what happened to john brown after the raid?

John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry — John Brown and many of his followers holed upward in the burn engine house awaiting reinforcements past a swarm of "bees"—slaves from the surrounding surface area. Only merely a handful showed up. Library of Congress

Harpers Ferry, Virginia, lay sleeping on the dark of Oct 16, 1859, every bit 19 heavily armed men stole down mist-shrouded bluffs along the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah. Their leader was a track-thin 59-year-old man with a shock of graying hair and penetrating steel-grey optics. His name was John Brown. Some of those who strode across a covered railway span from Maryland into Virginia were unconversant farm boys; others were seasoned veterans of the guerrilla war in disputed Kansas. Amongst them were Brown's youngest sons, Watson and Oliver; a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina; an African-American student at Oberlin College; a pair of Quaker brothers from Iowa who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Chocolate-brown; a former slave from Virginia; and men from Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana. They had come to Harpers Ferry to brand war on slavery.

The raid that Sunday night would be the nearly daring case on tape of white men entering a Southern state to incite a slave rebellion. In armed services terms, it was barely a skirmish, simply the incident electrified the nation. It also created, in John Brown, a figure who afterward a century and a one-half remains 1 of the most emotive touchstones of our racial history, lionized by some Americans and loathed by others: few are indifferent. Brown'due south curtain has been claimed by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Timothy McVeigh, Socialist leader Eugene Debs and abortion protesters espousing violence. "Americans do non deliberate about John Dark-brown—they feel him," says Dennis Frye, the National Park Service's main historian at Harpers Ferry. "He is still alive today in the American soul. He represents something for each of us, but none of us is in agreement near what he means."

"The impact of Harpers Ferry quite literally transformed the nation," says Harvard historian John Stauffer, author of The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. The tide of anger that flowed from Harpers Ferry traumatized Americans of all persuasions, terrorizing Southerners with the fear of massive slave rebellions, and radicalizing countless Northerners, who had hoped that violent confrontation over slavery could be indefinitely postponed. Before Harpers Ferry, leading politicians believed that the widening segmentation between North and South would somewhen yield to compromise. Later it, the chasm appeared unbridgeable. Harpers Ferry splintered the Democratic Party, scrambled the leadership of the Republicans and produced the conditions that enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to defeat 2 Democrats and a third-party candidate in the presidential ballot of 1860.

"Had John Dark-brown'south raid not occurred, it is very possible that the 1860 election would have been a regular 2-party contest between antislavery Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats," says Urban center Academy of New York historian David Reynolds, writer of John Brown: Abolitionist. "The Democrats would probably have won, since Lincoln received simply 40 percentage of the popular vote, around one million votes less than his 3 opponents." While the Democrats split over slavery, Republican candidates such as William Seward were tarnished by their clan with abolitionists; Lincoln, at the time, was regarded as one of his political party's more conservative options. "John Brown was, in effect, a hammer that shattered Lincoln's opponents into fragments," says Reynolds. "Considering Dark-brown helped to disrupt the party system, Lincoln was carried to victory, which in turn led 11 states to secede from the Marriage. This in turn led to the Civil State of war."

Well into the 20th century, information technology was common to dismiss Dark-brown every bit an irrational fanatic, or worse. In the rousing pro-Southern 1940 archetype film Santa Atomic number 26 Trail, actor Raymond Massey portrayed him equally a wild-eyed madman. But the ceremonious rights movement and a more thoughtful acquittance of the nation'south racial issues accept occasioned a more nuanced view. "Chocolate-brown was thought mad because he crossed the line of permissible dissent," Stauffer says. "He was willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of blacks, and for this, in a culture that was simply marinated in racism, he was chosen mad."

Dark-brown was a hard homo, to be certain, "congenital for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships," in the words of his close friend, the African-American orator Frederick Douglass. Brownish felt a profound and lifelong empathy with the plight of slaves. "He stood apart from every other white in the historical record in his ability to flare-up free from the power of racism," says Stauffer. "Blacks were amidst his closest friends, and in some respects he felt more comfortable around blacks than he did around whites."

