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by
Tony Horwitz
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September 26 - October 21, 2025
When in the course of Human events, it becomes necessary’ for an oppressed People to Rise, and assert their Natural Rights,” the declaration began. If the opening sounded familiar, the close was not. “We will obtain these rights or die in the struggle,” the document stated, before concluding: “Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet.”
Though many Americans hated slavery, very few sought its abolition, or expected the institution to disappear anytime soon. “I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at the least,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1858. He advocated resettling free blacks in Africa and pledged to leave slavery alone in the states where it existed.
The first serious strife flared in 1819, when Missouri sought statehood. Missouri had been settled mainly by Southerners; its admission to the Union would carry slavery well north and west of its existing boundaries and upset the numerical balance between slave and free states. After lengthy debate, Congress finessed the crisis by admitting Maine along with Missouri and by drawing a line across the continent, forbidding any further slavery north of the 36° 30’ parallel. This deal—the Missouri Compromise of 1820—formed the basis for a three-decade détente over slavery’s spread. But Thomas
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In the early 1800s, roughly a third of Americans died before reaching adulthood. Early death was so common that parents recycled their children’s names; the Browns, having lost a Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen, named three newborns Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen. Of the twenty children Brown fathered, nine died before the age of ten, among them a baby girl accidentally scalded to death by an older sister.
But Northerners recoiled whenever slavery threatened to bleed outside its existing boundaries. Their fear had much more to do with self-interest than with sympathy for blacks—indeed, the latter was so scarce that several northern states passed laws to exclude black immigrants altogether. At bottom, whites didn’t want to compete with slave labor and see their own status and prospects diminished.
In a major concession to Southerners, Congress also enacted a new and much tougher Fugitive Slave Act. Federal officials and ordinary citizens were now required to aid in the capture and return of runaways, even to the point of forming posses. In effect, every Northerner could be deputized as a slave catcher. Civil liberties were sharply curtailed, too, denying fugitive slaves the right to testify on their own behalf or to be tried before a jury.
The furor reenergized John Brown as well. “It now seems that the Fugitive Slave Law was to be the means of making more Abolitionists than all the lectures we have had for years,” he exulted in a letter to Mary in late 1850.
If the settlers of the new territories so chose, slavery might now extend across a swath of land reaching from Iowa and Minnesota to the Rockies. Signed into law by a compliant President Pierce in May 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act ignited a firestorm so intense that its author acknowledged, “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.”
The worst threat came from “Border Ruffians” based in neighboring Missouri who moved in and out of Kansas, harassing anyone who showed free-soil leanings. The Border Ruffians were particularly adept at voter fraud and intimidation. A territorial census in early 1855 found 2,905 eligible voters in Kansas. Yet proslavery forces “won” an early election that March with 5,427 votes.
The men walked much of the way because the horse was sick and the wagon’s load heavy. Its contents included the weapons Brown had collected in New York and Ohio, and the corpse of his four-year-old grandson, who had died en route to Kansas with his family the previous spring and been hastily buried. Brown stopped to disinter the child and bring his remains to Kansas, “thinking it would afford some relief to the broken hearted Father & Mother,” he wrote.
Most free-state settlers were antislavery but also antiblack; they wanted Kansas to be a free state for whites only.
Earlier that week, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered a five-hour diatribe about Kansas, accusing the “Slave Power” of perpetrating “the rape of a Virgin Territory” by “hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” Sumner also heaped invective on Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, whom he mocked for making great claims to chivalry while taking as his mistress “the harlot, Slavery.” Butler was ill and absent from the chamber. But a kinsman from South Carolina, Congressman Preston Brooks, accosted Sumner on the
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left this sacred spot with a far higher respect for the Great Struggle than ever I had felt before,” Redpath later wrote of his hour-long stay in Brown’s camp. “I had seen the predestined leader of the second and holier American Revolution.”
a frontier hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. This water gap, known to early pioneers as the Hole, was so dramatic and untamed that Thomas Jefferson judged it “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature,” a vista “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.”
Even if he failed, Brown’s assault on the Slave Power might bring on the great conflict necessary to vanquish it.
Many blacks in Chatham and the nearby towns would volunteer to fight in the Civil War. But they were painfully familiar with slavery, from their own experience or that of people close to them. Brown’s vision and ardor inspired more admiration for him than confidence in his chances of success—or in the chances of anyone who went with him.
