John Brown Abolitionist

John Brown

(May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859)

Abolisitonist Martyr

Raid on Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas

John Brown was an American abolitionist leader. First reaching national prominence for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, he was eventually captured and executed for a failed incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry preceding the American Civil War.

An evangelical Christian of strong religious convictions, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan faith of his upbringing. He believed that he was “an instrument of God”, raised up to strike the “death blow” to American slavery, a “sacred obligation”.Brown was the leading exponent of violence in the American abolitionist movement,  believing it was necessary to end American slavery after decades of peaceful efforts had failed. Brown said repeatedly that in working to free the enslaved, he was following Christian ethics, including the Golden Rule, as well as the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men are created equal”. He stated repeatedly that in his view, these two principles “meant the same thing”.

Brown first gained national attention when he led anti-slavery volunteers and his own sons during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the late 1850s, a state-level civil war over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. He was dissatisfied with abolitionist pacifism, saying of pacifists, “These men are all talk. What we need is action – action!”. In May 1856, Brown and his sons killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre, a response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. Brown then commanded anti-slavery forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie.

In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia), intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread south; he had prepared a Provisional Constitution for the revised, slavery-free United States that he hoped to bring about. He seized the armory, but seven people were killed and ten or more were injured. Brown intended to arm slaves with weapons from the armory, but only a few slaves joined his revolt. Those of Brown’s men who had not fled were killed or captured by local militia and U.S. Marines, the latter led by Robert E. Lee. Brown was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men, and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty of all charges and was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States.

The Harpers Ferry raid and Brown’s trial, both covered extensively in national newspapers, escalated tensions that led, a year later, to the South’s long-threatened secession and the American Civil War. Southerners feared that others would soon follow in Brown’s footsteps, encouraging and arming slave rebellions. He was a hero and icon in the North. Union soldiers marched to the new song “John Brown’s Body”, that portrayed him as a heroic martyr. Brown has been variously described as a heroic martyr and visionary, and as a madman and terrorist.

Life events

John Brown was born May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. The fourth of the eight children of Owen Brown (1771–1856) and Ruth Mills (1772–1808), he described his parents as “poor but respectable”. Owen Brown’s father was Capt. John Brown (1728–1776), who died in the Revolutionary War in New York on September 3, 1776; John Brown moved his grandfather’s tombstone to his farm in North Elba, New York. In 1857, Brown stated that he descended from Peter Browne, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed from the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. There are some historians that believe that his ancestor was Peter Brown, who arrived in Connecticut in 1650.

His mother, of Dutch and Welsh descent   was the daughter of Gideon Mills, also an officer in the Revolutionary Army.His older sister Anna Ruth was born in 1798, and his younger brothers Salmon and Oliver Owen were born in 1802 and 1804, respectively. Oliver Owen was also an abolitionist. Brown also had a brother named Frederick, who visited him when he was in jail, awaiting execution.

While Brown was very young, his father moved the family briefly to his hometown, West Simsbury, Connecticut. In 1805, the family moved, again, to Hudson, Ohio, in the Western Reserve, which at the time was mostly wilderness;  it became the most anti-slavery region of the country.The founder of Hudson, David Hudson, with whom John’s father had frequent contact, was an abolitionist and an advocate of “forcible resistance by the slaves”. Owen Brown became a leading and wealthy citizen of Hudson. He operated a tannery and employed Jesse Grant, father of President Ulysses S. Grant. Jesse lived with the Brown family for some years. Owen hated slavery and participated in Hudson’s anti-slavery activity and debate, offering a safe house to Underground Railroad fugitives. With no school beyond the elementary level in Hudson at that time, John studied at the school of the abolitionist Elizur Wright, father of the famous Elizur Wright, in nearby Tallmadge. John’s mother Ruth died in 1808. In his memoir, he wrote that he mourned her for years. While he respected his father’s new wife, he never felt an emotional bond with her.

In a story he told to his family, when he was 12 years old and away from home moving cattle, he worked for a man with a colored boy, who was beaten before him with an iron shovel. Brown asked him why he was treated thus, the answer was that he was a slave. According to Brown’s son-in-law Henry Thompson, it was that moment when John Brown decided to dedicate his life to improving African Americans’ condition.

