A

HARPERS FERRY

---

The Potomac drains the eastern slopes of the Allegheny Mountains and flows southeast until, at Harpers Ferry, it confronts the Shenandoah, flowing north out of the Virginia Blue Ridge. The rivers converge, proceed through a mountain pass, and flow past Washington, D.C., into the Chesapeake Bay. In 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was a prosperous town, strategically situated at this river junction, on two rail lines, and almost midway along a canal that carried freight from the Chesapeake to Pennsylvania. The town, with a population of almost three thousand, had a military economy: it was home to a U.S. armory, a federal arsenal, and Hall's Rifle Works.

THE RAID ON HARPERS FERRY

During the night of 16 October 1859, nineteen men walked into Harpers Ferry, captured the armory, and then commandeered the thousands of rifles stored at the arsenal. Three others waited outside town to provide a rear guard. Most members of this "multiracial alliance" were free-soil veterans of the Kansas civil war and were trained in guerrilla tactics. Their apparent plan was to capture the weapons and to quickly move them into improvised natural fortifications located at regular intervals along the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains. There the alliance would free slaves, arming some with pikes or rifles, and open a defendable route of ridgeline escape and logistical resupply from Alabama to Canada. Despite a last-minute shortage of volunteers and poor planning for food, ammunition, and transport, the raid quickly met its initial goal of capturing the weapons. But before the raiders could make a quiet escape, the mission's objectives were redrawn to include the capture of several prominent hostages and the theft of some symbolically charged weapons that had once belonged to George Washington.

John "Osawatomie" Brown (1800–1859), a fifty-nine-year-old radical abolitionist, led the raid. His growing reputation in the Kansas civil war had earned him enthusiastic support in preceding years as he lectured northerners on the need for armed resistance to slavery—although his audiences had probably assumed he meant further action in Kansas. Brown had met and corresponded with important literary figures, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. But in addition to the raiding party, his close conspirators included Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913), some influential and financial backers who have become known as the "Secret Six," his fifteen-year-old daughter, Annie Brown, and his daughter-in-law, Martha Brown.

In the early morning hours of 17 October, Brown awaited the return of the hostage-taking detachment he had sent five miles away to capture Lewis Washington and some Washington family heirlooms. But on two occasions sporadic shooting broke out in the town. The hostage detail finally returned to Harpers Ferry around 5:00 A.M., but lingering agitation over the inadvertent murder of a free black resident of Harpers Ferry delayed Brown from making a timely exit. By sunrise, with church bells pealing, the town's residents were becoming aware of the disturbance. Inconceivably, Brown and his men dawdled as units of the Virginia militia in nearby towns were notified. Forgoing his last clear chance of escaping with the captured rifles, Brown released a previously halted B&O passenger train, which then proceeded toward Baltimore without him as the townspeople began to put up a fledgling defense. Erratic gunfire kept Brown and his men engaged through the morning. By noon the raiders were pinned down with their hostages in a fire-engine garage under growing threat from units of the Virginia militia. By nightfall, Brown and five of the raiders defended the engine house against several hundred militiamen. The other raiders had been killed or wounded or had escaped into the nearby mountains.

Colonel Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), in temporary command of ninety marines, entered the fracas before midnight and ordered federal troops to form a perimeter around Brown and his demoralized raiders. Early the next morning, Lee offered to accept an unconditional surrender from Brown. During the ensuing negotiations over the terms of surrender, twelve marines stormed the building. Within three minutes, a seriously wounded Brown, along with four of his followers, had been captured alive.

THE NATIONAL REACTION

Rumors of abolitionist conspiracies and slave insurrections spread throughout the slave states during the rest of the winter. Democratic and southern newspapers blamed the Republicans and abolitionists for the attack, accusing them of encouraging slaves to murder defenseless families. Even northern and Republican newspapers expressed shock and horror over the raid. Republican leaders reacted to the news by distancing themselves from Brown and his methods. William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), the editor of The Liberator, called the raid "misguided, wild, and apparently insane." Accurately concerned that the nation's moral outrage could result in their own arrest, many of Brown's coconspirators fled the country, entered an asylum, or otherwise avoided the public gaze. A few of the more courageous or defiant refused to flee.

