Outbreak
Election; Southern secession;
creation of the Confederacy
The opening scene of the crisis of 1860-61
took place in the autumn of 1859. On
16 October, John Brown and a small band of
followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers
Ferry, Virginia, as part of a plan to gather
slaves in a mountain stronghold, arm them
and wage war on the South's slaveholders.
Robert E. Lee and a detachment of United
States Marines quickly suppressed the raiders,
and Brown himself was tried, sentenced to
die, and hanged. Comporting himself with
dignity and courage at his trial and execution,
Brown won the admiration of much of the
North. As he went to the gallows, he handed
one of his jailers a note that read, 'I John
Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of
this guilty, land: will never be purged away;
but with Blood.' In the North, a number of
newspapers praised Brown, church bells
peeled his honor and other such
demonstrations underscored that a substantial
element of the northern public shared, at least
to a degree, Brown's hatred of slavery.
White southerners, in contrast, reacted in
horror at both Brown's actions and the
northern response. Here was a man who had
planned to incite a full-scale slave rebellion
that would trigger a bloodbath and leave the
South in chaos. Assurances from northern
Democrats that they repudiated Brown's raid
fell on deaf ears. White southerners equated
Brown with abolitionists, abolitionists with
Republicans, and Republicans with the
whole North. A wave of near hysteria swept
the South, the greatest since Nat Turner's
rebellion some 30 years earlier. Slave patrols
were increased, volunteer military companies
drilled more seriously, and talk of secession
mushroomed. William L. Yancey of Alabama,
one of the extreme advocates of southern
rights known as 'fire-eaters', used heightened
fears of northern aggression to persuade his
state's Democratic Party to instruct delegates
With his flowing beard and thick shock of hair, John
Brown reminded many northern admirers of an
Old Testament prophet. White southerners took a very
different view of Brown, who stood among the most
implacable and violent foes of slavery. Frederick Douglass,
the famous black abolitionist, commented that Brown's
'will impressed all.' (Author's collection)