Raid at Harpers Ferry

Brown’s plans

Brown’s plans for a major attack on American slavery began long before the raid. According to his wife Mary, interviewed while her husband was awaiting his execution in Charles Town, “He had been waiting twenty years for some opportunity to free the slaves; we has all been waiting with him the proper time that he should put his resolve into action.” He spent the years between 1842 and 1849 winding up his business affairs, settling his family in the Negro community at Timbuctoo, New York, and organizing in his own mind an anti-slavery raid that would strike a significant blow against the entire slave system, running slaves off Southern plantations.

As put by Frederick Douglass, “His own statement, that he had been contemplating a bold strike for the freedom of the slaves for ten years, proves that he had resolved upon his present course long before he, or his sons, ever set foot in Kansas.” According to his first biographer James Redpath, “for thirty years, he secretly cherished the idea of being the leader of a servile insurrection: the American Moses, predestined by Omnipotence to lead the servile nations in our Southern States to freedom.” An acquaintance said: “As Moses was raised up and chosen of God to deliver the Children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage, …he was…fully convinced in his own mind that he was to be the instrument in the hands of God to effect the emancipation of the slaves.”

Brown was careful about whom he talked to. “Captain Brown was careful to keep his plans from his men”, according to Jeremiah Anderson, one of the participants in the raid  According to his son Owen, the only one who survived of Brown’s three participating sons, interviewed in 1873, “John Brown’s entire plan has never, I think, been published.”

He did discuss his plans at length, for over a day, with Frederick Douglass, trying unsuccessfully to persuade Douglass, a Black leader, to accompany him to Harpers Ferry (which Douglass thought a suicidal mission that could not succeed)

Brown thought that “A few men in the right, and knowing that they are right, can overturn a mighty king. Fifty men, twenty men, in the Alleghenies would break slavery to pieces in two years”.As he put it later, after the failure of his raid, “I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed through the revolt supposed to start with Harpers Ferry that ending slavery might be done.”

Brown returned to the East by November 1856, and spent the next two years in New England raising funds. Initially he returned to Springfield, where he received contributions, and also a letter of recommendation from a prominent and wealthy merchant, George Walker. Walker was the brother-in-law of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the secretary for the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, who introduced Brown to several influential abolitionists in the Boston area in January 1857.

Amos Adams Lawrence, a prominent Boston merchant, secretly gave Brown a large amount of cash. William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker and George Luther Stearns, and Samuel Gridley Howe also supported Brown. A group of six abolitionists – Sanborn, Higginson, Parker, Stearns, Howe, and Gerrit Smith – , two of them wealthy, agreed to offer Brown financial support for his antislavery activities; they eventually provided most of the financial backing for the raid on Harpers Ferry, and came to be known as the Secret Six[ or the Committee of Six. Recent research has also highlighted the substantial contribution of Mary Ellen Pleasant, an African American entrepreneur and abolitionist, who donated $30,000 toward the cause.Brown, however, often requested help from these donors with “no questions asked”, and it remains unclear how much of Brown’s scheme was related to his financial backers.[citation needed]

In December 1857, an anti-slavery Mock Legislature, organized by Brown, met in Springdale, Iowa. On several of Brown’s trips across Iowa he preached at Hitchcock House, an Underground Railroad stop in Lewis, Iowa.

On January 7, 1858, the Massachusetts Committee pledged to provide 200 Sharps Rifles and ammunition, which were being stored at Tabor, Iowa. In March, Brown contracted with Charles Blair, through an intermediary friend, Horatio N. Rust of Collinsville, Connecticut (1828–1906), for 1,000 pikes.

In the following months, Brown continued to raise funds, visiting Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, Syracuse, and Boston. In Boston, he met Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He received many pledges but little cash. In March, while in New York City, he was introduced to Hugh Forbes, an English mercenary, who had experience as a military tactician fighting with Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy in 1848. Brown hired him as his men’s drillmaster and to write their tactical handbook. They agreed to meet in Tabor that summer. Using the alias Nelson Hawkins, Brown traveled through the Northeast and then visited his family in Hudson, Ohio. On August 7, he arrived in Tabor. Forbes arrived two days later. Over several weeks, the two men put together a “Well-Matured Plan” for fighting slavery in the South. The men quarreled over many of the details. In November, their troops left for Kansas. Forbes had not received his salary and was still feuding with Brown, so he returned to the East instead of venturing into Kansas. He soon threatened to expose the plot to the government. This was when Brown started to wear a beard, “to change his usual appearance

