Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great…every man in this court would have deemed it worthy of reward rather than punishment.”
John Brown, November 2, 1859
The above quote was uttered by John Brown on the day he became the first American hung for treason in the United States. From a young age, Brown was raised to fight against slavery and those who used their power to protect it. Moving between the East Coast, the Midwest, and Western territories, Brown’s life culminated in the Harper’s Ferry Raid of 1859. The would-be slave insurrection is highly cited as a direct cause of the American Civil War and a movement that pressed American citizens to answer the not-so-simple question: would the United States be a nation that supported the subjugation of nearly 4 million people?
Divided Identities
Questions about the United State’s identity loomed as the country grew. Would the nation be one Union, comprised of states that followed a federal rule of law, or a group of sovereign states that dictated the laws of their own lands? Would the agricultural economy of the south outweigh the industrial strength of the north? As the country expanded west, would new states have the option of entering as slave states at all? The crux of each question was slavery.
All of the above questions were seemingly solved by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. The law passed by the US congress allowed Missouri to enter as a slave state and Maine as a free one, but ensured that every state admitted from the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36º 30’ parallel would ban slavery. The rules of the compromise stood for 30 years.
Enter the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Although both territories were above the 36º 30’ parallel, the territories were massive and agricultural opportunities abounded. Free labor would certainly maximize the potential profit extracted from their soil. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise and enforced popular sovereignty. It allowed every new state to decide for themselves whether or not they would allow slavery. The decision came down to American voters in the territories, comprised of the demographics of affluence (read: white) and non-affluent whites (read: class traitors). At this time, African Americans were not even legally considered actual people (see the Dred Scott V. Sandford case for the SCOTUS’ opinion on that at the time), thus freed or runaway slave’s opinions on the subjugation of their entire race were meaningless.
As such. anti and pro-slavery activists flooded Kansas and Nebraska to influence votes. Ideologies clashed and things turned violent quickly. The movement borne from this escalation was known by the undeniably bad-ass term “Bleeding Kansas” and two of John Brown’s sons were living in it. They wrote to him at his homestead in upstate New York (see my post on that here). They urged him to join them in their fight to persuade voters.
Brown, raised by abolitionists in a home that served as an Underground Railroad safe house, had always advocated for freedom, but in the years building up to Bleeding Kansas he became more zealous in his anti-slavery convictions. By the time he arrived in Kansas, he had become militant in his beliefs. His attitude was adjusted perfectly for Bleeding Kansas. Frederick Douglass’s journal entry regarding Brown after they met perfectly sums up Brown’s growing impatience:
From this night spent with John Brown Springfield, Mass., 1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.
Frederick Douglass, 1847
When pro-slavery actors, known as border ruffians, harassed Missouri border towns in Kansas, Brown devised the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856. Brown planned the surprise attack on the ruffians, five of which were killed.
The Best Laid Plans…
John Brown spent the following years travelling the territories, raising money for his abolitionist movement which endorsed violence-if-necessary. By 1859, he had recruited 22 men to undertake the capture of the Harper’s Ferry Armory, an act that would solidify Brown’s place in history and result in his execution.
In the evening of October 16, 1859, their operation began. The plan was threefold: capture important pro-slavery figures in Harper’s Ferry, gather them and raid the armory, and stop the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad train in order to stop word from reaching Washington D.C. . The group, comprised of Brown’s followers, freed slaves, and two of his sons, aimed to incite and arm a slave revolt.
Figureheads of the community were captured, the armory taken, and the train stopped and curiously let go. (I speculate this was possibly due to guilt, as a freed slave working as a porter at the train station was killed). By the morning, townspeople surrounded the Armory with the gang inside. At one point, Brown sent his son Watson out to surrender, but he was shot and killed. The townsfolk also blocked off the the town’s bridge, one of the only routes of escape possible for the group.
Upon learning of the raid, President Buchanan sent future Confederate general Robert E. Lee and a company of marines to Harper’s Ferry. Perhaps emboldened by the death of his son, Brown refused to surrender this time. Eventually the Marines charged the armory and all the captives were taken alive and jailed. Brown was tried and found guilty of treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia and hanged on December 2, 1859. His wife, Mary Day, took his body back to their farm in New York, where he buried in a grave site along some of his followers as well as his sons Watson and Oliver.
Famous abolitionist and editor William Lloyd Garrison said Brown’s attempt was “sadly misguided,” and Frederick Douglass, again remarking on the curious anti-slavery activist, wrote after his death:
“His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”
Frederick Douglass, 1859
One comes away with the impression that Brown could at best be called misguided, and at worst self-righteous. His actions may have been as misguided as Garrison remarked, but his beliefs were not. From aiding in the freedom of slaves since youth, to representing wool growers rights against merchants in his professional life, to spreading anti-slavery rhetoric across the new American territories: John Brown is one of few who truly served a higher purpose. He fought for freedom during a time when having an opinion contrary to the status quo could have you ostracized or even killed. No, the Harper’s Ferry raid did not live up to its intention, but Brown’s plan did directly influence the beginning of the Civil War by showing the country that abolitionists were ready, willing, and able to fight for their beliefs, making John Brown a #GreatPunkInHistory.
Punk Prana 