John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

By Tony Horwitz

---

There were eighteen men, not counting the Captain. Almost all were in their twenties and had written farewell letters to family and lovers. Five of them were black, including a fugitive slave and a freedman whose wife and children were still in bondage. Two others were the Captain’s sons. All had been formally inducted at the secluded log house as soldiers in the Provisional Army of the United States.

Their commander was fifty-nine, a sinewy man with gunmetal eyes and a white beard he’d grown to conceal his identity. He was wanted by state and federal authorities; President Buchanan had put a price on his head. While living underground, the Captain had drafted a constitution and a “Declaration of Liberty” for the revolutionary government that tonight’s action would found.

“‘When in the course of Human events, it becomes necessary’ for an oppressed People to Rise, and assert their Natural Rights,” the declaration began. If the opening sounded familiar, the close was not. “We will obtain these rights or die in the struggle,” the document stated, before concluding: “Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet.”

(Horwitz 2012, 1-2)

My son’s ninth-grade American history textbook offers little more insight than mine did in the 1970s. Harpers Ferry merits six paragraphs—a speed bump for students racing ahead to Fort Sumter and the Gettysburg Address. Recent history also provides a simplistic guide at best. Viewed through the lens of 9/11, Harpers Ferry seems an al-Qaeda prequel: a long-bearded fundamentalist, consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launches nineteen men in a suicidal strike on a symbol of American power. A shocked nation plunges into war. We are still grappling with the consequences.

But John Brown wasn’t a charismatic foreigner crusading from half a world away. He descended from Puritans and Revolutionary soldiers and believed he was fulfilling their struggle for freedom. Nor was he an alienated loner in the mold of recent homegrown terrorists such as Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. Brown plotted while raising an enormous family; he also drew support from leading thinkers and activists of his day, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau. The covert group that funneled him money and guns, the so-called Secret Six, was composed of northern magnates and prominent Harvard men, two of them ministers.

(Horwitz 2012, 3-4)

The first serious strife flared in 1819, when Missouri sought statehood. Missouri had been settled mainly by Southerners; its admission to the Union would carry slavery well north and west of its existing boundaries and upset the numerical balance between slave and free states. After lengthy debate, Congress finessed the crisis by admitting Maine along with Missouri and by drawing a line across the continent, forbidding any further slavery north of the 36° 30’ parallel. This deal—the Missouri Compromise of 1820—formed the basis for a three-decade détente over slavery’s spread.

But Thomas Jefferson, then in his late seventies, immediately sensed the danger inherent in the agreement. In demarcating a border between slave and free, the compromise underscored the country’s fault line and fixed the nation into two camps. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” Jefferson wrote of the debate over Missouri and slavery. “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

(Horwitz 2012, 15-16)

In his autobiographical letter to young Henry Stearns, John Brown said he felt the first stirrings of his “Eternal war with Slavery” at age twelve, when he saw a slave boy beaten with iron shovels. “This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition, of Fatherless & Motherless slave children,” he wrote. Brown, who was also motherless and subject to childhood beatings, may have identified with the slave boy. But his burning hatred of racial oppression had another source. Like so much else in his life, it reflected the influence of his father.

In most respects, Owen Brown’s religious faith harked back to his Puritan forebears, who believed they had a covenant with God to make America a moral beacon to the world. In the eighteenth century, Calvinist ministers began speaking of slavery as a threat to this special relationship— a breach of divine law that would bring down God’s wrath upon the land. Owen was strongly affected by this preaching, and like many other New England emigrants, he carried his antislavery convictions to the Western Reserve.

(Horwitz 2012, 16)

In earlier decades, Southerners had often spoken of slavery as a necessary evil, an uncomfortable inheritance from those who first brought Africans to the colonies. “I take higher ground,” John Calhoun told Congress in 1837. “Instead of an evil,” slavery was “a positive good.” It was rooted in the Bible and racial difference, which made whites the natural and rightful masters of “savage” Africans. Slaves were secure and well cared for, unlike wage laborers in northern mills; white Southerners were freed from drudgery and class conflict.

George Fitzhugh, of Virginia, later took Calhoun’s thesis to its logical extreme. In tracts such as Cannibals All!, he argued that if slavery was right, then the Founders themselves had been wrong. “All men are created equal” wasn’t a manifest truth; it was a self-evident lie.