With a free-state victory in the October elections, Kansas was quiet. Brown made his men return to Iowa, where he told them tidbits of his Virginia scheme. In January 1858, Brown left his men in Springdale, Iowa, and set off to visit Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. There he discussed his plans with Douglass, and reconsidered Forbes’ criticisms.Brown wrote a Provisional Constitution that would create a government for a new state in the region of his invasion. He then traveled to Peterboro, New York, and Boston to discuss matters with the Secret Six. In letters to them, he indicated that, along with recruits, he would go into the South equipped with weapons to do “Kansas work”.While in Boston making secret preparations for his operation on Harper’s Ferry, he was raising money for weapons that were manufactured in Connecticut. Abolitionist Chaplain Photius Fisk gave him a sizable donation and obtained his autograph which he later gave to the Kansas Historical Society

Brown and 12 of his followers, including his son Owen, traveled to Chatham, Ontario, where he convened on May 10 a Constitutional Convention The convention, with several dozen delegates including his friend James Madison Bell, was put together with the help of Dr. Martin Delany.One-third of Chatham’s 6,000 residents were fugitive slaves, and it was here that Brown was introduced to Harriet Tubman, who helped him recruit. The convention’s 34 blacks and 12 whites adopted Brown’s Provisional Constitution. Brown had long used the terminology of the Subterranean Pass Way from the late 1840s, so it is possible that Delany conflated Brown’s statements over the years. Regardless, Brown was elected commander-in-chief and named John Henrie Kagi his “Secretary of War”. Richard Realf was named “Secretary of State”. Elder Monroe, a black minister, was to act as president until another was chosen. A. M. Chapman was the acting vice president; Delany, the corresponding secretary. In 1859, “A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America” was written.

Although nearly all of the delegates signed the constitution, few volunteered to join Brown’s forces, although it will never be clear how many Canadian expatriates actually intended to join Brown because of a subsequent “security leak” that threw off plans for the raid, creating a hiatus in which Brown lost contact with many of the Canadian leaders. This crisis occurred when Hugh Forbes, Brown’s mercenary, tried to expose the plans to Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson and others. The Secret Six feared their names would be made public. Howe and Higginson wanted no delays in Brown’s progress, while Parker, Stearns, Smith and Sanborn insisted on postponement. Stearns and Smith were the major sources of funds, and their words carried more weight. To throw Forbes off the trail and invalidate his assertions, Brown returned to Kansas in June, and remained in that vicinity for six months. There he joined forces with James Montgomery, who was leading raids into Missouri.

On December 20, Brown led his own raid, in which he liberated 11 slaves, took captive two white men, and looted horses and wagons. The Governor of Missouri announced a reward of $3,000 (equivalent to $97,711 in 2022) for his capture. On January 20, 1859, he embarked on a lengthy journey to take the liberated slaves to Detroit and then on a ferry to Canada. While passing through Chicago, Brown met with abolitionists Allan Pinkerton, John Jones, and Henry O. Wagoner who arranged and raised the fare for the passage to Detroit and purchased supplies for Brown. Jones’s wife and fellow abolitionist, Mary Jane Richardson Jones, provided new clothes for Brown and his men, including the garb Brown was hanged in six months later. On March 12, 1859, Brown met with Frederick Douglass and Detroit abolitionists George DeBaptiste, William Lambert, and others at William Webb’s house in Detroit to discuss emancipation. DeBaptiste proposed that conspirators blow up some of the South’s largest churches. The suggestion was opposed by Brown, who felt humanity precluded such unnecessary bloodshed.

Over the course of the next few months, he traveled again through Ohio, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts to drum up more support for the cause. On May 9, he delivered a lecture in Concord, Massachusetts, that Amos Bronson Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau attended. Brown reconnoitered with the Secret Six. In June he paid his last visit to his family in North Elba before departing for Harpers Ferry. He stayed one night en route in Hagerstown, Maryland, at the Washington House, on West Washington Street. On June 30, 1859, the hotel had at least 25 guests, including I. Smith and Sons, Oliver Smith and Owen Smith, and Jeremiah Anderson, all from New York. From papers found in the Kennedy Farmhouse after the raid, it is known that Brown wrote to Kagi that he would sign into a hotel as I. Smith and Sons.