Brownish was born with the century, in 1800, in Connecticut, and raised past loving if strict parents who believed (as did many, if not most, in that era) that righteous punishment was an instrument of the divine. When he was a minor boy, the Browns moved west in an ox-drawn wagon to the raw wilderness of borderland Ohio, settling in the town of Hudson, where they became known as friends to the rapidly diminishing population of Native Americans, and equally abolitionists who were always ready to help fugitive slaves. Like many restless 19th-century Americans, Brown tried many professions, declining at some and succeeding modestly at others: farmer, tanner, surveyor, wool merchant. He married twice—his first wife died from illness—and, in all, fathered xx children, almost half of whom died in infancy; iii more would die in the war against slavery. Brown, whose beliefs were rooted in strict Calvinism, was convinced that he had been predestined to bring an terminate to slavery, which he believed with burning certitude was a sin against God. In his youth, both he and his father, Owen Brown, had served as "conductors" on the Undercover Railroad. He had denounced racism within his ain church, where African-Americans were required to sit in the back, and shocked neighbors by dining with blacks and addressing them equally "Mr." and "Mrs." Douglass one time described Chocolate-brown equally a man who "though a white gentleman, is in sympathy, a black human being, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the fe of slavery."

In 1848, the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith encouraged Brown and his family to live on land Smith had bestowed on black settlers in northern New York. Tucked away in the Adirondack Mountains, Brown concocted a programme to liberate slaves in numbers never before attempted: A "Subterranean Pass-Fashion"—the Underground Railroad writ large—would stretch south through the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains, linked past a chain of forts manned by armed abolitionists and free blacks. "These warriors would raid plantations and run fugitives north to Canada," says Stauffer. "The goal was to destroy the value of slave belongings." This scheme would course the template for the Harpers Ferry raid and, says Frye, under different circumstances "could take succeeded. [Chocolate-brown] knew that he couldn't free four meg people. But he understood economics and how much money was invested in slaves. There would be a panic—property values would dive. The slave economic system would plummet."

Political events of the 1850s turned Brownish from a vehement, if essentially garden-variety, abolitionist into a man willing to take upwards arms, even die, for his cause. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which imposed draconian penalties on anyone caught helping a runaway and required all citizens to cooperate in the capture of fugitive slaves, enraged Brown and other abolitionists. In 1854, another act of Congress pushed still more Northerners across their limits of tolerance. Under pressure level from the S and its Democratic allies in the Northward, Congress opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery under a concept called "popular sovereignty." The more northerly Nebraska was in little danger of condign a slave state. Kansas, however, was up for grabs. Pro-slavery advocates—"the meanest and near desperate of men, armed to the teeth with Revolvers, Bowie Knives, Rifles & Cannon, while they are not only thoroughly organized, only under pay from Slaveholders," John Brown Jr. wrote to his father—poured into Kansas from Missouri. Antislavery settlers begged for guns and reinforcements. Amongst the thousands of abolitionists who left their farms, workshops or schools to respond to the call were John Brown and v of his sons. Brown himself arrived in Kansas in Oct 1855, driving a wagon loaded with rifles he had picked upwardly in Ohio and Illinois, determined, he said, "to help defeat Satan and his legions."

In May 1856, pro-slavery raiders sacked Lawrence, Kansas, in an orgy of burning and looting. Almost simultaneously, Chocolate-brown learned that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the well-nigh outspoken abolitionist in the U.S. Senate, had been beaten senseless on the flooring of the chamber by a cane-wielding congressman from Due south Carolina. Brown raged at the North'due south apparent helplessness. Advised to human activity with restraint, he retorted, "Circumspection, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the discussion circumspection. It is zippo but the word of cowardice." A party of Gratis-Staters led by Brown dragged five pro-slavery men out of their isolated cabins on eastern Kansas' Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with cutlasses. The horrific nature of the murders disturbed fifty-fifty abolitionists. Brownish was unrepentant. "God is my judge," he laconically replied when asked to account for his actions. Though he was a wanted man who hid out for a time, Chocolate-brown eluded capture in the anarchic weather condition that pervaded Kansas. Indeed, almost no one—pro-slavery or antislavery—was ever arraigned in a court for killings that took place during the guerrilla war there.

The murders, all the same, ignited reprisals. Pro-slavery "border ruffians" raided Free- Staters' homesteads. Abolitionists fought dorsum. Hamlets were burned, farms abandoned. Dark-brown'southward son Frederick, who had participated in the Pottawatomie Creek massacre, was shot dead by a pro-slavery man. Although Brownish survived many brushes with opponents, he seemed to sense his ain fate. In August 1856 he told his son Jason, "I have only a short time to live—but one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause."

