John Brown
A Historic Figure
John Brown, 1800–1859, became a national figure in the struggle against slavery during the years leading to the American Civil War. He was a part of a movement called abolitionism that sought to end the enslavement of black persons as human property. Brown was outspoken in denouncing slavery and advocating for racial equality. He eventually came to a belief that overthrowing slavery by force was justifiable. He first took up arms in Kansas, to defend the territory from becoming a slave state. He then launched a daring plan to raid the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and lead slaves to fight for their freedom. The raid failed, and Brown was captured, tried and executed. But Brown’s motives and methods — a white man from the North who attempted to arm and organize a slave insurrection in the South — aroused heated public debate. It escalated hostilities between Northern and Southern states and moved the nation closer to the Civil War, the conflict that ultimately ended slavery.
John Brown was born May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. He was the son of Owen and Ruth (Mills) Brown. Owen Brown was of Puritan stock, a devout Christian who believed slavery was a great sin against God. When John Brown was 5 years old, the family relocated to Hudson, Ohio. It was in a region bordering south of Lake Erie and west of the Pennsylvania-Ohio line. Called the Western Reserve, the land originally was held by Connecticut and became settled by many who migrated from that state. The region also became a center for antislavery activity and debate. Owen Brown was active on the “Underground Railroad,” a covert affiliation of people and places that helped runaway slaves gain freedom in Northern states and in Canada. Owen Brown brought up John to oppose slavery and treat persons of all races and skin color as equal. Brown’s father also had a tannery where John worked and learned the leather-making trade. In 1819, John Brown started his own tannery in Hudson, married Dianthe Lusk a year later, and began a growing family of three boys.
In 1826, Brown moved his family to what is present-day New Richmond in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He went there to build a tannery, remnants of which still stand through the preservation of the John Brown Heritage Association of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Brown cleared a farm, hired workers and helped the settlement by initiating a school, church, post office and other improvements. He also suffered deep personal losses, first with the death of a young son born in New Richmond. Brown’s wife later became ill and died, along with a newborn baby, their seventh child. Brown remarried in 1833 to Mary Ann Day of Crawford County. She was half his age and would bear him 13 children. During his residences in Hudson, New Richmond and elsewhere, Brown had 20 children in all from his two marriages. Nine of his offspring died in childhood.
In 1835, after nearly a decade in Pennsylvania, Brown and his family returned to the Western Reserve where he had been offered a tannery partnership at Franklin Mills (now Kent), Ohio. The venture was short lived. Brown borrowed money to buy some nearby lands, expecting to capitalize on their rising value from the anticipated construction of a feeder canal linking Ohio with New York. An economic downturn interrupted completion of the canal. Brown then tried to pay his debts and support his family through pursuits that included cattle driving, horse breeding and sheep raising. Unable to recover from his speculative land deals, he had to declare bankruptcy in 1842. During this period, Brown, who had talked in New Richmond of wanting to break up slavery by starting a school for young blacks, took a further step toward becoming a militant abolitionist. The occasion was a church meeting in Hudson to condemn the mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy, a minister and an Illinois antislavery newspaper editor. At the meeting, Brown raised his right hand and vowed to dedicate his life to the destruction of slavery.
Talented in sheep farming, John Brown in 1843 became partner in a wool business with wealthy Simon Perkins Jr. of Akron, Ohio. They, at Brown’s urging, organized other Midwest sheep farmers into a cooperative aimed at getting better prices from Eastern wool buyers. Brown took some of his family to Springfield, Massachusetts, in order to grade and market the wool. While living there, he invited and received a visit from former slave and renowned abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass. “Though a white man,” Douglass said of Brown, “he is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced by the iron of slavery.” Meeting with Douglass in 1848, Brown revealed that he had a plan in mind to use the Appalachian mountain range as a base of operations for recruiting freed slaves into toppling slavery in the South.
By the next year, Brown and members of his family moved to a farm in North Elba (near Lake Placid), New York. He went there to offer his farming and pioneering skills to a community of black families to whom philanthropist Gerrit Smith had given land. The wool business was beginning to fail by that time. In 1851, he returned to Springfield to close the office and start settling the accounts of Perkins and Brown. Meanwhile, he assisted members of Springfield’s black community to form an organization called the League of Gileadites. It encouraged armed resistance to anyone who would attempt to capture free blacks or runaway slaves under the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Brown then returned to Akron, where he helped manage a sheep farm for Perkins. Brown was unable to pay off his share of the indebted wool business, and the partnership dissolved in 1854.
That year, the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It provided for settlement of the Kansas and Nebraska territories in the West. It said the settlers themselves should decide, by popular vote, whether or not the territories would become states that allow slavery. The South sent settlers sympathetic to proslavery control of the territory. The North enlisted companies of emigrants who wanted Kansas free of slavery. By 1855, five of John Brown’s sons had left Ohio for Kansas to start a new life and support the free-state cause. Brown joined his sons in the fall, persuaded by them that he was needed to help defeat “Border Ruffians” from Missouri who were terrorizing free-state settlers. The armed interference of the Border Ruffians also enabled an illegally elected proslavery legislature that attempted to ban any free speech against slavery. In 1856, facing no resistance, Border Ruffians sacked the free-state settlement of Lawrence. In retaliation, Brown led a small group of men in slaying five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. The attack on Lawrence and the Pottawatomie massacre escalated violence between the proslavery and free-state sides in Kansas. Brown’s reputation as an abolitionist guerilla fighter in Kansas grew when, outnumbered in both instances, he forced the surrender of a proslavery force at Black Jack and then drove back an attack by Border Ruffians at Osawatomie.