As he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by Harriet Tubman, “General Tubman”, as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Some abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, opposed his tactics, but Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves and made preparations for military action. After he began the first battle, he believed, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the South.

Brown asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.[126] He arrived in Harpers Ferry on July 3, 1859. A few days later, under the name Isaac Smith, he rented a farmhouse in nearby Maryland. He awaited the arrival of his recruits. They never materialized in the numbers he expected. In late August he met with Douglass in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where he revealed the Harpers Ferry plan. Douglass expressed severe reservations, rebuffing Brown’s pleas to join the mission. Douglass had known of Brown’s plans since early 1859 and had made a number of efforts to discourage blacks from enlisting.

In late September, the 950 pikes arrived from Charles Blair. Kagi’s draft plan called for a brigade of 4,500 men, but Brown had only 21 men (16 white and 5 black: three free blacks, one freed slave, and a fugitive slave). They ranged in age from 21 to 49. Twelve had been with Brown in Kansas raids. On October 16, 1859, Brown (leaving three men behind as a rear guard) led 18 men in an attack on the Harpers Ferry Armory. He had received 200 Beecher’s Bibles – breechloading .52 (13.2 mm) caliber Sharps rifles – and pikes from northern abolitionist societies in preparation for the raid. The armory was a large complex of buildings that contained 100,000 muskets and rifles, which Brown planned to seize and use to arm local slaves. They would then head south, drawing off more and more slaves from plantations, and fighting only in self-defense. As Douglass and Brown’s family testified, his strategy was essentially to deplete Virginia of its slaves, causing the institution to collapse in one county after another, until the movement spread into the South, wreaking havoc on the economic viability of the pro-slavery states.

THE RAID

Initially, the raid went well, and they met no resistance entering the town. John Brown’s raiders cut the telegraph wires and easily captured the armory, which was being defended by a single watchman. They next rounded up hostages from nearby farms, including Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington. They also spread the news to the local slaves that their liberation was at hand. Two of the hostages’ slaves also died in the raid.

Things started to go wrong when an eastbound Baltimore & Ohio train approached the town. After holding the train, Brown inexplicably allowed it to continue on its way. At the next station where the telegraph still worked, the conductor sent a telegram to B&O headquarters in Baltimore. The railroad sent telegrams to President Buchanan and Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise.

News of the raid reached Baltimore early that morning and Washington by late morning. In the meantime, local farmers, shopkeepers, and militia pinned down the raiders in the armory by firing from the heights behind the town. Some of the local men were shot by Brown’s men. At noon, a company of militia seized the bridge, blocking the only escape route. Brown then moved his prisoners and remaining raiders into the fire engine house, a small brick building at the armory’s entrance. He had the doors and windows barred and loopholes cut through the brick walls. The surrounding forces barraged the engine house, and the men inside fired back with occasional fury. Brown sent his son Watson and another supporter out under a white flag, but the angry crowd shot them. An intermittent shooting then broke out, and Brown’s son Oliver was wounded. His son begged his father to kill him and end his suffering, but Brown said “If you must die, die like a man.” A few minutes later, Oliver was dead. The exchanges lasted throughout the day.

By the morning of October 18 the engine house, later known as John Brown’s Fort, was surrounded by a company of U.S. Marines under the command of First Lieutenant Israel Greene, USMC, with Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army in overall command. Army First Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart approached under a white flag and told the raiders their lives would be spared if they surrendered. Brown refused, saying, “No, I prefer to die here.” Stuart then gave a signal. The Marines used sledgehammers and a makeshift battering ram to break down the engine room door. Lieutenant Israel Greene cornered Brown and struck him several times, wounding his head. In three minutes Brown and the survivors were captives.

Altogether, Brown’s men killed four people and wounded nine. Ten of Brown’s men were killed, including his sons Watson and Oliver. Five escaped, including his son Owen, and seven were captured along with Brown; they were quickly tried and hanged two weeks after John. Among the raiders killed were John Henry Kagi, Lewis Sheridan Leary, and Dangerfield Newby; those hanged besides Brown included John Copeland, Edwin Coppock, Aaron Stevens, and Shields Green.

TRIAL

Brown and the others captured were held in the office of the armory. On October 18, 1859, Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, Virginia Senator James M. Mason, and Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio arrived in Harpers Ferry. Mason led the three-hour questioning session of Brown.

