can visit the following websites:
• John Brown's Holy War , PBS
• The Raid on Harper's Ferry , PBS
• Nineteenth Century Documents Project , Furman University

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32c. John Brown's Raid

On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a small army of 18 men into the small town of Harper's Ferry , Virginia. His plan was to instigate a major slave rebellion in the South. He would seize the arms and ammunition in the federal arsenal, arm slaves in the area and move south along the Appalachian Mountains, attracting slaves to his cause. He had no rations. He had no escape route. His plan was doomed from the very beginning. But it did succeed to deepen the divide between the North and South.

John Brown and his cohorts marched into an unsuspecting Harper's Ferry and seized the federal complex with little resistance. It consisted of an armory, arsenal, and engine house. He then sent a patrol out into the country to contact slaves, collected several hostages, including the great grandnephew of George Washington, and sat down to wait. The slaves did not rise to his support, but local citizens and militia surrounded him, exchanging gunfire, killing two townspeople and eight of Brown's company. Troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived from Washington to arrest Brown. They stormed the engine house, where Brown had withdrawn, captured him and members of his group, and turned them over to Virginia authorities to be tried for treason. He was quickly tried and sentenced to hang on December 2.

Brown's strange effort to start a rebellion was over less than 36 hours after it started; however, the consequences of his raid would last far longer. In the North, his raid was greeted by many with widespread admiration. While they recognized the raid itself was the act of a madman, some northerners admired his zeal and courage. Church bells pealed on the day of his execution and songs and paintings were created in his honor. Brown was turned into an instant martyr. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that Brown would make "the gallows as glorious as the cross." The majority of northern newspapers did, however, denounce the raid. The Republican Party adopted a specific plank condemning John Brown and his ill-fated plan. But that was not what the south saw.

Would you consider John Brown a murderer or a martyr?

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Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities

John Brown (1800–1859)

John Brown was a fervent abolitionist who was accused of massacring pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1856 and who, in 1859, led an unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry , Virginia (in what is now West Virginia ), in an attempt to start a slave insurrection. On October 16, 1859, Brown and his men occupied the federal arsenal in the northern Shenandoah Valley and were quickly surrounded by the combined forces of local militias and a detachment of United States marines led by Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart . After a thirty-six-hour shoot-out, Brown and his surviving men surrendered. At the insistence of Virginia governor Henry Wise , Brown was tried in state, not federal, court. At the end of a gripping trial held in Charles Town, he was found guilty of conspiracy, of inciting servile insurrection, and of treason against the state. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Brown’s raid (and the fact that five of his “soldiers” were African Americans) touched off a frenzy among Southern slave-owners and, in the estimation of many historians, set the nation on an irreversible course toward the American Civil War (1861–1865).

Early Years

John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, the son of an antislavery tanner. He grew up in Ohio and at age sixteen moved to Massachusetts. After failing to complete training for the ministry, he returned to Ohio and married in 1820. With his first wife, Dianthe Lusk, who died in 1832, and his second wife, Mary Day, Brown became the father of twenty children. He moved often, hoping to find financial success in Pennsylvania and Ohio before settling in New Elba, New York. As often as Brown tried a new business venture he failed, and he spent much of his time fighting off creditors.

Eventually, a quest for Christian moral purity came to consume Brown. As a young man in Ohio, he had an on-again, off-again relationship with various Congregational churches. From 1840 on he was unaffiliated with any church, although his views always remained rooted in the black-and-white theology of Calvinism. In Brown’s view, sin abounded and, in the spirit of the Second Great Awakening, it needed to be eliminated immediately. Convinced that slavery was the nation’s greatest sin, Brown therefore dedicated himself to abolitionism.