Past almost any definition, the Pottawatomie killings were a terrorist act, intended to sow fear in slavery's defenders. "Brownish viewed slavery equally a state of state of war against blacks—a system of torture, rape, oppression and murder—and saw himself every bit a soldier in the army of the Lord against slavery," says Reynolds. "Kansas was Dark-brown's trial by burn, his initiation into violence, his preparation for real state of war," he says. "By 1859, when he raided Harpers Ferry, Chocolate-brown was ready, in his own words, 'to take the war into Africa'—that is, into the Due south."

In January 1858, Brown left Kansas to seek back up for his planned Southern invasion. In April, he sought out a diminutive former slave, Harriet Tubman, who had made eight cloak-and-dagger trips to Maryland'due south Eastern Shore to lead dozens of slaves northward to freedom. Chocolate-brown was and then impressed that he began referring to her as "Full general Tubman." For her part, she embraced Brownish as i of the few whites she had ever met who shared her conventionalities that antislavery piece of work was a life-and-death struggle. "Tubman thought Brown was the greatest white man who ever lived," says Kate Clifford Larson, writer of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.

Having secured financial bankroll from wealthy abolitionists known as the "Clandestine Six," Brown returned to Kansas in mid-1858. In December, he led 12 fugitive slaves on an ballsy journey east, dodging pro-slavery guerrillas and marshals' posses and fighting and defeating a forcefulness of Usa troops. Upon reaching Detroit, they were ferried across the Detroit River to Canada. Brown had covered near 1,500 miles in 82 days, proof to doubters, he felt certain, that he was capable of making the Subterranean Pass-Fashion a reality.

With his "Secret Six" state of war chest, Brown purchased hundreds of Sharps carbines and thousands of pikes, with which he planned to arm the first moving ridge of slaves he expected to flock to his imprint once he occupied Harpers Ferry. Many thousands more could then exist armed with rifles stored at the federal arsenal there. "When I strike, the bees volition swarm," Brown bodacious Frederick Douglass, whom he urged to sign on every bit president of a "Provisional Regime." Chocolate-brown too expected Tubman to help him recruit young men for his revolutionary army, and, says Larson, "to help infiltrate the countryside before the raid, encourage local blacks to bring together Brown and when the fourth dimension came, to be at his side—like a soldier." Ultimately, neither Tubman nor Douglass participated in the raid. Douglass was sure the venture would fail. He warned Chocolate-brown that he was "going into a perfect steel trap, and that he would non go out live." Tubman may take concluded that if Brown's plan failed, the Hush-hush Railroad would be destroyed, its routes, methods and participants exposed.

Sixty-one miles northwest of Washington, D.C., at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, Harpers Ferry was the site of a major federal armory, including a musket factory and rifle works, an armory, several large mills and an important railroad junction. "It was one of the most heavily industrialized towns south of the Mason-Dixon line," says Frye. "It was also a cosmopolitan town, with a lot of Irish and German immigrants, and even Yankees who worked in the industrial facilities." The town and its environs' population of 3,000 included about 300 African-Americans, evenly divided betwixt slave and gratuitous. Simply more than 18,000 slaves—the "bees" Brown expected to swarm—lived in the surrounding counties.

Equally his men stepped off the railway span into town that October night in 1859, Brown dispatched contingents to seize the musket factory, rifle works, armory and adjacent brick fire-engine business firm. (Three men remained in Maryland to guard weapons that Brown hoped to distribute to slaves who joined him.) "I want to free all the negroes in this land," he told ane of his first hostages, a night watchman. "If the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood." Guards were posted at the bridges. Telegraph lines were cut. The railroad station was seized. It was there that the raid'southward first casualty occurred, when a porter, a free black homo named Hayward Shepherd, challenged Brown'southward men and was shot expressionless in the dark. In one case primal locations had been secured, Brownish sent a disengagement to seize several prominent local slave owners, including Col. Lewis W. Washington, a great-grandnephew of the outset president.

Early on reports claimed that Harpers Ferry had been taken by 50, and so 150, so 200 white "insurrectionists" and "6 hundred runaway negroes." Chocolate-brown expected to accept 1,500 men under his command by midday Monday. He later on said he believed that he would somewhen have armed every bit many equally 5,000 slaves. But the bees did not swarm. (Simply a handful of slaves lent Chocolate-brown assistance.) Instead, as Brown's band watched dawn break over the craggy ridges enclosing Harpers Ferry, local white militias—similar to today'due south National Guard—were hastening to arms.