Although the attack had taken place on federal property, Wise wanted him tried in Virginia, and President Buchanan did not object. Murder was not a federal crime, nor was inciting a slave insurrection, and federal action would bring abolitionist protests. Brown and his men were tried in Charles Town, the nearby seat of Jefferson County, just 7 miles (11 km) west of Harpers Ferry. The trial began October 27, after a doctor pronounced the still-wounded Brown fit for trial. Brown was charged with murdering four white men and a black man, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. A series of lawyers were assigned to him, including Lawson Botts, Thomas C. Green, Samuel Chilton, a lawyer from Washington D.C., and George Hoyt, but it was Hiram Griswold, a lawyer from Cleveland, who concluded the defense on October 31. In his closing statement, Griswold argued that Brown could not be found guilty of treason against a state to which he owed no loyalty and of which he was not a resident, that Brown had not killed anyone himself, and that the raid’s failure indicated that Brown had not conspired with slaves. Andrew Hunter, the leading attorney in Charles Town and Governor Wise’s personal lawyer, presented the closing arguments for the prosecution.

On November 2, after a week-long trial and 45 minutes of deliberation, the Charles Town jury found Brown guilty on all three counts. He was sentenced to be hanged in public on December 2.

The trial attracted reporters who were able to send their articles via the new telegraph. They were reprinted in numerous papers. It was the first trial in the U.S. to be nationally reported.

November 2 to December 2, 1859

Under Virginia law, a month had to elapse before the death sentence could be carried out. Governor Wise resisted pressures to move up the execution date because, he said, he wanted everyone to see that Brown’s rights had been thoroughly respected.

Brown made it clear repeatedly in his letters and conversations that these were the happiest days of his life. He would be publicly murdered, as he put it, but he was an old man and, he said, near death anyway. Brown was politically shrewd and realized his execution would strike a massive blow against Slave Power, a greater blow than he had made so far or had prospects of making otherwise. His death now had a purpose. In the meantime, the death sentence allowed him to publicize his anti-slavery views through the reporters constantly present in Charles Town, and through his voluminous correspondence.

Before his conviction, reporters were not allowed access to Brown, as the judge and Andrew Hunter feared that his statements, if quickly published, would exacerbate tensions, especially among the enslaved. This was much to Brown’s frustration, as he stated that he wanted to make a full statement of his motives and intentions through the press.  Once he had been convicted, the restriction was lifted, and, glad for the publicity, he talked with reporters and anyone else who wanted to see him, except pro-slavery clergy.

Brown received more letters than he ever had in his life. He wrote replies constantly, hundreds of eloquent letters, often published in newspapers,and expressed regret that he could not answer every one of the hundreds more he received. His words exuded spirituality and conviction. Letters picked up by the Northern press won him more supporters in the North while infuriating many white people in the South.

Rescue plans

There were well-documented and specific plans to rescue Brown, as Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise wrote to President Buchanan. Throughout the weeks Brown and six of his collaborators were in the Jefferson County Jail in Charles Town, the town was filled with various types of troops and militia, hundreds and sometimes thousands of them. Brown’s trips from the jail to the courthouse and back, and especially the short trip from the jail to the gallows, were heavily guarded. Wise halted all non-military transportation on the Winchester and Potomac Railroad (from Maryland south through Harpers Ferry to Charles Town and Winchester), from the day before through the day after the execution. Jefferson County was under martial law, and the military orders in Charles Town for the execution day had 14 points.

However, Brown said several times that he did not want to be rescued. He refused the assistance of Silas Soule, a friend from Kansas who infiltrated the Jefferson County Jail one day by getting himself arrested for drunken brawling and offered to break him out during the night and flee northward to New York State and possibly Canada. Brown told Silas that, aged 59, he was too old to live a life on the run from the federal authorities as a fugitive and wanted to accept his execution as a martyr for the abolitionist cause. As Brown wrote his wife and children from jail, he believed that his “blood will do vastly more towards advancing the cause I have earnestly endeavored to promote, than all I have done in my life before.””I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.”

On December 1, Brown’s wife arrived by train in Charles Town, where she joined him at the county jail for his last meal. She was denied permission to stay the night, prompting Brown to lose his composure and temper for the only time during the ordeal.[citation needed] Brown made his will.