Fighting Slavery

As the issue of slavery continued to fuel political passions across the nation in the 1850s, Brown joined five of his sons to fight in “Bleeding Kansas.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 established “popular sovereignty,” or the idea that the people of a United States territory had a right to vote to determine whether, as a state, they would allow slavery or not. Predictably, violence erupted as pro- and anti-slavery forces poured into the newly created territory of Kansas. In May 1856, after a series of attacks on anti-slavery settlers in Lawrence, Brown and his sons retaliated by slaughtering five local pro-slavery farmers near Pottawattomie Creek in Franklin County, Kansas (although it remains unclear whether Brown himself took part physically in the killing). “Bloody Pottawattomie,” as the incident became known, signaled a new chapter in the growing crisis over slavery; some antislavery forces were now willing to meet violence with violence.

Execution of John Brown

Just two months before the raid, Brown met with the famous anti-slavery activist and former slave Frederick Douglass in an abandoned quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to discuss his plans. In the end, Douglass refused to accompany Brown into Virginia, predicting accurately that the plan would end in disaster.

News of John Brown’s raid sent white Southerners into a full-scale panic. Sensitized for decades by rumors of slave insurrections (from Gabriel to Nat Turner ) and abolitionist conspiracies, many white Southerners now became even more convinced that a peaceful solution to the problem of slavery was impossible. Those who had already been advocating for secession seized on Brown’s raid to meld abolitionism, slave insurrection, and the Republican Party into one unified threat. The repeated assurances of Northerners like Abraham Lincoln that, while they disapproved of slavery they also condemned John Brown’s actions, fell on deaf ears among white Southerners. Meanwhile, Northern supporters of Brown, such as American essayist, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, quickly turned him into a symbol of antislavery courage and righteousness; the marching song “John Brown’s Body” would be a favorite among Union soldiers once war had begun. When Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 and the Southern states began to secede, many writers pointed to Brown’s raid as the moment when the bonds of union began to snap.

John Brown’s Legacy

John Brown remains one of the most confounding figures in nineteenth-century American history. Did his willingness to use violence forever compromise his moral authority as an abolitionist? Was he a lawless terrorist or a champion of racial equality? What does it mean that he may have been both? For decades after the Civil War, historians settled into an interpretation of Brown as a madman whose actions a “bungling generation” of politicians (to quote the historian James Garfield Randall) could not prevent from spilling over into civil war. It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century, partly in opposition to new southern segregation laws, that a few biographies appeared defending Brown’s career as an advocate for racial equality.

John Brown became a subject of intense interest again in the 1960s when some African American historians and allied white historians championed Brown as the ultimate civil rights fighter. As the movement mourned martyrs such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., Brown came to represent an earlier example of paying the ultimate price in the ongoing freedom struggle. Brown’s volatile mixture of religious conviction and violence came back into the public consciousness again at the beginning of the twenty-first century as Americans witnessed homegrown terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who cast himself as a modern-day John Brown.

• African American History
• Antebellum Period (1820–1860)
• Civil War, American (1861–1865)
• Abels, Jules. Man on Fire: John Brown and the Cause of Liberty . New York: The MacMillan Company, 1971.
• Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown . New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.
• Russo, Peggy, and Paul Finkelman. Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005
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John Brown and Harpers Ferry

Written by: bill of rights institute, by the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how regional differences related to slavery caused tension in the years leading up to the Civil War
• Explain the political causes of the Civil War

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative alongside the John Brown: Hero or Villain? DBQ Lesson plan to allow students to fully evaluate John Brown’s approach to abolitionism.

During his lifetime John Brown was greatly admired as a hero by some and fiercely hated by others. Abolitionists who supported the end of slavery generally praised his actions as necessary to destroy the institution; southerners were usually horrified by the violence he used to achieve his ends. Others, such as politician Abraham Lincoln, questioned the means even if they agreed with the end of abolishing slavery. Even today, John Brown provokes a variety of responses among historians and biographers. Judgments of his characterize him as everything from a self-righteous, fundamentalist terrorist to a crusading abolitionist for freedom.

