Harpers Ferry Raid

Introduction
The issue of abolitionism came to a head with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Brown’s intention was to instigate an armed slave rebellion (Horwitz). Brown and nearly two dozen other men took over a U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia—but instead of achieving the goal of a slave revolt, the men were caught in a stand-off with U.S. Marines from October 16th to the 18th. Robert E. Lee, ironically, was the commander in charge of retaking the arsenal; Lee would be the commander of the Southern Army just a year and a half later. Other future Confederates assisting in the recapturing of Harpers Ferry from the insurrectionist Brown and his men were Stonewall Jackson and J. E. B. Stuart (Horwitz). This paper will discuss the raid, explain what happened and why, and what the fallout was.
The Reason for the Raid
John Brown was a fervent abolitionist who believed pacifism would never be sufficient to end slavery. He was a man who insisted on action—violent action if necessary (McGlone). During the Bleeding Kansas crisis, Brown had been in the thick of the violence, leading men in several battles and massacring five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie Creek. Brown conducted the massacre along with his sons and others. The killing of the five pro-slavery individuals during the Bleeding Kansas crisis showed how serious Brown was about his mission to free the slaves (Furnas).
The entire nation was on edge throughout the 1850s as the U.S. continued to spread west towards the Pacific. It was unclear, however, whether the states in the west would be slave states or free states. The conflict in Kansas was symbolic of the conflict running through the rest of the nation. Even in the U.S. Senate violence had broken out when in 1856 the Republican Senator Charles Sumner had viciously ridiculed the pro-slavery South Carolina Democratic Senator Andrew Butler. Butler’s cousin in defense of Andrew’s honor attacked Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor and nearly killed him. Southern Democrats applauded while northerners viewed the South as tyrannical (Hoffer).
Clearly, violence then was in the air if the men in the U.S. government were willing to resort to violence right there in the house of government. It should not be surprising therefore that John Brown was leading ambushes and slaughtering men that he, his sons and his followers captured. Brown had in his early days wanted to be a minister but he had ended up going into the tanning business. In the 1840s he was inspired by other abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to take action. He assisted in the Underground Railroad project and got to know Douglass and others by creating an abolitionist center in Massachusetts. Brown helped to free slaves and actively warred upon those who facilitated slavery (Furnas). As Brown gained experience in his raids, he plotted a bigger attack on the South, a planned armed slave revolt. He had his sights set on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Douglass opposed the scheme believing it would fail—but Brown pushed forward, always the man of action. Herman Melville would later write a poem about the man and refer to him as “Weird John Brown” because of his strong stubborn passion (Smith).
What Happened
Douglass was right, however; the plan was doomed. Brown had asked Harriet Tubman to help him organize the raid. Months in advance, Brown had rented a farmhouse in Maryland near Harpers Ferry and waited for his forces to show up—but they never came, at least not in the numbers that he had anticipated (Barney). Brown met again with Douglass to try to get the latter to join the raid. Douglass refused and was in fact urging other blacks to not play any part in Brown’s plans. For Douglass, Brown was a loose cannon and would do more harm than good (Furnas).
Brown’s original plan had been to have a small army of more than a thousand men. One the morning of the raid at Harpers Ferry, he had only just over 20 men. Nonetheless, he and his men entered the town, cut the telegraph wires and took possession of the arsenal as it was only guarded by one watchman. They then took local farmers as hostages. When a train pulled into the town, Brown’s men panicked and opened fire, killing a free black on the train. In their hurry to liberate the slaves of the South, the insurrectionists unwittingly made a free black man the first casualty of their Harpers Ferry (Horwitz).
The local militia reacted as news of the raid spread. The militia pinned Brown and his men down at the armory by mounting the hills behind the arsenal and firing down upon the insurrectionists. The militia took control of the bridge, which was the means of egress and ingress, and thus they blocked any possible escape by Brown and his men. Brown moved his hostages to the engine house at the rear of the armory. The militia again engaged the insurrectionists and Brown and his men holed up, turning the engine room into their fort. Two of Brown’s sons was killed in the shooting (Horwitz).
Lee and the Marines arrived along with J. E. B. Stuart of the Army. Stuart approached the engine house under a white flag and told Brown he and his men would not be shot on spot if they surrendered. Brown refused, so the Marines broke into the engine house and secured Brown and his men through force (Horwitz).
Altogether five had been killed by Brown and his men—four whites and one black. Brown would stand trial in Virginia over the course of a week that November and be hanged on December 2nd.