(Horwitz 2012, 23)

In the early 1800s, roughly a third of Americans died before reaching adulthood. Early death was so common that parents recycled their children’s names; the Browns, having lost a Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen, named three newborns Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen. Of the twenty children Brown fathered, nine died before the age of ten, among them a baby girl accidentally scalded to death by an older sister.

(Horwitz 2012, 28)

At midcentury, as Brown struggled to settle his family and finances, the fragile concord between free and slave states that had prevailed for three decades began to unravel. In the years since the Missouri Compromise, a new euphemism for slavery had emerged: “the peculiar institution.” In the early nineteenth century, this phrase connoted that slavery was “peculiar” or distinctive to the South. As long as it remained so, most Northerners chose to tolerate or ignore it. “It is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible,” President Millard Fillmore said in 1850, expressing a common view. “We must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.”

But Northerners recoiled whenever slavery threatened to bleed outside its existing boundaries. Their fear had much more to do with self-interest than with sympathy for blacks—indeed, the latter was so scarce that several northern states passed laws to exclude black immigrants altogether. At bottom, whites didn’t want to compete with slave labor and see their own status and prospects diminished. “The workingmen of the north, east, and west,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1847, “shall not be sunk to the miserable level of what is little above brutishness—sunk to be like owned goods, and driven cattle!”

(Horwitz 2012, 35-36)

The stereotypical “Old South” of columned mansions, hoop skirts, and endless rows of cotton was, in reality, new, and its bloom lasted for only the final decades of slavery’s 246-year history in North America. But it gave little sign of withering in the years before the Civil War. To the contrary, slaveholders sought ceaselessly to expand their reach, proclaiming it the nation’s manifest destiny to annex still more lands beyond those taken from Mexico and native tribes.

“Cuba must be ours,” declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become “a basin of water belonging to the United States.” His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. “I want these countries for the spread of slavery,” he said. “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.”

In the 1850s, proslavery partisans known as “filibusters” invaded Cuba. They failed, but another filibuster, William Walker, briefly established the “Republic of Baja California” after seizing the peninsula from Mexico. Two years later, he led a private army into Nicaragua, installed himself as president, and reinstituted slavery (which had ended there in 1824).

Walker’s dictatorship even won recognition from the White House, which was occupied in the 1850s by three of the weakest presidents in U.S. history. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan were all Northerners who supported or appeased southern interests, a breed derisively known as “doughfaces”—half-baked and malleable in the hands of slave holders. This pliability was all the more exasperating to antislavery Northerners because of their region’s dominance in other realms. By midcentury, the North was home to roughly 70 percent of the nation’s free population and more than 80 percent of its industry.

This rapid expansion only heightened the South’s insecurity—and the brashness of its leaders’ demands for more slaveholding territory and even for the resumption of the transatlantic slave trade, outlawed by Constitutional decree since 1808. “Slavery,” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, “loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of ‘unclean’ will keep from intrusion into uninfected company.”

(Horwitz 2012, 38)

Abolitionists were still a small minority in the North, often mocked as cranks, scolds, and “ultras” or extremists, well outside the mainstream. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act, more than any previous event, gave substance to the specter of an insatiable “Slave Power,” intent on devouring the liberties of all Americans. As a group of leading antislavery congressmen warned in a widely circulated appeal to the nation, the bill was “an atrocious plot,” designed “to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”

In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska debate, opponents of slavery’s extension formed a new political coalition: the Republican Party. Societies also sprang up to recruit and assist emigrants to Kansas. Since the territory’s status would be determined by popular vote, antislavery activists—and their proslavery counterparts—sought to fill Kansas with settlers sympathetic to their cause. In doing so, partisans on both sides resorted to scare tactics and crude stereotypes. Southerners conjured a tide of “grasping, skin-flint nigger stealing Yankees” washing over Kansas, while Northerners caricatured southern pioneers as “Pukes”—illiterate backwoodsmen with whiskey-red eyes, tobacco-stained teeth, and bowie knives.

(Horwitz 2012, 40)

In the 1790s, as the United States sought to free itself from dependence on foreign and privately made arms, President George Washington had determined that his young country needed to establish at least two armories. Springfield, an early milling center with a preexisting arsenal, seemed an obvious choice. But Harpers Ferry was quite the opposite, a frontier hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. This water gap, known to early pioneers as the Hole, was so dramatic and untamed that Thomas Jefferson judged it “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature,” a vista “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.”