The 1830s and 1840s witnessed increasing radicalism on the slavery issue with the rise of abolitionism. In 1831, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison launched his newspaper, The Liberator , with the principled, uncompromising words about eradicating slavery: “I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Brown was swept up by such unbending abolitionist thinking, which was consistent with his Calvinist Puritan faith. He asserted that he had an “ eternal war with slavery” and dedicated himself to the cause when abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob in 1837. “Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, in this church, [I] consecrate [my] life to the destruction of slavery,” Brown pledged during a church meeting.

This daguerreotype of John Brown was taken in 1846 or 1847 by an African American portraitist named Augustus Washington. Brown’s intensity is evident in his determined gaze and his raised right hand, as if taking an oath.

Over the next few decades, Brown failed in several business ventures and moved frequently, but he remained devoted to the cause of freeing slaves from bondage. He thought the Underground Railroad was inadequate and studied guerrilla warfare tactics. He settled near Lake Placid, New York, to manage a colony of free blacks and there organized a secret society to prevent slavecatchers from capturing their quarry in the North. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he urged violent opposition to the law and the immoral slave system generally.

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed the residents of those territories to decide whether to enter the Union as a free or slave state, according to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and overturned the Missouri Compromise. Brown thought a southern Slave Power had conspired to destroy republican institutions, and he followed several of his sons who had moved to the newly created Kansas Territory. Southerners and northerners alike were flooding the territory to decide the issue. Deeply divided over slavery, they set up rival territorial governments in different towns. Tension was rife and erupted into sporadic violence, threatening to cause civil war. Brown had raised money from northern abolitionists and purchased firearms, swords, and knives to fight in the impending war. He and his sons joined the Liberty Guards militia and the Pottawatomie Rifles militia company to fight proslavery forces.

On the night of May 24, 1856, a frenzied Brown unleashed his righteous vengeance against on nearby southerners he presumed were complicit in the evil slave system. He and his sons knocked on the doors of nearby cabins of several proslavery families who were too poor to own slaves. Armed with his pistols, hunting knives, and swords, Brown and his sons took five adult males prisoner at gunpoint and led them outside into the darkness while their wives and children cowered inside. They hacked the hostages to death and shot a wounded prisoner in the head. The mutilated bodies were discovered the following day.

When asked about the deeds, Brown said, “I did not do it, but I approved of it.” He proclaimed his godly righteousness in murdering proslavery advocates: “God is my judge. We were justified under the circumstances.” He went into hiding in the woods and soon returned to the Northeast to raise money, weapons, and recruits for another scheme against southern slavery, believing murder was morally permissible if done in the name of what was right.

Brown traveled around New England, speaking to wealthy, prominent abolitionists, including Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. He received some encouragement and funding, but many were skeptical of his violent means and remarks, such as that it would be better if a whole generation should die a violent death than that a word of the Bible or Declaration of Independence be violated. Brown was incredulous that others did not share his zeal or commitment, especially in the wake of the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott declaring blacks incapable of citizenship and the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. Meanwhile, he used the donations he collected to order hundreds of pikes and firearms to launch his war to liberate the slaves.

As he informed a few confidants, Brown intended to lead an army to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in what then was Virginia. He planned to seize the weapons there and distribute them to liberated slaves to start a violent race war in which enslaved persons killed their masters and fled to a revolutionary state in the Appalachian Mountains. In the summer of 1859, he assumed a false identity and moved to a farmhouse near Harpers Ferry. Only 21 recruits (16 whites and five African Americans) joined Brown to initiate his slave revolt. As months ebbed away in hiding, he wrote a political manifesto modeled on the Declaration of Independence and entitled “A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America,” and a new constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all races.

On the night of October 16, the small, but righteous band finally moved out in the dark to begin the war. Three men were assigned to hide a cache of weapons at a schoolhouse as a staging point for the slave rebellion. The rest marched on Harpers Ferry and easily took prisoner a night watchman and an arsenal guard when they broke into the armory. Brown dispatched a handful of men in a wagon loaded with weapons to break into nearby homes, liberate their slaves, and take hostages. The rebels wounded a watchman and accidentally shot and killed a free black railroad worker. As the town’s population was roused, church bells warning of a slave insurrection pealed throughout the countryside and telegraph messages spread word of the raid across the nation. Brown’s men had taken prisoner some 40 townspeople who had been going to work and taken cover in a firehouse.

