“The impact of Brown’s raid was traumatic and far-reaching; it touched off an emotional storm that swept across the country.”

By Charles P. Poland Jr.

IN THE 1850s, America was a deeply divided nation.

Disputes over federal powers, national banking and the settlement of the western territories combined to create rifts between Northern and Southern states. And beneath it all bubbled the long-standing disagreement over the institution of slavery.

As the decade drew to a close, Northern abolitionists continued their generations-long campaign to emancipate the nearly four million blacks held in servitude. All the while, Southern elites defended the plantation system and the cotton, known as “white gold,” that it produced.

Among the more militant in the anti-slavery camp was John Brown, a 58-year-old firebrand from Connecticut who had made a name for himself as an abolitionist zealot in the long-running “Bleeding Kansas” quasi-war.

Believing himself on a holy mission to end slavery, Brown rejected oratory and debate to bring about change and instead embraced violence and bloodshed.

“These men are all talk,” Brown complained of the pacifists in the abolitionist movement. “What we need is action.”

On Oct. 16, 1859, Brown and 20 followers, including his own sons, launched an ill-conceived raid on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (present-day West Virginia). The objective was to seize weapons stored in the arsenal and use them to bring about a slave revolt across the South. It was a dismal failure.

After moving into the town and taking several and hostages, Brown and his band captured the arsenal. By the following morning, word of the seizure had spread to the surrounding countryside. Although slaves in the area refused to rise up, the local militia was activated and was soon marching for Harpers Ferry to take back the town. Later that day, 100 U.S. Marines from Washington Navy Yard – the closest federal troops in the area – were heading to the site of the disturbance as well. Robert E. Lee, then a colonel in the U.S. Army, commanded the operation. The following day, Brown’s raid ended in defeat after a brief skirmish; 10 of the insurrectionists were dead and seven were in custody, including Brown himself.

Brown was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Hanged at Charles Town, Virginia on Dec. 2, 1859, he would be the first U.S. citizen executed for treason in the country’s history.

Despite ending in fiasco, the impact of Brown’s raid was traumatic and far-reaching. It touched off an emotional storm that swept across the country and even reached Europe’s shores. The violence exacerbated the sectional bitterness and paranoia of the 1850s and further diminished the American capacity for rational debated, tolerance and compromise.

The South was horrified by Brown’s plot; moderate Northerners were also shocked. In fact, so unnerved were authorities in Philadelphia that just four days after the raid, the adjutant-general there confiscated weapons that had recently been issued to an all-black volunteer company in the city.

Some saw Brown as a hero. On the day of his execution, crowds of blacks and white abolitionists gathered in Northern cities to pray, sing hymns and delivery eulogistic speeches. Resolutions were proclaimed, bells pealed and salutes were fired.

Indeed, Northern anti-slave firebrands spouted nothing but praise for Old Brown, whom they considered a martyr. Even the Northern Republican press, who at first denounced the violence, gradually began espousing high regard for the courageous and noble old man who led it. Public figures in the slave states were incensed by Northern intellectuals and abolitionists who compared him to Christ.

In Congress, John Brown was the main topic of debate the winter after the Harpers Ferry raid. Animosity in the legislature ran rampant. Quarrels between pro- and anti-slavery lawmakers grew so acrimonious that politicians feared for their safety.

As a precaution, one Congressman, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, put himself on a fitness regimen and took up target practice. Many Republicans carried pistols and escorted their colleagues who did not. The division on Capitol Hill mirrored the mood of the country; uncertainty over the state of the nation was spreading.

Terror swept through the South following Brown’s raid. With righteous indignation, Southerners blamed the North for trying to ignite a servile insurrection. The discovery of 200 carbines and nearly 1,000 pikes Brown had stockpiled on the Kennedy farm and a schoolhouse in rural Maryland along with a cache of correspondence and marked up maps of six Southern states only heightened fears. Southerners saw the details as conclusive evidence of an extensive Northern conspiracy to destroy slavery by triggering armed slave revolts. Many feared a repeat of Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising in Southampton County, Virginia. During the three-day rebellion, slaves had killed nearly 60 whites, mainly women and children. Indeed, the revelations only fuelled Southern extremists’ justification for secession.

Even moderates in the South took little reassurance from the many Northern newspaper editorials denouncing the raid or the numerous public meetings taking place throughout the North aimed at reaffirming the sanctity of the Union and condemning John Brown.

To placate Southern fears, many in the North expressed sympathy and support at unity rallies in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, New York, Boston and Jersey City. The gatherings included music, speeches, banners, flags, and pictures of famous national leaders. Speaker after speaker condemned John Brown and all fanaticism to the cheers and applause of thousands. Delegates reaffirmed their allegiance to the Union, expressed support for Southerners, and proclaimed their unwillingness to meddle in the internal affairs of slave states. Letters of support were read from prominent Americans such as anti-abolitionist former president Franklin Pierce and Winfield Scott, the noted hero of the War of 1812 and Mexican-American War and commanding general of the U.S. Army.