In early 1857, John Brown went back East. He toured New England and New York, raising money for weapons and supplies that he planned to use for the further defense of Kansas. By this time, though, free-state settlement was prevailing. Free-state candidates won the majority of the territorial legislature in the October election. Kansas was mostly at peace. Brown turned his attention to his old plan, discussed with Frederick Douglass a decade earlier, of striking a blow against slavery in the South.
In 1858, at Douglass’s home in Rochester, New York, Brown composed a “Provisional Constitution for the People of the United States.” Written on behalf of those oppressed and disenfranchised by slavery, the constitution was to govern a fortified interracial communal free state that Brown hoped to establish in the Appalachian Mountains. Brown planned that, from such a defensive base, he and his allies could draw off slaves and recruit many of them into a fighting force. Then they would launch further attacks to make slaveholding insecure and influence legislation to end slavery. Brown shared this overall plan with a group of prominent Northerners who had helped fund his efforts to acquire guns and equipment for the antislavery struggle in Kansas. Called the Secret Six, they consisted of schoolteacher Franklin Sanborn, landowner Gerrit Smith, businessman George Stearns, physician Samuel Howe, social reformer Thomas Higginson, and clergyman Theodore Parker. Although having doubts about Brown’s plan, they endorsed the provisional constitution on principle. Brown later unveiled his constitution to the approval of a secret convention of black leaders meeting in Chatham, Canada.
Brown went back to Kansas one more time. Although the territory still was generally quiet, Brown saw opportunity to lead a group of volunteers in rescuing slaves from two plantations in Missouri. Eluding search parties, Brown and his men escorted the freed slaves by wagon through Nebraska and Iowa, put them on a railroad car that passed through Chicago and Detroit, and finally on a ferry to safety in Canada. The rescue effort took three months and covered 1,100 miles during the winter of 1858–1859. Brown then returned to his New York farm, where he bade farewell to his wife and family members, and departed on his grand mission to mount a direct assault on slavery in the South.
Brown did not disclose to the Secret Six the starting point for his planned strike. Nor did he reveal it to his band of man, at least not at first. Under an assumed name, he rented a small farmhouse on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. There he assembled the rifles, revolvers, pikes and supplies he originally intended for Kansas but now redirected to his secret Maryland headquarters by way of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He also gathered as many volunteers as he could, 21 men, most in their 20s, and five of them black. Many of the men were in shock when Brown announced his plan would begin with a raid on the nearby U.S. armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown apparently believed a raid there would serve as a “trumpet blast” to inform slaves of their coming liberation and rally them to his force. Despite a heated debate, Brown’s men ultimately remained committed to their leader and his master plan. Brown subsequently informed Frederick Douglass as to the target of the raid at a meeting the two men had at a stone quarry in Chambersburg. Douglass tried to convince his friend that the raid would be crushed, but Brown would not listen.
Harpers Ferry lay in a narrow gap of shore between the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, flanked by mountains on both the Maryland and Virginia sides. The town at the time existed to manufacture and store weapons for the federal government. Brown and his small band of men launched their raid on the Sunday evening of Oct. 16, 1859. Splitting up, they quickly seized a musket factory, an arsenal and a rifle works, and took prisoner some slaveowners in the outlying countryside. After Brown allowed a Baltimore-bound train to pass through Harpers Ferry, the conductor telegraphed authorities; national news spread of a “negro insurrection” led by whites. Through Monday morning, Brown waited for slaves to flock to him. But, by afternoon, local militia and townspeople had surrounded the raiders and killed several. Brown barricaded himself, along with a handful of his men and some hostages, in a fire engine house near the armory gate. That evening, U.S. troops led by then Colonel Robert E. Lee (the later Civil War general) arrived and stormed the building with a battering ram. Brown suffered sword wounds during the fighting and was taken captive. By the end of the 36-hour raid, 10 of Brown’s men had died, including two of his sons, Oliver and Watson. Along with Brown, six of his followers eventually were captured. Five other raiders successfully escaped, one of whom was Brown’s son, Owen. Brown’s hopes for a massive slave revolt never materialized.
Brown and the other captured men were moved to a jail in Charlestown, Virginia (now Charles Town, West Virginia). A speedy trial ensued in the Charles Town courthouse. Convicted on charges of treason against Virginia, conspiring with slaves to rebel, and murder (some civilians were killed during the raid), Brown and his comrades were sentenced to execution by hanging. Through his trial appearances and letters that he penned from prison, Brown nevertheless was able to make a widely publicized defense of his actions at Harpers Ferry. It was not wrong, but right, he maintained, to have “interfered” with the inhumanity and injustice of slavery.
On Dec. 2, 1859, John Brown died on the gallows in Charles Town. Standing guard were 1,500 soldiers. Among those at the scene were Thomas (later to be called “Stonewall”) Jackson, who became a Confederate general in the Civil War, and John Wilkes Booth, who would be the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. Just before being transported to his execution, Brown had handed one of his jailers a note. Indicating that much bloodshed would be necessary now to purge slavery from the nation, Brown’s last written words were prophetic of the American Civil War fought from 1861 to 1865.
Brown’s widow, Mary Ann, escorted her husband’s body as it was taken by train and ferry for burial at their North Elba farm in the Adirondack Mountains. Memorial meetings were held and church bells rang in the North, where abolitionists honored Brown as martyr. Although many Northerners disapproved of Brown’s militant methods, they admired his noble motives in wanting an end to slavery. In the South, however, Brown was denounced as a fanatic and an invader. His raid on Harpers Ferry magnified Southern fears of slaves turning on their masters and the “peculiar institution” coming under attack.
The controversy over John Brown and his raid deepened the divide between North and South, thrusting America nearer to the Civil War. Union soldiers soon would be singing and marching to “John Brown’s Body.” The lyrics of the song came to have many variations, including this one that fittingly speaks of John Brown’s legacy: “But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave, His soul is marching on.”