Daylight brought nothing but disaster for the ill-conceived raid. Brown’s rebels engaged in a shootout with the townspeople and lost one of the band to a sniper. Armed militia arrived and cut off any escape. When Brown sent three emissaries to negotiate a cease-fire, they were gunned down. When five of his men tried to retreat to the Shenandoah River, two were shot and killed, one drowned, and two (one free black and one enslaved man) were captured and nearly hanged. The raiders shot and killed the mayor of the town, only fueling the anger of the citizens of Harpers Ferry. In the chaos, some 30 of Brown’s prisoners had escaped, and by nightfall he only had four or five healthy men left. One of his sons died of his wounds and another barely clung to life, but Brown resolved to fight to the end to achieve his goal of liberating the slaves.

In this depiction, published in Harpers Weekly in November 1859, U.S. Marines are shown attacking John Brown’s improvised fortifications at Harpers Ferry.

The following day, Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived with Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart and 90 Marines. Stuart tried to negotiate a surrender, but Brown refused. The Marines battered down the heavy door and stormed into the building where Brown and his men were amid gunfire and thrusting swords and bayonets. After his other men had all gone down in the mêlée, Brown was slashed by a saber before being knocked unconscious.

A few days later, Brown was tried for murder, inciting slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia and was convicted on all charges. Predictably, many antislavery activists praised his actions, while southern defenders of slavery were horrified. Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau delivered an oration praising Brown for breaking an unjust law. “Are laws to be enforced simply because they are made?” Thoreau asked.

This broadside was published in November 1859, after John Brown was convicted of murder and treason. Brown’s deeds at Harpers Ferry horrified some, but others supported his extreme actions.

During his sentencing, Brown was allowed to make a statement, which he concluded by saying, “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!”

On December 2, a wagon brought him to a gallows on a cornfield surrounded by 1,500 militiamen to guard against any rescue attempt. There Brown was bound, hanged, and placed in a coffin. That morning, he had handed one of the guards a scrap of paper with a prophetic warning: “I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.” Brown’s raid helped fuel the sectionalism that led to the bloody Civil War between North and South and claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans.

Review Questions

1. Why did John Brown oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)?

• He did not want the territories to enter the Union as free states.
• He thought a southern Slave Power was attempting to spread slavery in the western territories.
• He wanted the settlement of Kansas and the decision for statehood to be peaceful.
• He was mostly concerned with preserving the integrity of the Missouri Compromise.

2. What was John Brown’s method of freeing the enslaved persons held in bondage in the United States?

• He supported compensated emancipation and resettlement in Africa.
• He preferred disunion with slaveholders because of the institution of slavery.
• He supported the nonviolent emancipation of enslaved persons by the outlawing of slavery across the country.
• He advocated arming enslaved persons to fight a violent racial war for their liberation.

3. By 1859, John Brown was viewed as a hero by

• moderate Republicans
• Abraham Lincoln
• radical abolitionists

4. In his tactics and beliefs regarding slavery, John Brown most resembled

• Harriet Tubman
• Harriet Beecher Stowe

5. Which event triggered a response by John Brown that foreshadowed his actions in Harpers Ferry in 1859?

• Compromise of 1850
• “Bleeding Kansas”
• Dred Scott decision
• Election of Abraham Lincoln

This image from 1863 depicts John Brown meeting an enslaved woman on the steps of the Charlestown courthouse. He is on his way to execution after being convicted of treason. The drawing was originally captioned: “Regarding with a look of compassion a Slave-mother and Child who obstructed the passage on his way to the Scaffold. –Capt. Brown stooped and kissed the Child–then met his fate.”

