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On Oct. 16, 1859, John Brown and 21 armed followers stole into the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept.

The men among them, three free Blacks, one freed enslaved person and one fugitive enslaved person–hoped to spark a rebellion of freed enslaved persons and to lead an “army of emancipation� to overturn the institution of slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Colonel Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town’s United States arsenal and its rifle works.

By the evening of Oct. 17, conspirators were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on Oct. 18 to storm the building.

Brown and most of his men were veteran foes of slavery. In 1849, he and his family had settled in a black community at North Elba in New York State. Brown had become increasingly militant during the 1850s in his quest to eradicate slavery.

In 1855, he had migrated to Kansas Territory to become the leader of a band of anti-slavery guerrillas. He led a nighttime raid in retaliation for the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, by pro-slavery forces and helped to liberate the enslaved and transport them safely to Canada.

In 1858, Brown drafted a constitution for a provisional United States government of which he was elected president. He intended to establish an effective means of freeing the enslaved people of Maryland and Virginia. Most of his raiders held commissions in the government’s army. Apparently, only the black conspirators held no commissions. Even the ill-conceived plan for the raid had been germinating in Brown’s thoughts for some time; he had moved to nearby Kennedy Farm in July to prepare for the raid.

Brown claimed he, “knew the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they would never consent to give up their slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads,� and that a slave-holding community was, by its nature, in a state of war, thus drastic actions were necessary and justified. 

In his account of the raid for Century magazine, Alexander Boteler wrote, “The usages of ordinary warfare had been more than once disregarded, during the day, by the belligerents on both sides.�

Harper’s Ferry mayor Fountain Beckham was clearly unarmed and his hands were in his pockets when he was shot by the insurgents; raider Dangerfield Newby’s ears were cut off as trophies; and Jeramiah Anderson was tortured and beaten as he lay dying. Some considered the Harper’s Ferry raid to have been the first skirmish of the Civil War.

The raid inflamed emotions of parties on both sides of the conflict while Northern and Southern press fanned the flames that had been smoldering hotter and hotter with the publication of �,� the , and. Fear and anger totally eclipsed any other motivations that had been factors in the battle over slavery.

Fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized in Brown an unparalleled devotion: “I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.� Brown had lost two sons in the raid. Another son already had sacrificed his life for the anti-slavery cause in the Osawatomie raid.

Brown was tried and convicted of murder, slave insurrection and treason against the state and sentenced to death by hanging. 

While awaiting his fate in Harper’s Ferry jail, he received a sympathetic letter from Massachusetts� writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “I think of you night and day,� she wrote, “bleeding in prison, surrounded by hostile faces, sustained only by trust in God and your own heart. I long to nurse you–to speak to you sisterly words of sympathy and consolation.�

Brown declined her offer, asking instead that she contribute to the financial support of his surviving family that included two daughters-in-law whose husbands had been killed in the raid.

“Would you not,� he wrote, “as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?