Washington took a more utilitarian view. A man of many parts, he was among other things a land speculator and transportation booster with grand visions for the river that ran past his plantation at Mount Vernon. He had long dreamed of making the Potomac a busy corridor between the Atlantic Seaboard and the Ohio Valley; upon becoming president, he touted Harpers Ferry as an ideal site for a national armory.

“This spot affords every advantage that could be wished for,” Washington wrote his secretary of war in 1795. The Shenandoah and Potomac provided endless water power; the surrounding hills abounded with timber and iron ore for gunstocks and barrels. And Harpers Ferry was just sixty miles from the new nation’s capital, roughly in the middle of the country as it then existed.

As a military strategist, Washington was also mindful of defense. Harpers Ferry—well inland, walled by mountains, and moated by rivers—was the most secure place imaginable to manufacture and store the nation’s guns.

“There is not a spot in the United States, which combines more or greater requisites,” Washington wrote, “considered either as a place of immense strength,” or as “inaccessible by an enemy.”

(Horwitz 2012, 69)

In reality, Brown had convened a latter-day Constitutional Convention: the secret creation of a new American government. The delegates—all black, apart from Brown and eleven of his Iowa cohort—included a printer, a gunsmith, a schoolmaster, a minister, a poet, and the pioneering black nationalist Martin Delany, a physician and editor who was soon to lead the “Niger Valley Exploring Party” to found a colony of American blacks in Africa.

A secretary took notes as Dr. Delany made a motion for Brown “to state the object of the convention,” which he did “at length.” For many years, Brown said, the idea of freeing the slaves “had possessed him like a passion,” and he’d “read all the books upon insurrectionary warfare which he could lay his hands upon.” The mountain-based guerrilla action he now planned, and which he outlined, would cause slaves to “immediately rise all over the Southern States.” As they did so, a new social order would emerge, with its own schools, churches, and government.

Brown then presented “a plan for organization” for this new society, entitled “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States.” In many respects, it mimicked the existing U.S. Constitution, including a preamble and articles ordered by Roman numerals. But the language was more John Brown than James Madison. 

“Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion,” the preamble began, “WE, CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE … ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH FOR OURSELVES, THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONAL CONSTITUTION.”

Brown’s redrafting of one of the nation’s founding documents wasn’t in itself bizarre. Antebellum reformers and Utopians did so routinely; a statement of women’s rights, for instance, was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Abolitionists were especially prone to challenging the sanctity of the Constitution, and never more so than in the late 1850s, following the Supreme Court’s notorious ruling in the Dred Scott case, a year before the Chatham Convention.

Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, sued for his freedom on the basis of living for many years in free territory, where he had been taken by an owner who was posted in the North as a military officer. Not only did the Court rule against Scott, it also declared that the Founders had never intended for blacks—free or slave—to have any of the privileges of U.S. citizens. As the staunchly proslavery chief justice, Roger Taney, wrote in his opinion, blacks had “no rights that white men were bound to respect.”

John Brown cited this infamous ruling in his constitution’s preamble, which explained why a new government was needed “to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties.” But the forty-eight articles that followed were less concerned with rights than with the command structure of Brown’s highly militarized state. The role of its weak president and Congress was mainly to advise a powerful commander-in-chief, who could tap the treasury as needed for money and valuables “captured by honorable warfare.” Article XL was directed toward another preoccupation of Brown’s. It forbade “filthy conversation,” “indecent behavior,” “intoxication,” and “unlawful intercourse.”

(Horwitz 2012, 80-82)

Contrary to stereotype, the antebellum South wasn’t a uniformly agrarian and insular society. Its cities and industry, though smaller than the North’s, were growing rapidly, and the region’s economy was well integrated with national and global markets. Even so, Harpers Ferry stood out. It was a bustling crossroads of industry and innovation, and its history was emblematic of the nation’s development.

In 1803, just a few years after George Washington established a federal armory in the Virginia village, President Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase, more than doubling the geographic size of the United States. The man he dispatched to explore this vast territory, Meriwether Lewis, went first to Harpers Ferry to buy “Rifles, Tomahawks & knives” for his expedition, as well as a collapsible iron boat frame that could be covered in hides—a vessel he called “the Experiment.”