By the time this illustration was made, the popular view of John Brown

• had not changed because most Americans considered him mentally unstable
• had moderated because most Americans viewed him as a flawed human being
• had declined as people came to realize the horrors of the Civil War
• had become more positive because many viewed Brown as a hero for the abolitionist cause

Free Response Questions

• John Brown espoused violence, including guerrilla warfare tactics, in his fight against slavery. Compare his actions with those of other abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Lloyd Garrison.
• Analyze the impact of John Brown’s raid on the start of the Civil War.

AP Practice Questions

“We ask not that the slave should lie, As lies his master, at his ease, Beneath a silken canopy, Or in the shade of blooming trees. We ask not “eye for eye,” that all Who forge the chain and ply the whip Should feel their torture, while the thrall Should wield the scourge of mastership. We mourn not that the man should toil. ‘Tis nature’s need. ‘Tis God’s decree. But let the hand that tills the soil Be, like the wind that fans it, free. Melody to “Old Hundred’ Hymn” The Abolitionist Hymn (Author unknown, circa 1850s)

1. A historian might use this song as evidence to support

• the way a lack of copyright and patent precedent led to widespread violations
• the role religious affiliation played in the spread of abolitionist sentiment
• the popular appeal of Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential election
• the impact of Irish immigration on the Free Soil movement

2. Which group would most likely support the song’s point of view?

• Radical abolitionists such as John Brown
• Advocates of free black repatriation to the African state of Liberia
• Members of the Free Soil party
• Antislavery advocates such as Harriet Beecher Stowe

3. The song most directly resulted from what earlier movement?

• The Republican view of motherhood
• The Market Revolution
• The Second Great Awakening
• The Seneca Falls Convention

Primary Sources

Benjamin S. Jones, Editor. “John Brown’s Speech from the Scaffold,” Anti-slavery Bugle, December 03, 1859: “https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1859-12-03/ed-1/seq-1/

Francis Smith Report: The Execution of John Brown, January 16, 1860: https://www.vmi.edu/archives/civil-war-and-new-market/john-brown-execution/

John Brown’s Speech to the Court at his Trial, by John Brown (1800-59), November 2, 1859: https://nationalcenter.org/JohnBrown’sSpeech.html

Speech of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Delivered in the U.S. Senate, January 28, 1860: http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/bbspr02-0012.html

Virginia Legislature, Title Report of the Joint Committee on the Harpers Ferry Outrages, January 26, 1860: http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/vajointcommitteereport.html

Suggested Resources

Carton, Evan. Patriotic Treason . Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Earle, Johnathan. John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents . Boston: Bedford Books, 2008.

Holt, Michael F. The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War . New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War . New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown . Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970.

Peterson, Merrill D. John Brown: The Legend Revisited . Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 . New York: Harper, 2011.

Reynolds, David. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights . New York: Knopf, 2005.

John Brown: Domestic Terrorist or National Hero?

150 years after the violent abolitionist's execution, some are calling John Brown a national hero. Why his legacy still matters.

His legacy is as unsettling today as it was 150 years ago, when he was hanged at the gallows for treason. While John Brown's anti-slavery crusade is seen as a moral cause, his violent tactics--which culminated in a failed raid on Harpers Ferry in which no slaves were freed but many people died--is decidedly less celebrated. In history books, Brown is often portrayed as a mentally unstable religious fanatic, but on the anniversary of his execution, columnists are painting a different picture. They argue that Brown proves it possible to be both a domestic terrorist and national hero. Why John Brown's legacy is more relevant and complex than previously imagined:

