John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

Between 16 and 18 October 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown and a band of about twenty men seized the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark a rising of enslaved people across the South. The attempt collapsed within two days, and Brown was captured by US Marines and hanged for treason. Yet the raid, and Brown's conduct at his trial, deepened the rift between North and South and is often counted among the main causes of the American Civil War.

Brown, already notorious for his anti-slavery activity in Kansas, rented a farmhouse in Maryland about four miles from Harpers Ferry and lived there under a false name. His company eventually numbered 21 men besides himself, sixteen of them white and five Black. Northern supporters supplied around 200 Sharps carbines, and Brown ordered 950 pikes for the enslaved men he expected to arm. He believed hundreds would flock to him on the first night, after which he would move south along the Appalachians, freeing more people as he went.

He tried to recruit Frederick Douglass, but Douglass refused, warning that an attack on federal property would turn the whole country against them and that Brown would never get out alive. Harriet Tubman was also approached but was kept away by illness.

Late on the night of Sunday 16 October, Brown led his men across the Potomac bridge into the town. They captured the lightly guarded armoury, cut the telegraph lines, and took hostages, among them Lewis Washington, a great-grandnephew of George Washington. The first person killed was Haywood Shepherd, a free Black railway baggage handler shot on the bridge.

Brown had no way to spread word to the enslaved people of the district, and he lingered too long waiting for them. By Monday morning townspeople and militia companies from Virginia and Maryland were converging on the town, and by noon they held the bridges, the only practical routes of escape. Brown and his remaining men barricaded themselves with their most important hostages in the armoury's fire-engine house, later known as John Brown's Fort. Two of Brown's sons, Watson and Oliver, were mortally wounded, and four townspeople, including the mayor, were killed.

President James Buchanan sent a detachment of Marines from Washington under Lieutenant Israel Greene, with Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, on leave at his home nearby, in overall command. At dawn on 18 October Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart offered Brown terms, which he refused. The Marines broke down the door with a ladder and stormed the building in about three minutes. One Marine was killed, and Brown was wounded and captured. In all, ten or eleven raiders died, seven were later executed, and five escaped.

Virginia tried Brown quickly for treason against the state, murder and inciting a slave insurrection. He was convicted, sentenced on 2 November and hanged on 2 December 1859; the actor John Wilkes Booth was among the onlookers. Six other raiders were hanged in the following months. Brown's speech at sentencing and his letters from jail, widely printed through the new telegraph network and newspapers, turned what many Northerners had first dismissed as a madman's scheme into a martyrdom. Writers such as Henry David Thoreau praised him, while the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had at first called the raid misguided.

In the South, the sympathy Brown won in the North provoked fury and fed fears of abolitionist invasion. Secessionists argued that the Union could no longer protect slavery, and Jefferson Davis cited the raid as a reason for leaving it. The episode helped shape the 1860 election that brought Abraham Lincoln to power, after which Southern states began to secede. Brown's final written words predicted that the nation's crimes would be purged only with blood.

Our 1815 and 1878 maps show Harpers Ferry within the United States; at the time of the raid the town lay in Virginia, but it is now part of West Virginia.