An 1859 daguerreotype of John Brown (Photo via Library of Congress)
When John Brown assembled a small team of men to raid the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry 160 years ago this month, he sought to ignite an anti-slavery revolt that never materialized. But as Brown’s confidant and fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in a speech more than two decades later, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”
The United States military armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry stored 100,000 rifles and muskets and 1,500 pikes and spears. By seizing the arsenal, Brown aimed to distribute the weaponry and establish communities of freed people through the Appalachians and seed stations of the Underground Railroad. He envisioned white insurgents training black fighters to use the weapons, among them the infamous pikes with 10-inch blades and 6-foot-long wooden handles.
The October 1859 attack on the town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers ended in the deaths of 16 people, including two of Brown’s sons: Oliver, 21, and Watson, 24; the latter was shot and killed under a flag of truce.
Brown was raised by a Calvinist family that believed slavery to be an abomination before God. At age 12, while entrusted by his father to drive cattle from Ohio to Detroit, he witnessed a Michigan man beating his slave with a fire shovel. The incident solidified Brown’s desire to become, as he recalled, “slavery’s most determined foe.”
His rage against the machine of slavery turned violent when Brown, at age 55, moved his family to the Kansas territory. After pro-slavery forces attacked Lawrence, Kansas — a town founded by abolitionists — he led a small band of men to Pottawatomie Creek on May 24, 1856. The group yanked five unarmed men and boys from their homes — they’d been identified as slavery supporters — and killed them. Brown went afterward into Missouri, where he and his men freed 11 slaves and killed the slave owner.
Brown then spent two and a half years traveling throughout New England, raising funds to finance his war against slavery. Under the alias of Isaac Smith, he rented a farmhouse 4 miles north of Harpers Ferry, where he began to train his cadre of 21 men.
The convergence of threads at this skirmish that eventually led to the Civil War would, by fiction standards, be rendered improbable.
On Oct. 17, 1859, Brown seized the armory and took 60 hostages. Yet he sent some of the captives home for breakfast and arranged with a hotel to make breakfast for 47 men. Brown also allowed a stopped train to continue on to Baltimore, where the conductor quickly spread word of an insurrection. For two days, the abolitionist group exchanged gunfire with townspeople and disorganized militia men — who started drinking as though at a party — and the death toll rose.
Robert E. Lee commanded military units sent by President James Buchanan to quash Brown’s uprising attempt. Lee, who later became leader of the Confederate armies, believed Brown was insane and that the few black men who joined him were coerced by lies. Similarly, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison described Brown’s actions as “misguided, wild and apparently insane.”
A wounded Brown was charged by the state 10 days after his capture with treason, murder and inciting slaves to revolt. He and five others received a sentence to hang. Brown’s defenders collected affidavits to attest to his insanity as a way to commute his death sentence.
As his execution loomed, Virginia Gov. Henry Alexander Wise received hundreds of letters urging clemency for Brown and his followers, according to Library of Virginia records. There were also letters threatening to invade Virginia or to kill Wise if the execution proceeded.
The governor wavered on a decision until he went to Brown’s cell.
Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson described the meeting of Brown and Wise as a “bond of union between two enemies. … As they confer, they understood each other swiftly, each respects the other.” Wise observed of Brown that “he is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful and intelligent.”
Also captivated by the militant abolitionist was Hanover County’s Edmund Ruffin, a renowned agricultural theorist and farmer turned secessionist agitator. He may have disapproved of Brown’s goals, but he admired his ferocity. Ruffin wrote in his diary that he respected Brown’s “animal courage” and understood his “complete fearlessness & insensibility to danger & death” in service to a cause.
Ruffin sought to view Brown’s Dec. 2, 1859, execution in Charles Town (now part of West Virginia), but he was blocked by a rule restricting the witnessing of executions to military personnel. Francis H. Smith, Virginia Military Institute’s superintendent and the state militia colonel in command of activities in Harpers Ferry, relented and arranged for the 64-year-old Ruffin to borrow the weapons and uniform overcoat of a soldier.
Also at that time, actor John Wilkes Booth was rehearsing for a production at the Marshall Theatre at Eighth and Broad streets in Richmond. The playhouse stood near the main depot of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac railroad.
The governor, leery of rumored violence at Charles Town to avenge Brown, ordered up the Richmond Greys infantry for deployment. Booth, from the theater’s second floor, observed the drama and wanted a part in that show. He got onto the baggage car, where he met Greys officers George W. Libby and Louis F. Bossieux, who explained that the train was intended only for military transport. The handsome, charismatic actor turned up his charm meter and offered to purchase a uniform.
Soldiers from the Richmond Greys at Brown’s execution in Charles Town. John Wilkes Booth is pictured in the upper left of the group, holding a knife, according to a Library of Congress description. (Photo via Library of Congress)
Libby and Bossieux gave in. They scrounged up trousers and a jacket, and the train lurched forward with Booth aboard and in costume, entertaining his comrades by presenting passages from Shakespeare.
Booth later described Brown to his sister, Asia Booth Clarke, as a “brave old man,” adding that “his heart must have been broken when he felt himself deserted at the gallows.”
Before the hood was draped over him, Brown handed to a guard a written statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”
After Brown fell, the color drained from Booth’s face, and he expressed a desire for whiskey.
Abraham Lincoln’s Feb. 27, 1860, speech at the Cooper Institute, which some believe assured his nomination for the presidency, addressed what he called Brown’s “peculiar” effort at Harpers Ferry.
“It was not a slave insurrection,” Lincoln reflected. “It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves.” Those whom Brown hoped to free “saw plainly enough it could not succeed,” he added. Likening Brown to would-be assassins from history, Lincoln continued, “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them.”
The latter sentence also could have described Booth, who thought he would be hailed as a hero after he assassinated Lincoln five years later, on April 14, 1865.
The fascination with Brown’s actions continues. A new interpretation of his life has been filming in and around Richmond since July for the Showtime network’s eight-part adaptation of the James McBride novel “The Good Lord Bird.” Ethan Hawke portrays Brown, and Daveed Diggs (the Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson in Broadway’s “Hamilton”) is Frederick Douglass.