• A National Hero   In The New York Times, David S. Reynolds says few American heroes are purely righteous, including Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. "It's important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history." Reynolds wants Brown to be officially pardoned. And, "unlike nearly all other Americans of his era, John Brown did not have a shred of racism," Reynolds writes. "He had long lived among African-Americans, trying to help them make a living, and he wanted blacks to be quickly integrated into American society. When Brown was told he could have a clergyman to accompany him to the gallows, he refused, saying he would be more honored to go with a slave woman and her children."
• When Terrorism Causes War   In The New York Times, Tony Horowitz says that "in 1859, John Brown sought not only to free slaves in Virginia but to terrorize the South and incite a broad conflict. In this he triumphed: panicked whites soon mobilized, militarized and marched double-quick toward secession. Brown’s raid didn’t cause the Civil War, but it was certainly a catalyst." Brown, he writes, may have lessons for today's war against terrorism. "It may be too early to say if 9/11 bred a similar overreaction. But last night President Obama vowed to increase our efforts in Afghanistan — one of two wars that, eight years on, have killed nearly twice as many Americans as the hijacked planes."
• Ghandi Wasn't That Popular Either  At The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit reminds her readers that changing the world can be a lonely task. And those we consider to be "fanatics" today, we may consider "heroes" tomorrow. "Though it's popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people, a lot of the saints and agents of change are obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding, of themselves and of us," she writes. "That's what it generally takes to change the world."
• Fanaticism Is Wrong. Period.   The Guardian's Julian Baggini says John Brown may have been an example of a fanatic with a good cause, but his tactics were wrong nonetheless. "The rightness of the cause does not in any way negate the wrongness of the fanaticism. We should condemn the blind dedication even of those whose objectives we share."
• John Brown, Dismissed at Our Own Peril  Historian David Blight of The History News Network says writing off Brown as just a fanatic keeps us " comfortable with our prejudices and our desires" about the history of race in America. He says Brown should unsettle us. " John Brown should confound and trouble us. Martyrs are made by history; people choose their martyrs just as we choose to define good and evil.  And we will be forever making and unmaking John Brown as Americans face not only their own racial past, but the ever changing reputation of violence in the present."
• A Seminal American Figure   At The Hartford Courant, William Hosley says Brown is a pivotal figure in American history, regardless of how we feel about him. "Aside from Abraham Lincoln , no individual and few events led so decidedly to the Civil War. Brown transformed a stalemate on race, law and American values in a way that made Southern succession, civil war and the election of Lincoln inevitable."

John Brown, Martyr or murderer?

A figure who has polarized political opinion from the Civil War to today

Test your knowledge with a quiz

Hovenden, john brown.

• The abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in what is now West Virginia) in 1859. He intended to redistribute the weapons to slaves and incite a rebellion that would lead to the end of slavery. Within two months of the raid and his arrest, Brown was tried, sentenced, and executed.
• The violent actions of John Brown to end slavery were controversial at the time. The debate surrounding the morality of the raid polarized American politics. It is believed to have contributed directly to the secession of southern states in 1860-61, but even some abolitionists were concerned by Brown’s violent methods.
• During the Civil War, John Brown became a hero to Union soldiers and the subject of a popular marching song. By World War I, this had changed, and today his place in history is controversial and complex.
• Painted 25 years after the raid at Harpers Ferry, Thomas Hovenden’s image is clearly sympathetic with John Brown. He depicts Brown on his way to his execution: his arms are bound, a noose is visible around his neck, and he is heavily guarded by armed men, yet he pauses to tenderly kiss a young child (a story that circulated in the press but was never confirmed). Hovenden also used religious references to elevate John Brown to the status of a martyr, depicting him with a long white beard like Moses and creating a subtle crucifix behind him.

See this work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Learn more about the relationship between John Brown and Frederick Douglass

See images and other documents depicting the raid on Harpers Ferry

Read an essay on John Brown’s complicated place in American history

Learn more details about Harpers Ferry and its legacy

Read the lyrics and listen to the song “John Brown’s Body”

More to think about

How do you respond to the speakers’ question about whether John Brown should be seen as a martyr or a terrorist? What reasons or historical examples inform your answer?