On the day of Brown’s execution, December 2, there were large meetings in many cities in the Northeast. In many of the cases, “Negroes were the chief actors in creating excitement”

Victor Hugo’s reaction

Victor Hugo, from exile on Guernsey, tried to obtain a pardon for John Brown: he sent an open letter that was published by the press on both sides of the Atlantic. This text, written at Hauteville House on December 2, 1859, warned of a possible civil war:

Politically speaking, the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin. It would create in the Union a latent fissure that would in the long run dislocate it. Brown’s agony might perhaps consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it would certainly shake the whole American democracy. You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness, on that day where one would see the assassination of Emancipation by Liberty itself.

The letter was initially published in the London News and was widely reprinted. After Brown’s execution, Hugo wrote a number of additional letters about Brown and the abolitionist cause.

Abolitionists in the United States saw Hugo’s writings as evidence of international support for the anti-slavery cause. The most widely publicized commentary on Brown to reach America from Europe was an 1861 pamphlet, John Brown par Victor Hugo, that included a brief biography and reprinted two letters by Hugo, including that of December 9, 1859. The pamphlet’s frontispiece was an engraving of a hanged man by Hugo that became widely associated with the execution.

John Brown’s last words

Brown was well read and knew that the last words of prominent people are valued. On the morning of December 2, 1859, Brown wrote and gave to his jailor Avis the words he wanted to be remembered by:

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done

Brown read his Bible and wrote a final letter to his wife, which included his will. At 11:00 a.m. he rode, sitting on his coffin in a furniture wagon, from the county jail through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers to a small field a few blocks away, where the gallows were. Among the soldiers in the crowd were future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth (the latter borrowing a militia uniform to gain admission to the execution). The poet Walt Whitman, in Year of Meteors, described viewing the execution.

Brown was accompanied by the sheriff and his assistants, but not by a minister since no abolitionist minister was available. Since the region was in the grips of virtual hysteria, most Northerners, including journalists, were run out of town, and it is unlikely any anti-slavery clergyman would have been safe, even if one were to have sought to visit Brown. He elected to receive no religious services in the jail or at the scaffold. He was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and pronounced dead at 11:50 a.m.

Funeral and burial

Brown’s desire, as told to the jailor in Charles Town, was that his body be burned, “the ashes burned”, and his dead sons disinterred and treated likewise. He wanted his epitaph to be:

I have fought a good fight.

I have finished my course.

I have kept the faith. [2 Timothy 4:7

However, according to the sheriff of Jefferson County, Virginia law did not allow the burning of bodies, and Mrs. Brown did not want it. Brown’s body was placed in a wooden coffin with the noose still around his neck, and the coffin was then put on a train to take it away from Virginia to his family homestead in North Elba, New York for burial.

His body needed to be prepared for burial; this was supposed to take place in Philadelphia. There were many Southern pro-slavery medical students and faculty in Philadelphia, and as a direct result, they left the city en masse on December 21, 1859, for Southern medical schools, never to return. When Mary and her husband’s body arrived on December 3, Philadelphia Mayor Alexander Henry met the train, with many policemen, and said public order could not be maintained if the casket remained in Philadelphia. In fact he “made a fake casket, covered with flowers and flags, which was carefully lifted from the coach”; the crowd followed the sham casket. The genuine casket was immediately sent onward. Brown’s body was washed, dressed, and placed, with difficulty, in a 5-foot-10-inch (1.78 m) walnut coffin, in New York. It was transported via Troy, New York, Rutland, Vermont, and across Lake Champlain by ferry. He was buried on December 8. Abolitionist Rev. Joshua Young gave the invocation, and James Miller McKim and Wendell Phillips spoke.

In the North, large memorial meetings took place, church bells rang, minute guns were fired, and famous writers such as Emerson and Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown.

On July 4, 1860, family and admirers of Brown gathered at his farm for an informal memorial. This was the last time that the surviving members of Brown’s family gathered together. The farm was sold, except for the burial plot. By 1882 John Jr., Owen, Jason, and Ruth, widow of Henry Thompson, lived in Ohio; his wife and their two unmarried daughters in California. By 1886 Owen, Jason, and Ruth were living near Pasadena, California, where they were honored in a parade.

Senate investigation

On December 14, 1859, the U.S. Senate appointed a bipartisan committee to investigate the Harpers Ferry raid and to determine whether any citizens contributed arms, ammunition or money to John Brown’s men. The Democrats attempted to implicate the Republicans in the raid; the Republicans tried to disassociate themselves from Brown and his acts.

