This a a request from the history hotline. John Brown was a militant American Abolitionist whose raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va., in 1859 made him a martyr to the anti-slavery cause and was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities that led to the American Civil War (1861 – 65).
Links:
- PBS Resource Bank John Brown
- PBS: American Experience Mini-Site
- Wikipedia Article
- Lots of information
- John Brown and the Kennedy Farmhouse
John Brown was a militant American Abolitionist whose raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va., in 1859 made him a martyr to the anti-slavery cause and was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities that led to the American Civil War (1861 – 65).
Moving about restlessly through Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, Brown was barley able to support his large family in any of several vocations at which he tried his hand; tanner, sheep drover, wool merchant, farmer, and land speculator.
Though he was white, in 1849 Brown settled with his family in a black community founded at North Elba, N.Y., on land donated by the New York antislavery benefactor Gerrit Smith. Lon foe of slavery, Brown became obsessed with the idea of taking overt action to help win Justice for enslaved black people. In 1855 he followed five of his sons to the Kansas Territory to assists antislavery forces struggling for control there. With a wagon laden with guns and ammunition, Brown settled in Osawatomie and soon became the leader of antislavery guerrillas in the area.
Brooding over the sack of the town of Lawrence by a mob of slavery sympathizers (May 21, 1856), he concluded that he had a divine mission to take vengeance. Three days later he led a nighttime retaliatory raid on a pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, in which five men were dragged out of their cabins and hacked to death. After this raid, the name of “Old Osawatomie Brown” conjured up a fearful image among local slavery apologists.
In the spring of 1858, Brown convened a meeting of blacks and whites in Chatham, Ont., at which he announced his intention of establishing in the Maryland and Virgina mountains a stronghold for escaping slaves. He proposed, and the convention adopted, a provisional Constitution for the people of the United States. He was elected commander and chief of this paper government while gaining the moral and financial support of Gerrit Smith and several prominent Boston Abolitionists.
In the summer of 1859, with an armed band of 16 whites and 5 blacks, Brown set up a headquarters in a rented farmhouse in Maryland, across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry, the site of a federal armory. On the night of October 16, he quickly took the armory and rounded up some 60 leading men of the area as hostages. Brown took this desperate action in the hope that escaped slaves would join his rebellion, forming an “army of emancipation” with which to liberate their fellow slaves. Throughout the next day and night he and his men held out against the local militia, but on the following morning he surrendered to a small force of U.S. Marines who had broken in and overpowered him. Brown himself was wounded, and 10 of his followers (including two sons) were killed. He was tried of murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and was convicted and hanged.
Although Brown failed to start a general escape movement among slaves, the high moral tone of his defense helped to immortalize him and to hasten the war that would bring emancipation.
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