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• Theme: Politics and Power
• Period: 1877–1898
• Topic: From slavery to Civil Rights
• Art in context: John Brown's "tragic prelude" to the Civil War

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• Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown

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John Brown And Abraham Lincoln: Divergent Paths In The Fight To End Slavery

Dave Davies

In The Zealot and the Emancipator , historian H.W. Brands reflects on two 19th century leaders who fought the institution of slavery in different ways: one radical and the other reformist.

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Correction Oct. 28, 2020

In this interview, the host incorrectly says H.W. Brands is the chair of the University of Texas at Austin's Department of History. The chair of the department is Daina Ramey Berry. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. chair in history.

John Brown: APUSH Topics to Study for Test Day

John Brown was a radical abolitionist who believed that the only way to abolish slavery was to arm slaves and to spur their insurrection. To successfully respond to John Brown APUSH questions, it is important to know the effects John Brown’s actions had on pro and antislavery voices, and to look especially at his raid on Harpers Ferry.

Who is John Brown?

John Brown was a northern abolitionist who moved about the country supporting antislavery causes, which included giving land to fugitive slaves and participating in the Underground Railroad. He was unsatisfied with the results of the peaceful protests of the mainstream abolitionist movement and became a violent radical for the cause. In 1855, Brown and his sons moved to Kansas where they took part in guerrilla warfare during the Bleeding Kansas crisis, murdering five pro-slavery settlers.

John Brown’s actions in Kansas brought him national attention. He moved to Virginia and began hatching an elaborate plot to fund an army that would raid Harpers Ferry , arm slaves, and begin an uprising. Brown led 21 men on his raid, where they attacked and occupied the federal armory for two days. Brown’s army was surrounded and many of his men were killed. Brown himself was eventually captured, charged of murder, conspiring, and treason, and hanged.

Important years to note for John Brown:

• 1856: John Brown murders five proslavery settlers in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas crisis
• 1859: John Brown raids Harpers Ferry

Why is John Brown so important?

John Brown was a divisive figure. His ideas attracted many abolitionists who were no longer content with the institution of slavery and grew impatient for emancipation. He remained, however, a radical figure, and his methods, especially after the Harpers Ferry attack, were condemned by mainstream abolitionists. Southern Democrats and other pro-slavery Americans, however, were convinced that Brown was acting on the behest of Republicans, and that his Harpers Ferry raid was just the beginning of an advanced abolitionist plot to overthrow the system of slavery. John Brown’s actions likely hastened the coming of war, as they emboldened northern abolitionists and convinced those with an interest in slavery that if republicans took control of the government slavery in the South would be ended.

What are some historical people and events related to John Brown?

• Bleeding Kansas: The crisis that followed the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Fighting ensued as Kansas citizens fought over whether or not the territory would be a free or slave state.
• Robert E. Lee: Led the military forces that captured Brown at Harpers Ferry.

What example question about John Brown might come up on the APUSH exam?

“The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ignorant of the fact, that there are at least as many as two or three individuals to a town throughout the North who think much as the present speaker does about him and his enterprise. I do not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing party. We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in. Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five Negroes were concerned in the late [raid on Harpers Ferry]; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticize the tactics.” -“A Plea for Captain John Brown” by Henry David Thoreau, 1859 ( Source ) Thoreau’s assessment of Harpers Ferry seems to support A) the Democrats’ assertion that slavery should be a matter of popular sovereignty. B) the Republicans’ conviction that John Brown’s actions were fair and just. C) the South’s fears that the North aimed not to contain slavery, but to end it. D) the North’s concern that the South would secede over John Brown’s actions.

The correct answer is (C). After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Southern Democrats and others with a stake in the institution of slavery feared that it was a sign of the insurrection to come. Republicans insisted that they did not condone Brown’s actions, but abolitionists like Thoreau came out in support of Brown and stoked the South’s fears that, should the northern Republicans win Congress and the White House, slavery would be ended.

Sarah is an educator and writer with a Master’s degree in education from Syracuse University who has helped students succeed on standardized tests since 2008. She loves reading, theater, and chasing around her two kids.

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