(Horwitz 2012, 86)

Equally ambitious was Brown’s political manifesto, a fiery companion piece to his constitution entitled “A Declaration of Liberty By the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” Loosely modeled on “that Sacred Instrument” signed in 1776, the declaration proclaimed a new revolution, to “secure equal rights, privileges, & Justice to all,” black and white, slave and free, “Irrespective of Sex.” It also called for punishing those guilty of “oppressing their fellow Men,” condemned “Our President and other Leeches,” and repudiated allegiance to a government that had betrayed the original Declaration of Independence by protecting slave owners and traffickers.

The declaration was written in large letters on sheets of foolscap, with each page pasted onto white cloth. The fabric was then rolled around a stick and tied with a string, like a Torah scroll. This was Brown’s Sacred Instrument, which he would bring down from the mountains to fulfill God’s will and the destiny of his chosen nation.

(Horwitz 2012, 122-123)

At about one thirty on the morning of October 17, Lewis Washington awoke to a low voice calling his name from the hallway outside his bedroom. A forty-six-year-old widower with grown children, Washington lived at Beallair, his 670-acre estate five miles west of Harpers Ferry. He described himself as a farmer, but this was misleading. The great-grandnephew of George Washington, he was also a close associate of Virginia’s governor, an honorary colonel, and one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Jefferson County. 

When Washington heard someone summoning him in the night, he thought a traveling friend had arrived late and been let in a back door “by the servants.” These “servants” were, of course, his slaves, who were a commodity as well as a workforce in antebellum Virginia. In just the past year, Washington had sold nine slaves for $7,300 and “hired” two servants, meaning he paid another slave owner for the year’s use of their labor. Washington recorded these transactions in his diary, alongside his notations about the purchase and sale of bacon, potatoes, and cord wood. In July 1859, he noted in the same diary that he was decamping for a mountain spa until September, leaving his overseer and slaves to toil in the summer heat.

(Horwitz 2012, 133-134)

He’d also indicated to his band that he anticipated some support from white townspeople. “From Brown,” one of them later stated, “I understood that there were laboring men at Harper’s Ferry who wished to get rid of slaves and would aid in running them off.” At the least, Brown appears to have believed that most whites would stay out of the fray rather than take up arms in defense of the slaveholding gentry.

This belief was bolstered by the intelligence he had received from Cook, who found the community welcoming, even to a Northerner who sometimes told his acquaintances of his sympathy for the free-state cause in Kansas. Relatively few townspeople owned slaves, and they seemed to live and work peaceably alongside free blacks. Thomas Boerly, for instance, rented part of his property to a black family. The black baggage master, Heyward Shepherd, was employed at the B & O depot by the town’s mayor, who had also helped another free man buy his wife and children out of slavery.

But this interracial cooperation didn’t translate into sympathy for Brown’s cause. Nor were many people in Harpers Ferry aware of his intentions, at least initially. The shooting of a free black man confused matters, as did the mixed signals Brown seemed to convey. He said he meant no harm to citizens—yet seized their town at night, took hostages, claimed command of a vast army, and brought with him barrels of gunpowder and torches that one hostage described as “sticks wrapped with cotton waste and dipped in burning fluid.” His men also carried Sharps rifles, a new kind of carbine named for a gunsmith who had once worked at Harpers Ferry. Compact, quick-loading, and renowned for its range and accuracy, the Sharps was the deadliest firearm of its day, and the origin of the word “sharpshooter.”

(Horwitz 2012, 148-149)

The insanity defense was a new but widely accepted doctrine in American courtrooms. In a sensational murder trial just months before Brown’s, a New York congressman, Daniel Sickles, had successfully pleaded temporary insanity after shooting his wife’s lover dead in a park in Washington, D.C. Brown, with his wild hair and even wilder scheme for slaves’ liberation, fit many people’s notion of a lunatic. “As mad as a March hare,” opined the Chicago Press and Tribune, offering a typical view of Brown a few days after his capture.

The telegram from Akron also contained a certain amount of truth. Nineteen Ohioans later supported it by submitting affidavits about Brown’s mental state. While these statements were collected in an obvious effort to win clemency for Brown, they attested to his family’s long history of mental illness. A number of relatives on his mother’s side had been committed to asylums. And two of Brown’s children, Frederick and John junior, were clearly disturbed, though their instability may have been inherited from their mother, Dianthe, who was described as mentally afflicted.

