SYMHC Classics: John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry

This 2016 episode covers John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which set out to create an armed revolution of emancipated slaves. Instead, it became a tipping point leading to the U.S. Civil War.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This episode is coming out May night.
Abolitionist John Brown was born on this day, two twenty
years ago, so we thought it would be a good
time to re release our episode on his raid on
Harvard's Ferry. This episode originally came out on September twelve,
two thousand sixteen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

(00:26):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry has come up two
different times in recent episodes of our podcast. The first

(00:47):
time was in our two parter on Harriet Tubman, and
then it came up again in our episode on Mary
Anne Shad Carrie. And then it came up two different
times on a completely different podcast which is politically retve
with w Comal Bell and Harri Kondabolo and on. As
I said, on two different episodes. Plus, we've had a
ton of listener request to talk about this one as well,

(01:10):
So it seems like it's time for the world to
have an episode on John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry.
There you go for background. John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut,
on May nine of eighteen hundred. His family restrict Calvinists,
and John's father, Owen, was a white abolitionist who believed
fervently that holding people in bondage was a sin against God.

(01:33):
In eighteen o five, Owen moved the family to Hudson, Ohio,
where he became deeply involved in the town's efforts in
the underground Railroad, including sheltering escaping slaves in the family's barn.
There are still a bunch of houses and Hudson that
are still existing that were tied to the underground railroad,
and when you read the descriptions of them, his name

(01:54):
comes up over and over and over again. In eighteen
twenty one, John Brown married and the Lusk, with whom
he would have seven children, before both she and their
seventh child died in eighteen thirty two. Then in eighteen
thirty three, Brown remarried Mary Day, who at that point
was sixteen, and the two of them would have another

(02:14):
thirteen children. There are also several sources that say they
adopted a previously enslaved child and then raised that child
as their own as well. Brown approached parenthood in a
way that was both strict and austere, including some corporal
punishment that could be described as cruel. In eighteen thirty seven,

(02:35):
at the memorial service for anti slavery newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy,
who had been murdered by a pro slavery mob, Brown
made a public vow. He stood before the congregation and said, quote,
here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I
consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. This devotion

(02:56):
to ending slavery and his Calvinist upbringing would eventually combining
into a complete and utter certainty that he was predestined
to bring about slavery's end. It was a while before
he really put that belief into concrete action, though. He
and his family moved around a lot, and during his life,
Brown would live, among other places, in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kansas, Massachusetts,

(03:19):
and New York. He also moved from job to job,
doing everything from farming to land speculation to trading wool
to try to earn his money, and for the most part,
these efforts to make money were not particularly successful. In
in eighteen forty two, he even wound up in federal court.
As he went through a bankruptcy partially brought on by

(03:39):
the Panic of eighteen thirty seven. But as has been
the case with some of our other podcast subjects, including
Bronson Alcott and Harriet Tubman, he didn't let a lack
of money stop him from trying to put what he
did have towards causes that mattered to him. These efforts,
in many cases, were ambitious. For example, Brown wanted to
ex spanned the underground railroad into what he called the

(04:03):
Subterranean Passway, and this would be an enormous effort that
would take advantage of the remote and difficult terrain of
the Appalachian Mountains to extend the underground railroads activities beyond
the border states and into the deep South. Under this plan,
a small group of operatives would raid plantations, liberate the
people enslave there, and then guide them into the mountains

(04:25):
where they could be secreted north. He hoped to free
hundreds of thousands of slaves in this way, but the
Subterranean Passway wasn't just about freedom. As part of this plan,
some of these liberated people would become part of an
armed fighting force of free black people who would forcibly
end slavery in the South by raiding plantations and robbing

(04:46):
slave owners of their power and their workforce. Although a
lot of people remember the abolitionist movement in the United
States as being relatively non violent, Brown's focus on armed
resist stints was not unique. So running parallel to the
abolitionists who did things like right right essays and deliver
speeches and work for legal reforms and help enslave people

(05:10):
liberate themselves, there were also radical abolitionists who thought that
violence would be required to bring slavery to an end.
For example, John Brown was one of the people who
had helped fund David Walker's Appeal, which was published in
eighty nine. Walker was a free black man from the South,
and his work Appeal was a radical anti slavery document

