362 Chapter 13 The Coming of the Civil War
transcontinental railroad, river and harbor improve-
ments, a free homestead bill) were all blocked by
southern votes.
Whether the South could continue to prevent the
passage of this legislation in the new Congress was
problematical. In early 1859 even many moderate
Southerners were uneasy about the future. The radi-
cals, made panicky by Republican victories and their
own failure to win in Kansas, spoke openly of seces-
sion if a Republican were elected president in 1860.
Lincoln’s “house divided” speech was quoted out of
context, while Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine added to
southern woes. When Senator William H. Seward of
New York spoke of an “irrepressible conflict”
between freedom and slavery, white Southerners
became still more alarmed.
Douglas, Debate at Galesburg, Illinoisat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
John Brown’s Raid
In October 1859, John Brown, the scourge of Kansas,
made his second contribution to the unfolding sectional
drama. Gathering a group of eighteen followers, white
and black, he staged an attack on Harpers Ferry,
Virginia, a town on the Potomac River upstream from
Washington. Having boned up on guerrilla tactics, he
planned to seize the federal arsenal there; arm the slaves,
whom he thought would flock to his side; and then
establish a black republic in the mountains of Virginia.
Simply by overpowering a few night watchmen,
Brown and his men occupied the arsenal and a nearby
ReadtheDocumentrifle factory. They captured several hostages, one of
them Colonel Lewis Washington, a great-grand-
nephew of George Washington. But no slaves came
forward to join them. Federal troops commanded by
Robert E. Lee soon trapped Brown’s men in an
engine house of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
After a two-day siege in which the attackers picked off
ten of his men, Brown was captured.
No incident so well illustrates the role of emotion
and irrationality in the sectional crisis as does John
Brown’s raid. Over the years before his Kansas escapade,
Brown had been a drifter, horse thief, a swindler, and
several times a bankrupt, a failure in everything he
attempted. After his ghastly Pottawatomie murders it
should have been obvious to anyone that he was both a
fanatic and mentally unstable: Some of the victims were
hacked to bits with a broadsword. Yet numbers of high-
minded Northerners, including Emerson and Thoreau,
had supported Brown and his antislavery “work” after- White Southerners reacted to Harpers Ferry with
equal irrationality, some with a rage similar to Brown’s.
Dozens of hapless Northerners in the southern states
were arrested, beaten, or driven off. One, falsely sus-
pected of being an accomplice of Brown, was lynched.
Brown’s fate lay in the hands of the Virginia author-
ities. Ignoring his obvious derangement, they charged
him with treason, conspiracy, and murder. He was
speedily convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.
Yet “Old Brown” had still one more contribution
to make to the developing sectional tragedy. Despite
the furor he had created, cool heads everywhere called
for calm and denounced his attack. Most Republican
After John Brown’s capture, Emerson called him “a martyr” who would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Brown’s
principled radicalism found favor during the Depression decade of the 1930s. John Stewart Curry’s mural, completed in 1943,
depicted the demented John Brown in the pose of Christ on the cross. The image offended the Kansas legislature, which had
commissioned Curry to portray Kansas history in a “sane and sensible manner.”
Source: Kansas State Historical Society, Copy and Reuse Restrictions apply.