Showtime to arrive were the Jefferson Guards, from nearby Charles Town. Uniformed in blue, with tall black Mexican War-era shakos on their heads and brandishing .58-caliber rifles, they seized the railway bridge, killing a former slave named Dangerfield Newby and cutting Brown off from his route of escape. Newby had gone north in a failed attempt to earn plenty money to buy liberty for his wife and six children. In his pocket was a letter of the alphabet from his wife: "Information technology is said Main is in desire of money," she had written. "I know non what time he may sell me, and then all my brilliant hopes of the future are blasted, for their [sic] has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you."

As the day progressed, armed units poured in from Frederick, Maryland; Martinsburg and Shepherdstown, Virginia; and elsewhere. Brown and his raiders were shortly surrounded. He and a dozen of his men held out in the engine house, a small but formidable brick building, with stout oak doors in front. Other small groups remained holed up in the musket manufactory and rifle works. Acknowledging their increasingly dire predicament, Brown sent out New Yorker William Thompson, bearing a white flag, to suggest a cease-burn. Only Thompson was captured and held in the Galt Firm, a local hotel. Chocolate-brown and then dispatched his son, Watson, 24, and ex-cavalryman Aaron Stevens, likewise under a white flag, simply the militiamen shot them down in the street. Watson, although fatally wounded, managed to clamber dorsum to the engine house. Stevens, shot iv times, was arrested.

When the militia stormed the rifle works, the three men inside dashed for the shallow Shenandoah, hoping to wade across. Two of them—John Kagi, vice president of Brown'due south conditional authorities, and Lewis Leary, an African-American—were shot expressionless in the water. The black Oberlin student, John Copeland, reached a rock in the center of the river, where he threw downward his gun and surrendered. Twenty-year-former William Leeman slipped out of the engine house, hoping to make contact with the three men Dark-brown had left as backup in Maryland. Leeman plunged into the Potomac and swam for his life. Trapped on an islet, he was shot dead as he tried to surrender. Throughout the afternoon, bystanders took potshots at his body.

Through loopholes—small openings through which guns could be fired—that they had drilled in the engine house's thick doors, Dark-brown's men tried to pick off their attackers, without much success. One of their shots, however, killed the town's mayor, Fontaine Beckham, enraging the local citizenry. "The anger at that moment was uncontrollable," says Frye. "A tornado of rage swept over them." A vengeful mob pushed its mode into the Galt House, where William Thompson was being held prisoner. They dragged him onto the railroad trestle, shot him in the head as he begged for his life and tossed him over the railing into the Potomac.

By nightfall, atmospheric condition within the engine house had grown desperate. Brown's men had non eaten for more than 24 hours. Just four remained unwounded. The bloody corpses of slain raiders, including Brown's 20-year-one-time son, Oliver, lay at their feet. They knew in that location was no hope of escape. Eleven white hostages and two or three of their slaves were pressed against the back wall, utterly terrified. Two pumpers and hose carts were pushed against the doors, to brace against an assault expected at any moment. Yet if Brownish felt defeated, he didn't show it. As his son Watson writhed in agony, Brown told him to die "as becomes a man."

Shortly perhaps a thousand men—many uniformed and disciplined, others drunkard and brandishing weapons from shotguns to old muskets—would fill the narrow lanes of Harpers Ferry, surrounding Brown's tiny band. President James Buchanan had dispatched a visitor of Marines from Washington, under the control of i of the Ground forces's most promising officers: Lt. Col. Robert Due east. Lee. Himself a slave owner, Lee had only disdain for abolitionists, who "he believed were exacerbating tensions past agitating amidst slaves and angering masters," says Elizabeth Dark-brown Pryor, writer of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert Due east. Lee Through His Private Letters. "He held that although slavery was regrettable, it was an institution sanctioned past God and as such would disappear only when God ordained it." Dressed in noncombatant clothes, Lee reached Harpers Ferry effectually midnight. He gathered the 90 Marines behind a nearby warehouse and worked out a program of attack. In the predawn darkness, Lee's adjutant, a flamboyant young cavalry lieutenant, boldly approached the engine firm, carrying a white flag. He was met at the door by Brown, who asked that he and his men be allowed to retreat across the river to Maryland, where they would free their hostages. The soldier promised simply that the raiders would be protected from the mob and put on trial. "Well, lieutenant, I see we tin can't agree," replied Chocolate-brown. The lieutenant stepped aside, and with his manus gave a prearranged betoken to attack. Brown could accept shot him dead—"only as easily as I could kill a musquito," he recalled afterward. Had he done so, the form of the Civil War might have been different. The lieutenant was J.E.B. Stuart, who would go on to serve brilliantly as Lee'southward cavalry commander.