(05:33):
that called for enslaved people to rise up against their owners.
He wrote quote, they want us for their slaves and
think nothing of murdering us. Therefore, if there is an
attempt made by us, kill or be killed, and believe
this that it is no more harm for you to
kill a man who is trying to kill you than
it is for you to take a drink of water

(05:53):
when thirsty. Brown was also connected to Henry Highland Garnett,
who had been enslaved from birth but for escaping with
his family at age nine. Garnett gave a speech at
the National Negro Convention in eighteen forty three that became
known as the Call to Rebellion. In this speech, he
said quote, you cannot be more oppressed than you have been.

(06:14):
You cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather
die freeman than live to be slaves. For Brown's part,
his belief that violence was required to bring an end
to slavery was tied directly to United States history. Rather
than putting pressure on Southern states to put a rapid
end to slavery, the Northern states and the federal government

(06:37):
had a history of compromises and appeasing slave states in
the interest of keeping the South in the Union. One
of these was the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty,
after which Brown helped found the League of Gileadites, which
was a radical organization dedicated to protecting escaped slaves from
slave catchers, again through violent means if necessary. Another act

(07:00):
that was meant to appease slave states led John Brown
to shift from violent rhetoric to actual violence, and this
is where some of the things we're talking about are
going to get a little bit gruesome. So just so
you know, we will get into that after a brief
sponsor break. In eighteen fifty four, Congress passed the Kansas

(07:30):
Nebraska Act. So for a little bit of context, if
you don't remember, under the Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty,
Congress had maintained a balance between slave states and free
states by admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri
as a slave state, and then also by drawing a
line at parallel thirty six degrees thirty minutes north uh

(07:50):
and that was basically a border for slavery. Slavery would
be outlawed when new states north of that line entered
the Union. However, the Kansas Nebraska Act up ended that
previous compromise, and it instead allowed new states to decide
whether to allow slavery when they joined the Union by
popular vote. Nebraska is north of Kansas, and most people

(08:14):
considered that territory pretty well decided on being a free
state when it entered the Union. Kansas, however, was not
nearly so certain, and as a result, people both in
favor of and against slavery flooded to Kansas to try
to sway the vote. One way or another. Kansas became
a literal battleground, and the result was a period of

(08:34):
violent conflict that came to be known as Bleeding Kansas.
John Brown was one of the people, specifically one of
the anti slavery people who went to Kansas to fight.
He actually followed in the wake of five of his
sons who had already moved there, and he arrived with
a wagon full of swords and rifles in eighteen fifty five.

(08:57):
In December of that year, he led a fighting or
says he and his neighbors went to defend the town
of Lawrence, which was a an anti slavery town, from
a pro slavery invasion. The following May, Brown's father died,
and at about the same time, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner
had been caned on the Senate floor. There's an episode

(09:19):
about that incident in the archives. Brown was simultaneously grief
stricken over his father and outraged over Charles Sumner, and
at about the same time pro slavery forces returned to
Lawrence and sacked it. And when he was urged to
act with caution and restraint, Brown said, quote caution, caution, Sir,
I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It

(09:41):
is nothing but the word of cowardice. On May eighteen
fifty six, Brown led a small party in dragging five
pro slavery men out of their cabins and hacking them
to death in retribution for the sacking of Lawrence. This
would come to be known as the Potawatamie Massacre. John
Brown's involvement in these murders had multiple consequences. Two of

(10:05):
his sons, who had not participated but were distraught at
what their father had done, had psychological breakdowns. Another son, Frederick,
who had participated, was killed in the aftermath, and a
lot of the rest of the abolitionist community was actually
horrified by what he had done. But Brown was steadfast
in that action he had taken, and the murders were

(10:28):
a tipping point in Kansas as pro slavery forces sought
retribution in Federal troops went from community to community on
a relentless search for Brown and his party. Brown, on
the other hand, evaded capture, which in his mind solidified
his idea that he could similarly evade capture in the
Appalachian Mountains as part of his subterranean passway strategy. He