The Outcome
Brown remained a polarizing figure right up to his death and after. He won the admiration of some poets are artists, like Emerson and Hugo, and he infuriated others, who were glad to see him receive a death sentence (Smith). Brown was, to some extent, as Melville noted in his poem, a “portent”—a sign of things to come in America—and the Civil War that followed was the same type of violence that John Brown brought, just on an epic scale. Melville wrote of John Brown that in him was the “meteor of the war”—a streaking, blinding, blasting, hot, fiery rock from somewhere no one could have predicted, thrusting itself upon the world’s stage as only a meteor could do. And as a result the world would change and that change would be war and destruction, a nation torn apart, a half million dead, the South ruined, and an entire minority population suddenly finding itself both free and abandoned at the same time. Thus, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry is seen as the prelude to the Civil War for good reason: it was the sign of things to come, the sign of the beginning of the end of a way of life in the South (Smith).
A Senate investigation followed and made sure that the event did not escape politicization. Democrats sought to find Republicans who had contributed to the raid on Harpers Ferry, while Republicans attempted to distance themselves from the man that many were calling a martyr for abolitionism (Smith). Nonetheless, the Democrats laid the blame for the violence at the feet of Republicans and their rhetoric and anti-slavery doctrines that were inflaming the passions of unstable persons like Brown.
Moreover, the violence was not over. Thaddeus Stevens, a member of Congress, was attacked while in the House of Representatives, and society in general was still brimming, now more than ever, with animosity on both sides of the slavery aisle. Abraham Lincoln, who would be elected president the following year, gave his opinion on John Brown, stating that the man had been insane. Lincoln, himself was not an abolitionist, though he played the anti-slavery card when it suited him politically.
Many in the South felt the damage had been done and that and irreversible step had been taken, a giant wheel set in motion that would bring repercussions to all of them. The Southern states thus took steps to restore their militias and to get ready for more attacks like this one. Thus when the Southern states seceded in 1861, the Confederate Army was more or less already established thanks to these militias (Horwitz).
Even Frederick Douglass eulogized John Brown later, describing him as a martyr for the slave, giving his life to help set slaves free. It was perhaps a sentimental take on reality—for if anything Brown was more like a fierce vigilante rather than a martyr—but for the poet’s purposes martyr had the better ring to it (Smith). The Battle Hymn of the Republic was set to the tune of John Brown’s Body and in the Hymn John Brown was depicted as a Christ figure who died to make men holy.
Thus, if John Brown succeeded in doing anything it was in polarizing the people of the U.S. still further, and provoking them all into action by the outrageousness of his own action, which some chose to justify and eulogize and others chose to condemn. The raid on Harper’s Ferry is still seen in polarizing terms, with some viewing it as a necessary act of heroism meant to address the issue of slavery that no one was addressing practically speaking though everyone was talking about it. Others view it as an imprudent attempt to take action without thinking about the repercussions or the immediate likelihood even of success.
Conclusion
The raid on Harpers Ferry was planned and executed by a zealous abolitionist who had already killed multiple men in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. He was, in other words, a killer—though many saw him as a paragon of Christianity, a man full of religious fervor and zeal, willing to put his life on the line for his beliefs. He was also willing to put the lives of others on the line and to take the lives of others. He viewed the sin of slavery as being one that could only be washed away by blood, and he wanted to be the one to spill that blood. In doing so he opened a deep wound in the heart of the nation from which it is has still never recovered. The Harpers Ferry Raid represented a fantasy on the part of John Brown—a type of if-you-take-it-they-will-come plot that he had played out in his head. In reality, he took it and the “they” who came were the Marines, not other free blacks who saw the righteousness of his cause and wanted to join in. The only free black who came to town that morning was on the train and he was killed by John Brown’s men when they panicked. That alone should be enough to show that the Harpers Ferry Raid was not a well-thought out action but rather a hastily conceived plot and a delusion of grandeur on the part of John Brown. And yet it helped to kick start an even greater war, so perhaps John Brown looked back from the other side of the grave with satisfaction, knowing that his burst of violence had helped spur on even greater violence.
Works Cited
Barney, William L. "Brown, John". The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Student Companion. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001.
Furnas, J. C. The Road to Harpers Ferry. New York, William Sloane Associates, 1959.
Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. Henry Holt and Company, 2011. 
McGlone, Robert E. John Brown's War against Slavery. Cambridge, CUP, 2009.
Smith, Ted A., Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.