The Senate committee heard testimony from 32 witnesses, including Liam Dodson, one of the surviving abolitionists. The report, authored by chairman James Murray Mason, a pro-slavery Democrat from Virginia, was published in June 1860. It found no direct evidence of a conspiracy, but implied that the raid was a result of Republican doctrines. The two committee Republicans published a minority report, but were apparently more concerned about denying Northern culpability than clarifying the nature of Brown’s efforts. Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln rejected any connection with the raid, calling Brown “insane”.

The investigation was performed in a tense environment in both houses of Congress. One senator wrote to his wife that “The members on both sides are mostly armed with deadly weapons and it is said that the friends of each are armed in the galleries.” After a heated exchange of insults, a Mississippian attacked Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania with a Bowie knife in the House of Representatives. Stevens’ friends prevented a fight.

The Senate committee was very cautious in its questions of two of Brown’s backers, Samuel Howe and George Stearns, out of fear of stoking violence. Howe and Stearns later said that the questions were asked in a manner that permitted them to give honest answers without implicating themselves. Civil War historian James M. McPherson stated that “A historian reading their testimony, however, will be convinced that they told several falsehoods.”

Aftermath of the raid

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was among the last in a series of events that led to the American Civil War. Southern slaveowners, hearing initial reports that hundreds of abolitionists were involved, were relieved the effort was so small, but feared other abolitionists would emulate Brown and attempt to lead slave rebellions.Future Confederate President Jefferson Davis feared “thousands of John Browns”. Therefore, the South reorganized the decrepit militia system. These militias, well-established by 1861, became a ready-made Confederate army, making the South better prepared for war.

Southern Democrats charged that Brown’s raid was an inevitable consequence of the political platform of what they invariably called “the Black Republican Party”. In light of the upcoming elections in November 1860, the Republicans tried to distance themselves as much as possible from Brown, condemning the raid and dismissing its leader as an insane fanatic. As one historian explains, Brown was successful in polarizing politics: “Brown’s raid succeeded brilliantly. It drove a wedge through the already tentative and fragile Opposition–Republican coalition and helped to intensify the sectional polarization that soon tore the Democratic party and the Union apart.”

Many abolitionists in the North viewed Brown as a martyr, who sacrificed for the sins of the nation. Immediately after the raid, William Lloyd Garrison published a column in The Liberator, judging Brown’s raid as “well-intended but sadly misguided” and “wild and futile”. However, he defended Brown’s character from detractors in the Northern and Southern press and argued that those who supported the principles of the American Revolution could not consistently oppose Brown’s raid. On the day Brown was hanged, Garrison reiterated the point in Boston: “Whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections”.

Frederick Douglass believed that Brown’s “zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine – it was as the burning sun to my taper light – mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Legacy and Honors

Of all the major figures associated with the American Civil War Brown is one of the most studied and pondered. Kate Field raised money to give to the State of New York for what was to be, in her words, “John Brown’s Grave and Farm” (now John Brown Farm State Historic Site). At the centenary of the raid in 1959, a “sanitized” play about him was produced at Harper’s Ferry

John Brown Day

May 1: In 1999, John Brown Day was celebrated on May 1.
May 7: In 2016, John Brown Lives! Friends of Freedom celebrated May 7 as John Brown Day.

In 2018, it was May 5. Spirit of John Brown Freedom Awards were given to environmentalist Jen Kretser, poet Martin Espada, and to Soffiyah Elijah, attorney and executive director of the Alliance of Families for Justice, which advocates for prison reform.

In 2022, the day chosen was May 14.
May 9: The John Brown Farm, Tannery & Museum, in Guys Mills, Pennsylvania, holds community celebrations on John Brown’s birthday, May 9.
August 17: In 1906, the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the NAACP, celebrated John Brown Day on August 17.
October 16: In 2017, the Vermont Legislature designated October 16, the date of the raid, as John Brown Day.[205][206]

John Brown Memorials
Statue of Brown in front of the John Brown Museum, Osawatomie, Kansas

Museums

John Brown Museum, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

John Brown Farm State Historic Site, North Elba, New York

John Brown Farm, Tannery & Museum, Guys Mills, Pennsylvania

John Brown House (Chambersburg, Pennsylvania) John Brown Museum, Osawatomie, Kansas