(10:52):
just needed weapons and a few men, and he left
Kansas to find them. In January of eighteen fifty eight,
he started meeting with some of the most prominent black
abolitionist leaders, including Frederick Douglas and Harriet's have Been. With Douglas,
he drafted a constitution for a provisional government of the
community of Liberated Slaves that he was hoping to build,

(11:14):
of which he hoped that Frederick Douglas would be president.
He then went to Chatham, Ontario, which is home of
Mary Anne dad Carry, which is how that came up
previously to plan the raid that would launch this movement.
His target for the raid was Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Virginia
was a slave state and Harper's Ferry was in a

(11:35):
strategic position where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers meet. It
was also home to a federal arsenal that he planned
to use to arm his fighters, many of whom would
be liberated slaves, as well as an iron works, a
munitions factory, and other industries that would be useful for
a growing rebellion. The surrounding counties were home to about

(11:55):
eighteen thousand enslaved people, as well as sympathetic white residents
of the nearby Appalachian Mountains, all of whom he hoped
to bring into his cause. Yeah, a lot of the
people he was supposed or that he was hoping to
draw from in terms of white support, were from what
is now West Virginia, which was much more anti slavery

(12:16):
than the other rest of Virginia, and that is why
West Virginia seceded from Virginia during all of this. Having
planned this raid out while he was in Chatham, he
started connecting with other abolitionists in New York and Massachusetts
to try to get the money to carry out this plan.
He ultimately got financial backing from a group of wealthy

(12:39):
abolitionists who came to be known as the Secret Six.
These were George L. Steam's, Garrett Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Theodore Parker, Franklin Sandborn, and Samuel Gridley. How but then
things got derailed. A little mercenary Hugh Forbes threatened to
expose the plan, which caused Brown to return to Kansas

(13:01):
to try to avoid suspicion. He stayed for six months
and when he left, sort of as a proof of concept,
he liberated a Missouri slave named Jim Daniels and his family,
along with a handful of people enslaved on nearby plantations,
and he sheltered them in Kansas for a month before
a looting, capture and slave catchers to guide them to Canada.

(13:23):
With this success under his belt, Brown got back to
the task of raiding Harper's Ferry. He rented a house
across the border in Maryland as a base of operations.
He bought rifles and pikes and basically started outfitting the
slave army that he believed would come to join him
at Harper's Ferry as soon as they learned what he
was doing. He also enlisted Harriet's Taubman to travel through

(13:46):
the area's plantations and spread the word and enlist the
help of the enslaved people in the surrounding counties. The
actual raid began on October sixteenth of eighteen fifty nine,
and Brown was fifty nine years old at the time.
His force was smaller than originally planned. It was twenty
two people total, three of them left behind at the
rented house in Maryland to receive liberated slaves, so Brown

(14:10):
and nineteen men made their way into Harper's Ferry by night,
cut the telegraph lines and took control of the railroad
station and the musket factory and rifle works, which were
essentially unguarded. Then they abducted some of the area's most
notorious slave owners, and they took them to the engine
house of the train station as hostages. There was only

(14:31):
one fatality in that original takeover, and that was a
free black porter who had been working at the train station.
With the telegraph lines cut, the biggest source of news
out of Harper's Ferry overnight was a train that came
through at the station after Brown ticket over, which they
actually allowed to pass, even though it meant risking that

(14:51):
the people aboard would take word to the authorities of
what was happening, which they did. Soon rumors started to
spread that John Brown had again Harper's Ferry, first with
fifty people, and then with a hundred, and then with
two hundred, and by morning it was clear to people
living there that Brown had indeed taken over several strategic points,

(15:11):
and the town started to muster a resistance. At first,
this resistance was mostly in the form of militia and
local farmers and slave owners. But at the same time,
the vast wave of support Brown had expected just did
not materialize. There were several reasons for this. One was
that so much time had passed between the meeting in Chatham,

(15:32):
Ontario and the raid that a lot of the black
population that had been interested in helping had lost interest
or they had just lost touch with Brown and his allies.
Another was that Harriet Tubman couldn't be found when Brown
decided to go ahead with the raid. The historical record
is not entirely clear on why they couldn't locate her,
but she may have been ill. Yeah, she had already