THE LEGEND: "MANIAC" TO "MARTYR"

Early support for John Brown and for his violent raid began in a surprising yet familiar place, Concord, Massachusetts, a town that "instigated the first American 'insurrection,'" according to James Redpath, a journalist who had befriended Brown during the Kansas war. One Concord resident, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), learned of the Harpers Ferry incident a day after the engine house had been stormed. Thoreau was misinformed that Brown had been killed; in his journal entry that day he ranted for an unprecedented eleven pages against the federal government, the newspapers, Republicans, his neighbors, and humankind. Almost daily until 8 December Thoreau's journal dwelt upon Brown, and much of this invective was excerpted for lectures and later essays. Over the next several weeks, he gave fiery speeches in Concord, Boston, and Worcester that were culled from these journal entries. Later, Thoreau compiled these speeches into an essay that he titled "A Plea for Captain John Brown."

Meanwhile, a slowly healing Brown was charged with murder and treason and quickly put on trial. Throughout the very public and internationally reported proceedings, a passionate letter and lecture campaign blossomed. Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), a prolific abolitionist author, wrote to the governor of Virginia requesting permission to visit Brown and to act as his prison nurse. The governor used the opportunity of a public reply to belittle northern sympathy for Brown and his violence. To raise funds for Brown's legal defense and for his family's ongoing support, the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips (1811–1884) made a powerful speech in Brooklyn on 1 November. Six days later, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) spoke at a well-attended and sympathetic Boston fund-raiser. To mixed applause, Emerson compared the prospect of Brown's execution on the gallows to the death of Jesus on the cross.

Others writers contributed essays, letters, and poems and were quoted in support of Brown in important newspapers. Victor Hugo (1802–1885) published a letter referring to Brown as "the liberator, the champion of Christ." On 2 December, the day of Brown's hanging near Charles Town, Virginia, sympathizers attended memorial services that were held throughout the North. The Concord event included readings, hymns, prayers, and eulogies. Thoreau, Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) participated. In another part of Concord, however, Brown was hanged in effigy. Popular sentiment across the nation was beginning to shift. From the day of Brown's execution, a regional divergence of public opinion developed as to the meaning of the raid. Northerners began to view the assault as a pious and heroic—if desperate—effort by a martyr in the cause of liberty; southerners blasted it as an insane act of terrorism against innocent citizens of Virginia.

Within months, James Redpath published a volume of poems, letters, and essays honoring Brown the martyr. Included in this collection were poems by Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Maria Child, and William Dean Howells. Less than five months after Brown's hanging, the Democratic Party split into regional factions over its slavery platform. During the ensuing Civil War, Brown's legend grew with Union victories and benefited from the spirit of home-front sacrifice. Many Union soldiers marched to "John Brown's Body"—a rousing song with multiple versions—that inspired Julia Ward Howe to write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the same tune.

After the war, lengthy biographies of Brown, written by devotees such as Richard Hinton and Franklin Sanborn, helped to preserve the John Brown legend. Borrowing a metaphor from Thoreau, both Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Walt Whitman (1819–1892) paid tribute to Brown the "meteor" in several poems about the war. In 1882 the American historian George Washington Williams (1849–1891) recognized that the view of John Brown as a "madman" had been corrected.

Like West Virginia itself, which had abandoned its allegiance to Virginia at the outbreak of the Civil War, Harpers Ferry had also jettisoned the stigma it had gained as a site of violence. The town became an abolitionist shrine, a symbol of liberty in the national literary imagination. Seen within the context of the Civil War, the violence of the raid seemed less shocking and more justifiable. By 1900 the historical facts of John Brown's abortive raid, his indecisive leadership, his resort to violence, and his failure to incite an immediate slave insurrection had faded in importance and in meaning, while the almost-sacred ruins of the once-prosperous town had come to represent the continuing struggle for African American rights.

See also Abolitionist Writing; Battle-Pieces; Civil War; Transcendentalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson's Antislavery Writings. Edited by Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

Hinton, Richard J. John Brown and His Men. 1894. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Redpath, James. Echoes of Harper's Ferry. 1860. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Sanborn, F. B., ed. The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia. 1885. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by Lewis Hyde. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

Secondary Works

Boyer, Richard O. The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and a History. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Finkelman, Paul, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Geier, Clarence R., Jr., and Susan E. Winter, eds. Look to the Earth: Historical Archaeology and the American Civil War. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

Karcher, Carolyn L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.

Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

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

Quarles, Benjamin. Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown. 1972. Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1974.

Richardson, Robert D., Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Vols. 12–13. 1906. Edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. New York: Dover, 1962.

Joseph M. Petrulionis