Some anti-Brown sentiment in the North led to outright violence. A group of youths in Quincy, Massachusetts held a public sham trial and near-fatal mock execution of a young boy who also happened to be named John Brown. After condemning the youngster, the group carried out a pretend hanging that soon went awry leaving the hapless victim dangling by his neck. According the Boston Herald, a woman in a nearby house ran out “with a big carving knife and cut the youth down saving his life.”

Northern and Southern Democrats alike condemned Brown, charging that the “invasion of Harpers Ferry” was a Republican plot. They demanded a congressional investigation. Fearing political damage, Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln himself, promptly refuted the charge and denounced Brown’s raid. Later a special U.S. Senate committee composed of three pro-slave Democrats and two Republicans from the North investigated the raid. The committee issued a report that the raid was “simply the act of lawless ruffians under the sanction of no public or political authority” by which Brown intended “to commence a servile insurrection on the borders of Virginia” that would spread throughout the South. The committee’s tepid conclusions failed to change or calm minds, especially in the South.

Contradicting the Senate committee was the investigation of the “Harpers Ferry Invasion” by a joint committee of the Virginia legislature. It concluded that a widespread Northern conspiracy was present that posed a dangerous threat not only to the Old Dominion but to the entire South. With most Southerners convinced that they faced the twin menaces of internal slave revolts and “invasion from without,” militia units were drilled and expanded to be combat-ready as a watchful eye was kept on all strangers, traveling salesmen, itinerants, and especially Northern preachers, since they might be abolitionist agents.

The sectional conflict preceding Harpers Ferry created a fragile political environment that intensified Southerners’ reaction to Brown’s raid, making it even more emotional and extreme. After the Harpers Ferry attack the South demanded at least expulsion or punishment of outsiders, and censorship and repression of words or deeds by anyone – Yankee or Southerner, white or black – who had any potential, regardless of how remote, of stirring up the slaves. In Texas, a 60-year-old minister who believed slavery was sanctioned by the Bible was subjected to 70 lashes after criticizing the treatment of black slaves from the pulpit. Elsewhere, anti-slavery books were burned in public ceremonies. Northern companies that were “suspected of abolitionist tendencies” were boycotted.

Ironically, Brown’s raid to free the slaves led to greater repression of all Southern blacks, both free and enslaved. Slave patrols were expanded to monitor and ferret out suspected troublemakers. The Arkansas legislature passed an act “giving free colored population of the state the alternative of migrating before Jan. 1, 1860, or becoming slaves.”

John Brown’s raid also prompted a call to arms and revitalization of the militia system that springboarded mobilization for the Civil War. The following November, the New York Herald ran the headline “VIRGINIA ARMING FOR CIVIL WAR,” while reporting mobilizations across the South. The raising of slave state militia in 1860 was in reality a rehearsal for war.

John Brown’s raid was not the spark that set off the Civil War, but it certainly lit the fuse. Sectional issues, especially slavery, had long plagued American for decades and helped set the emotional and political stage so Brown’s feeble raid had a monumental impact. To Northern abolitionists and blacks, Brown became the martyred paladin of downtrodden enslaved people. To Northern and some Southern moderates, he was a courageous, though misguided man. But to most Southerners, Brown was the symbol of a diabolical Northern conspiracy to shed Southern blood. The fear that Brown inspired tainted all Republicans in the eyes of Southerners, whether they were moderates or abolitionists.

Abraham Lincoln’s election victory in 1860 was the event that ultimately fractured the Union; seven lower Southern states soon responded to his win by seceding. Secession in turn set in motion the seizure of federal forts by Confederate forces and ultimately the firing on Fort Sumter. Lincoln responded with a call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the widening “insurrection,” which drove additional states into rebellion, including Virginia. Americans were now at war with each other. Compromise – the answer to settling America’s earlier sectional crises – was doomed. A series of proposals by Congress, the Crittenden Compromise, and Virginia Peace Convention failed to contain the crisis. The repercussions of Brown raid played a major role in their failure. Although not the sole cause of disunion, John Brown’s raid was unequivocally a pivotal factor in widening and deepening sectional bitterness, a bitterness that tore apart the Union and ushered in the Civil War.

Charles P. Poland Jr. is the author of America’s Good Terrorist: John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. A college instructor with 40 years of classroom experience, he is the founder and director of the Northern Virginia Community College’s Mobile Civil War Museum. Among the courses he has taught were field-trip course on the Harpers Ferry raid and all the eastern Civil War battle sites. He is the author of eight books and received the 2012 outstanding Faculty award by the State Council of Higher Education, the highest honours bestowed upon Virginia faculty.