(15:54):
done some preliminary searching slash work through the the plantations
of the area to spread the word of what was coming.
But they had expected her to be on hand to
rally support further when the raid actually happened, and they
just couldn't find her. Even though there is evidence that
a few enslaved people from nearby did join the raid,

(16:16):
it was definitely not the ground swell of massive support
that Brown had been expecting. So soon he and his
raiders were surrounded and pinned in at both the train
station and the musket Factory and rifle works. Two attempts
to send somebody to call for a ceasefire under a
white flag both failed. The second person sent was actually

(16:37):
Brown's son, Watson, who was shot and killed. Some of
Brown's men tried to flee their positions via the Shnandoah
and Potomac rivers, leading to their being shot, some of
them while still in the water. And meanwhile, Brown and
the men he was holed up within the engine house
of the train station drilled holes in the door that
they could shoot through, hoping to hit their attackers, and

(16:59):
they were mostly unsuccessful, although one shot did hit Harper's
ferry Mayor Fontaine Beckham. With Beckham's death, any support that
Brown's raid might have had among Harper's ferries residents just evaporated.
A mob stormed the hotel where William Thompson, which was
the first man that had been sent out for a ceasefire,

(17:20):
was being held. They shot him in the head and
threw him into the Potomac. Eventually, President James Buchanan dispatched
marines under the command of Robert E. Lee to restore order.
At that point, Harper's ferry streets were mobbed with both
trained fighters and angry rabble trying to get it. Brown's
men in the engine house, all but four of whom

(17:41):
were by that point injured or dead. After arriving around midnight,
Lee sent J. E. B. Stewart, who would go on
to become Lee's own cavalry commander on the Southern side
in the Civil War, to the engine house under a
white flag to negotiate. Stewart promised Brown protection from the
mob and a fair trial if he would let the

(18:01):
hostages go. Brown refused. He wanted himself and his surviving
men to be allowed to go back to Maryland with
the hostages as basically as a strategic point, and then
they would free the hostages once they were safely back
in Maryland. With negotiations at an impass, Lee sent men

(18:21):
to batter down the door. The morning of the eighteen,
Marines swarmed the engine house, killing some of Brown's few
remaining men and taking others prisoner. Brown was hit with
a sword and only survived because the sword happened to
hit a buckle that he was wearing. In the end
of the original crew of nineteen men, ten had been

(18:41):
killed or mortally wounded, two of them being Brown's sons
and five had been taken prisoner. There were also six
civilian deaths, the mayor, to townspeople, to enslaved people that
belonged to the hostages, and the porter that had been
killed at the train station. Here's how the official reply
weren't described. It quote, A fanatical man, stimulated to recklessness

(19:04):
and desperation by the constant teachings and intemperate appeals of
wild and treasonable enthusiasts, unrestrained by the Constitution and the
laws of the land, by the precepts of religion, by
appeals of humanity or of mercy, formed a conspiracy to
make a sudden descent upon the people of Harper's Ferry,

(19:25):
to rob the arsenal, plunder public property, and stir up
servile insurrection. With that brief recap from the official report,
we will take a brief word from a sponsor before
we talk about the raids aftermath. After their capture, Brown

(19:56):
and his surviving men were put on trial. The charges
were murder, treason, and conspiring with negroes to produce insurrection.
That trial began on October, just ten days after the raid.
All of the men were found guilty and the penalty
for all of the charges was death. John Brown was
hanged on December two of eighteen fifty nine, and before

(20:18):
his hanging he handed a guard a note that read, quote,
I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes
of this guilty land will never be purged away, but
with blood. Among those present were Roberty Lee Stonewall Jackson,
and John Wilkes Booth measured by whether it launched an
armed slave resistance that freed thousands of slaves and forcibly

(20:42):
rested control of the South from slave owners, as had
been the original plan. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferria
was a complete failure. Measured by whether it launched an
armed slave resistance that freed thousands of slaves and forcibly
rested control of the South from slave owners, as had
been the original plan. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry
was a complete failure, but measured by its ultimate effect