More telling, perhaps, were the words used to describe Brown in the affidavits and other accounts of people who knew him well. They frequently called him “excitable” or a “monomaniac”—a term that Herman Melville applied to Captain Ahab. In 1857, almost two years before the question of Brown’s mental health arose in court, a free-state official in Kansas had written a striking letter to Franklin Sanborn, reporting that Brown was acting so oddly that some free-staters “openly express[ed] the opinion that one of his old fits of insanity has returned upon him.”

Brown’s own writing also spoke to his violent mood swings; he oscillated between periods of giddy, frantic activity and sloughs of despond that left him almost paralyzed. To modern eyes, this might suggest manic depression. So would Brown’s recurrent grandiosity—his unassailable faith in his own plans and abilities, and his belief that he was “God’s instrument,” singled out for the liberation of slaves.

But diagnosing mental illness at a distance of a century and a half is a dubious exercise. Even if Brown gave signs of bipolar tendencies, there’s no evidence he had hallucinations or other symptoms so severe that he could have been considered legally insane—in the parlance of Virginia’s antebellum code, “an idiot, lunatic, non compos, or deranged.”

In any event, Brown wanted no part of an insanity defense. As soon as his lawyer read the telegram from Ohio in court, he raised himself from his cot and objected. “I look upon it as a miserable artifice and pretext of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me,” he said. “I am perfectly unconscious of insanity, and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempt to interfere on my behalf on that score.”

(Horwitz 2012, 205-206)

While Higginson stewed in private, another New Englander went boldly public in defense of Brown. A few days after the Harpers Ferry attack, Henry David Thoreau told townspeople in Concord that he planned to give a speech supporting the jailed abolitionist. Though many citizens of the freethinking town had backed Brown strongly just months before, they now dreaded any association with Harpers Ferry. Local abolitionists discouraged Thoreau from speaking and town selectmen refused to ring a bell announcing his lecture. Undaunted, Thoreau rang the bell himself—on October 30, the eve of the abolitionist’s conviction—before delivering a stirring oration that was published under the title “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

Harking back to his famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau cast Brown as an exemplar of principled resistance to authority. “Is it possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?” he asked. “Are laws to be enforced simply because they are made?” Brown, he said, had resisted unjust laws and stood up for human dignity, “knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all.”

(Horwitz 2012, 210-211)

Brown accepted his conviction under Virginia law. But he invoked another, higher code. “This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things ‘whatsoever I would men should do to me I should do ever so to them.’ It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to these instructions.”

He had abided by the Golden Rule and the scriptural injunction to care for the afflicted. This was all he had done. To do otherwise would have been a much greater crime. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was no wrong but right.”

This brought Brown to the climax of his speech—in effect, to the climax of his long struggle against slavery. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!”

(Horwitz 2012, 212-213)

Brown was indeed no Republican, and Lincoln no abolitionist. Though the two men shared certain traits, including a Calvinist upbringing on the frontier, Lincoln had very different views on race and emancipation. Born in the slave state of Kentucky, he believed the institution would die of its own accord, and he favored resettling freed blacks in Africa, just as Jefferson and others had proposed decades earlier.

“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he stated during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Citing a “physical difference between the races” that made such equality impossible, he added: “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Such attitudes were broadly in line with the white northern mainstream and served Lincoln well in the anxious aftermath of Harpers Ferry. So did the militancy of the Republican frontrunner, Senator William Seward, of New York, who was famous for having spoken of “an irrepressible conflict” that would make the nation all slaveholding or entirely free. Southerners and their northern allies repeatedly cited this remark after Harpers Ferry. In their telling, Seward had called for an abolitionist crusade, of which Brown and his men were the inevitable vanguard.

Lincoln had many political assets, including his “Rail-Splitter” image of backwoods self-reliance. But his deft handling of the slavery issue, amid the fallout from Harpers Ferry, did much to secure his surprise, third-ballot victory over Seward at the Republican convention in May 1860. The party also wrote into its platform Lincoln’s rebuke of Brown, adopting a resolution to “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”

(Horwitz 2012, 273-274)

---

References

Horwitz, Tony. 2012. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. N.p.: Picador.

ISBN  978-0-312-42926-3