Brown, John 331armory and then distributing those arms to the slaves so
that they could kill their masters. He spent months trav-
eling to meet with abolitionists, including renowned black
abolitionist Frederick Douglass, in an eff ort to garner fi nan-
cial and physical support. Few were willing to give Brown’s
scheme much legitimacy, but the funding he had previously
received from the Secret Six proved to be enough to enact
his plan.
Th us, on October 16, 1859, Brown unleashed his attack
at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with 21 men, including 5 blacks.
Initially, Brown was able to conquer the federal armory, but
the local citizenry, aided by Col. Robert E. Lee of the U.S.
Marines, thwarted his plans. In the ensuing attack, most of
Brown’s men were killed or wounded, including his sons
Oliver and Watson. Th e Marines gave Brown the opportu-
nity to surrender peacefully, but he refused. Instead, Brown
was taken prisoner; in total, 10 of his men were killed,
7 were captured, and 5 men (including his son Owen) es-
caped. John Brown was held captive at the armory, where
he was questioned by the Virginia governor, Henry A. Wise,
and two other congressmen. His trial commenced on Octo-
ber 27; Brown was charged with murder, treason, and incit-
ing slave rebellion. One week later, aft er only 45 minutes of
deliberation, the jury found Brown guilty on all counts. On
December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged in Virginia.
Although John Brown did not live to see the end of
slavery, many scholars (and even some of his contempo-
raries) have indicated that Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry
hastened the coming of the Civil War. It did indeed serve
to polarize the growing divide between North and South.
Southerners blamed abolitionists for the attack, and abo-
litionists celebrated Brown as a fallen martyr, a decision
that served to further enrage proslavery forces. In the end,
although John Brown’s raid did not immediately end the in-
stitution of slavery, it brought nation closer to the brink of
civil war.
See also: Abolition, Slavery; Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854;
Slave Resistance; Smith, GerritJaime Ramón Olivares
and Leslie M. AlexanderBibliography
Quarles, Benjamin. Allies for Freedom. New York: Da Capo Press,
2001.
Scott, Otto. Th e Secret Six. New York: New York Times Books, ca.
1979.were harassed by their neighbors. Even so, by the early 1850s,
John Brown was known within the abolitionist circles.
He was a sponsor of Harriet Tubman’s Underground
Railroad and helped establish the League of Gileadites, an
organization that off ered to assist the free black popula-
tion and to a certain degree mirrored Brown’s increasing
radicalism. Important national events in the West, specifi -
cally in Kansas, gained his immediate attention. In 1854,
Congressman Stephen Douglas proposed a congressional
bill to prepare parts of the Louisiana Purchase for possible
statehood. Th e Kansas-Nebraska Act stipulated that the
northern part of the territory would be Nebraska, and the
southern part would be Kansas. Under the guise of popular
sovereignty, the settlers of the territories assumed the right
to choose whether slavery would exist in their territories.
Many Americans assumed that Nebraska would be a “free”
state. Kansas, a neighbor of slave state Missouri, posed a
problem. Many “border ruffi ans” from Missouri entered
Kansas to establish slave towns to act as pressure points be-
fore admission. Abolitionists led by Henry Ward Beecher
created companies to send abolitionists into Kansas. In-
fl uenced by the events in Kansas, John Brown decided to
migrate to the hotly contested terrain. John Brown’s imme-
diate reasons for migrating stemmed from the passage of
his fi ve sons to the region.
Brown’s radicalism entered into a new phase in May
- On May 21, 1856, Sheriff Samuel Jones and his posse
of mostly Missourian proslavery men ransacked the free
town of Lawrence, Kansas. Jones and his men bombarded
the Free State Hotel, which was owned by the New England
Emigrant Aid Company. Along with the destruction of the
hotel, Jones destroyed two newspapers and killed one man.
Th e “sack of Lawrence,” as it came to be known, angered
many abolitionists in the region, including John Brown.
On May 24, 1856, Brown retaliated in Pottowatomie, Kan-
sas. Brown and his posse, consisting primarily of his sons,
sacked this proslavery town and murdered fi ve proslavery
men in the process. Th e Pottawatomie Massacre catapulted
Brown into the national spotlight as a violently radical
abolitionist. Immediately aft er the incident, the U.S. Army
and local militia began to hunt Brown. He traveled to the
friendly confi nes of the east. Over the next two years, a se-
cret abolitionist group called “Th e Secret Six” funded John
Brown and his plans for slave insurrection.
In 1859, Brown hatched a radical plan to liberate all of
the slaves in the South. His plan called for raiding a national