(21:05):
on the progression of slavery in the United States, it's
a completely different story. The same way that those murders
of five pro slavery settlers in Kansas that we talked
about earlier had sparked a tide of violence there. The
raid at Harper's Ferry inflamed passions, tensions, and violence around
slavery and the relationships between slave and free states in

(21:28):
many circles. In the North, John Brown became a martyr,
especially as he was eloquent and steadfast in his denunciations
of slavery while on trial, and people doubled down on
their efforts to abolish the institution. But in the South,
people were terrified. The idea of a slave insurrection was
already a source of fear in a lot of the South,

(21:50):
and in some places, white slave owners and the rest
of the white population were vastly outnumbered by enslaved people,
so the idea that these people might unite and violently
overthrow their owners was petrifying. The South tried to downplay
Brown's raid as unimportant in an effort to dismiss it,
while simultaneously being completely horrified at what it could spell

(22:12):
for the future. On a more practical level, many parts
of the South renewed their call from militia membership and
military drills of those militia, so that when the Civil
War did begin, those militias that had been created under
the idea of fighting up potential John Brown inspired rebellion
if it was necessary, were already there and trained and

(22:33):
ready to go to war. It was also one of
many events that happened in the late eighteen fifties that
stoked political passions over the issue of slavery. The Democrats
split over the issue of slavery in the eighteen sixty election,
with pro and anti slavery factions each putting forth candidates
for presidency and neither securing a necessary two thirds majority

(22:55):
at the party convention. After a series of efforts to
unite the party, the Democratic Party nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas,
while the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, and both
Douglas and Breckinridge presented themselves as the official party candidates. Meanwhile,
an entire other party, the Constitutional Union Party, nominated former

(23:17):
Senator John Bell of Tennessee, to be their candidate for president,
and in the end it was Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee,
who won this four way election with only a hundred
and eighty electoral votes and just shy of the popular vote.
As a consequence of Lincoln's election, eleven Southern states seceded
from the Union, which directly led to the Civil War.

(23:41):
Fifty years after the raid, Frederick Douglas would say that
John Brown quote began the war that ended American slavery
and made this a free republic. There are a lot
of historians who basically think without this lightning point of
Harper's ferry, there would not have been that four way
uh split in the election that ultimately led Lincoln to

(24:02):
be elected, not with a whole majority of the popular vote.
And for decades, even a century after the raid, historical
accounts painted Brown as mentally unstable, with descriptions being full
of words like delusional and madman. But really Brown was
methodical and well researched in this whole idea. He had

(24:23):
studied other uprisings, including net Turner's rebellion in the Haitian Revolution,
and he had also studied guerilla resistance to military forces
in both Europe and the United States, including in the
colonial era. Today, some historical depictions of him have shifted
a little bit to be uh more, including of language

(24:44):
like fiercely devoted rather than unhinged and insane, even when
he was alive at first, as news of the raid
was spreading, even in the North where it's sort of
reinvigorated abolition as a cause. Um. At first, there were
people who were like that Ban is not in his

(25:07):
right mind. Mind and sentiment shifted about him as he
continually made these like steadfast and very eloquent denunciations of
slavery during his trial. UM. So the idea that everybody
thought that he was like mentally unwell even at the time,

(25:28):
was not totally accurate. Um. Harriet Tubman in particular described
him as being the only white person that she ever
met who actually thought that slavery was a life or
death issue that really needed to be treated that way.
Um And even like even in the more recent past,

(25:49):
you see divisions and how people talk about John Brown
and like whether his ideas were good and whether he
uh was was making sense and a methoughtical way, or
whether he was sort of flying off in this delusional fervor. UM.
Like the Malcolm X talked about if you if you

(26:10):
meet a white person who says that they are in
favor of black power, find out what they think about
John Brown. And I think that's one of the things
that sort of led to the in the Politically Reactive
podcast that we talked about early earlier in the top
of the show, um was that they were talking about
John Brown, white people and this idea of people who
are that fervently devoted and that ready to put their

(26:31):
own lives on the line no matter what to end slavery.
So he's a complicated person. Yeah, I feel like we
I feel like we barely scratched the surface of his
complicated nous. Uh and what people thought about him then
and now. Thank you so much for joining us today

(26:52):
for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind
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(27:15):
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