Lee first sent several men itch beneath the loopholes, to smash the door with sledgehammers. When that failed, a larger party charged the weakened door, using a ladder as a battering ram, punching through on their second endeavor. Lt. Israel Green squirmed through the hole to find himself below ane of the pumpers. According to Frye, equally Greenish emerged into the darkened room, one of the hostages pointed at Brown. The abolitionist turned just as Green lunged forwards with his saber, striking Chocolate-brown in the gut with what should have been a expiry blow. Chocolate-brown fell, stunned but astonishingly unharmed: the sword had struck a buckle and bent itself double. With the sword's hilt, Dark-green then hammered Chocolate-brown's skull until he passed out. Although severely injured, Brown would survive. "History may be a affair of a quarter of an inch," says Frye. "If the blade had struck a quarter inch to the left or right, up or down, Brown would have been a corpse, and at that place would have been no story for him to tell, and there would have been no martyr."

Meanwhile, the Marines poured through the breach. Brown's men were overwhelmed. One Marine impaled Indianan Jeremiah Anderson against a wall. Another bayoneted young Dauphin Thompson, where he lay nether a fire engine. It was over in less than iii minutes. Of the 19 men who strode into Harpers Ferry less than 36 hours before, five were now prisoners; 10 had been killed or fatally injured. Four townspeople had also died; more than than a dozen militiamen were wounded.

Only two of Dark-brown's men escaped the siege. Amid the mayhem, Osborne Anderson and Albert Hazlett slipped out the back of the arsenal, climbed a wall and scuttled behind the embankment of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the bank of the Potomac, where they found a boat and paddled to the Maryland shore. Hazlett and some other of the men whom Brown had left backside to guard supplies were later captured in Pennsylvania and extradited to Virginia. Of the full, v members of the raiding party would eventually brand their way to safety in the North or Canada.

Chocolate-brown and his captured men were charged with treason, first-caste murder and "conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection." All of the charges carried the death penalty. The trial, held in Charles Town, Virginia, began on Oct 26; the verdict was guilty, and Brown was sentenced on Nov 2. Brown met his death stoically on the morning of December 2, 1859. He was led out of the Charles Boondocks jail, where he had been held since his capture, and seated on a small carriage carrying a white pine coffin. He handed a note to one of his guards: "I John Brown am now quite sure that the crimes of this guilty state: will never be purged away; but with blood." Escorted by vi companies of infantry, he was transported to a scaffold where, at 11:15, a sack was placed over his caput and a rope fitted around his neck. Brownish told his guard, "Don't keep me waiting longer than necessary. Be quick." These were his last words. Among the witnesses to his death were Robert Eastward. Lee and 2 other men whose lives would be irrevocably changed by the events at Harpers Ferry. 1 was a Presbyterian professor from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, who would earn the nickname "Stonewall" less than ii years later at the Boxing of Balderdash Run. The other was a immature actor with seductive eyes and curly hair, already a fanatical laic in Southern nationalism: John Wilkes Booth. The remaining bedevilled raiders would exist hanged, one by one.

Chocolate-brown's death stirred blood in the Northward and the Due south for opposing reasons. "We shall be a thousand times more Anti-Slavery than we ever dared to recollect of beingness before," proclaimed the Newburyport (Massachusetts) Herald. "Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified," Henry David Thoreau opined in a speech in Hold on the day of Dark-brown'due south execution, "This morning, peradventure, Captain Brownish was hung. These are the ii ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown whatever longer; he is an angel of low-cal." In 1861, Yankee soldiers would march to boxing singing: "John Brown'due south torso lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on."

On the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, "this was the South's Pearl Harbor, its ground nix," says Frye. "There was a heightened sense of paranoia, a fright of more than abolitionist attacks—that more than Browns were coming any solar day, at any moment. The Southward's greatest fear was slave insurrection. They all knew that if you held iv meg people in bondage, you're vulnerable to set on." Militias sprang upwardly across the South. In town afterwards town, units organized, armed and drilled. When war broke out in 1861, they would provide the Confederacy with tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers. "In effect, 18 months earlier Fort Sumter, the S was already declaring state of war confronting the Due north," says Frye. "Brown gave them the unifying momentum they needed, a common cause based on preserving the chains of slavery."

Fergus 1000. Bordewich, a frequent contributor of articles on history, is profiled in the "From the Editor" column.