John Brown Raid Headquarters (Kennedy Farm), Samples Manor, Maryland

All of the museums above except the one in Harpers Ferry are places Brown lived or stayed

Barnum’s American Museum in New York, destroyed by fire in 1868, contained according to a November 7, 1859, advertisement “a full-length Wax Figure of OSAWATOMIE BROWN, taken from life, and a KNIFE found on the body of his son, at Harper’s Ferry”. An agent of Barnum traveled to Harpers Ferry in November, saw Brown, and offered him $100 (equivalent to $3,257 in 2022) for “his clothes and pike, and his certificate of their genuineness.” By December 7 the exhibits included “his autograph Commission to a Lieutenancy as well as TWO PIKES or spears taken at Harper’s Ferry”. On December 16 the Museum added, with document vouching for its authenticity, “the link of the shackles that Cook and Coppock cut in two…that consequently permitted them to escape.” Also exhibited were the Augustus Washington 1847 daguerrotype of Brown (see above) and the now-lost painting by Louis Ransom of the famous, apocryphal incident of Brown kissing a black baby on his way to the gallows, reproduced in an Currier & Ives print (see Paintings). The latter was only exhibited for two months in 1863; Barnum withdrew it to save the building from destruction during the anti-Negro riot that broke out shortly.

Nothing came of the proposal that Kansas send a statue of Brown as one of its two representatives honored in the U.S. Capitol.
The first statue of Brown, and the only one not at one of his residences, is that located on the (new) John Brown Memorial Plaza, on the former campus of the closed Black Western University, site of a freedmen’s school founded in 1865, the first Black school west of the Mississippi River. The statue is the one surviving structure of the entire Quindaro Townsite, a ghost town today part of Kansas City, Kansas (27th Street and Sewell Avenue), a major Underground Railroad station, a key port on the Missouri River for fugitive slaves and contrabands escaping from the slave state of Missouri. The pillar and the life-sized statue of Brown were erected by descendants of slaves in 1911, at a cost of $2,000 (equivalent to $62,814 in 2022). ] Lettering reads: “Erected to the Memory of John Brown by a Grateful People”. There is a bronze plaque. In March 2018, the statue was defaced with swastikas and “Hail Satan”.

At the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, near Lake Placid, New York, there is a 1935 statue of Brown escorting a black child to freedom. The artist was Joseph Pollia. The cost of the statue and pedestal “was contributed in small sums by Negroes of the United States”.
A statue (1933) is at the John Brown Museum, Brown’s home in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was sponsored by the Women’s Relief Corps, Department of Kansas.
The only other sculptures of Brown are two busts: the first by Black sculptor Edmonia Lewis,which she presented to Henry Highland Garnet; and the other, at Tufts University, by Edward Brackett.

Streets

Only one major street in the world honors Brown, the Avenue John Brown in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, near an avenue honoring abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner.
A rural John Brown Road is near Torrington, Connecticut, his birthplace. Small roads near museums in North Elba, New York, and Guys Mills, Pennsylvania, are named for Brown. There is a Harpers Ferry Street in Davie, Florida, and in Ellwood City and Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in Northwest Pennsylvania near the Ohio border, near the route Owen Brown took seeking refuge after the raid in his brother John Jr.’s house in Ashtabula County, Ohio, there is a Harpers Ferry Road, and intersecting with it, a smaller John Brown Road. In Osawatomie, Kansas is John Brown Highway

Storer College

Storer College began as the first graded school for Blacks in West Virginia. Its location in Harpers Ferry was because of the importance of Brown and his raid. The Arsenal engine house, renamed John Brown’s Fort, was moved to the Storer campus in 1909. It was used as the college museum.
A Plaque honoring Brown was attached to the Fort in 1918, while it was on the Storer campus.

In 1931, after years of controversy, a tablet was erected in Harpers Ferry by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, honoring the key “Lost Cause” belief that their slaves were happy and neither wanted freedom nor supported John Brown. (See Heyward Shepherd monument.) The president of Storer participated in the dedication. In response, W. E. B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP, wrote text for a new plaque in 1932. The Storer College administration would not allow it to be put it up, nor did the National Park Service after becoming owner of the Fort. In 2006, it was placed at the site on the former Storer campus where the Fort had been located.

The National Park Service