In 1803, just a few years after George Washington established a federal armory in the Virginia village, President Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase, more than doubling the geographic size of the United States. The man he dispatched to explore this vast territory, Meriwether Lewis, went first to Harpers Ferry to buy “Rifles, Tomahawks & knives” for his expedition, as well as a collapsible iron boat frame that could be covered in hides—a vessel he called “the Experiment.”
Best of all, he had turned the hated Fugitive Slave Act on its head. Instead of slave catchers trespassing on free territory, Northerners had invaded a slave state to liberate bondspeople.
“I have discovered the existence of a secret association, having for its object the liberation of the slaves at the South by a general insurrection. The leader of the movement is ‘old John Brown,’ late of Kansas.” The letter stated that small companies of men would “pass down through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and enter Virginia at Harper’s Ferry.” It also warned of a mountain rendezvous in Virginia and a spy placed at an armory in Maryland. The letter reached the secretary of war in late August 1859, when Floyd had fled the Washington summer for Red Sweet Springs, a mountain spa in Virginia.
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Brown also turned the debate into a test of loyalty: since so many opposed him, he insisted on resigning as commander so the men could choose another. Within five minutes, he was reinstated as leader.
Charles Tidd wrote his parents telling them where to find his possessions, since “this is perhaps the last letter you will ever receive from your son. The next time you hear from me, will probably be through the public prints. If we succeed the world will call us heroes; if we fail, we shall hang between the Heavens and earth.”
When he and his uninvited guests repaired to the dining room, Cook directed Stevens to a gun closet he’d seen on his previous visit. The intruders took several of the weapons inside, including a fowling piece, the pistol given George Washington by Lafayette, and a dress sword that had allegedly been presented to the first president by Prussia’s Frederick the Great.
At first light, Brown said, he would ask Washington to “write to some of your friends to send a stout, able-bodied Negro” as ransom. Brown also told Washington why he’d been the first slave owner taken. “I wanted you particularly for the moral effect it would give our cause, having one of your name as a prisoner.”
John Brown’s campaign to liberate slaves had claimed as its first casualty a free black man, shot down while defying the orders of armed whites.
Cook, nonchalant as always, walked in and informed the teacher that he needed part of the schoolroom to store boxes of weapons. Equally startling was Cook’s request that Currie continue with his lessons; the teacher, Cook said, “should not be interrupted.”
His men also carried Sharps rifles, a new kind of carbine named for a gunsmith who had once worked at Harpers Ferry. Compact, quick-loading, and renowned for its range and accuracy, the Sharps was the deadliest firearm of its day, and the origin of the word “sharpshooter.”
Brown told Stuart, he preferred to die fighting and “would sell his life as dearly as possible.”
He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
Virginians believed they were holding to their own high standards by conducting a trial in a civilian court, before the eyes of the nation, rather than administering “drum-head justice” in a closed military tribunal. All the legal “decencies” would be duly observed in the Charlestown court. But given the realities of antebellum society in Jefferson County and its surrounds, an impartial hearing for Brown and his men was impossible. Richard Parker, the presiding judge, was a respected, by-the-book jurist. He was also a slave owner and a former paymaster at the Harpers Ferry armory, who stated
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Thoreau also mocked his Yankee neighbors who saw everything in terms of gain, and therefore felt that Brown had thrown his life away. “No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to,” Thoreau said.
This brought Brown to the climax of his speech—in effect, to the climax of his long struggle against slavery. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done!”
In essence, Brown’s speech had turned the case against him on its head. He had put his accusers on trial and pronounced them guilty, of crimes before God. He had also denied Virginians the righteous satisfaction of hanging a convicted felon. Feeling “no consciousness of guilt,” he told the court, he would gladly go to the gallows for “the ends of justice,” in solidarity with the slaves he had sought to free. Instead of pleading for his life, he made his death sentence a triumph. So let it be done!
Emerson, like many others, had initially viewed Harpers Ferry with horror, writing that Brown “lost his head” and committed a “fatal blunder” in attacking Virginia. Now, moved by Brown’s words—and those of his neighbor Thoreau—Emerson reconsidered his earlier stance and became one of the abolitionist’s greatest champions.
One of these antic militiamen was a noted young actor named John Wilkes Booth. He had been in Richmond preparing for a play called The Filibuster when he noticed troops readying to board a train for Charlestown. Borrowing portions of two men’s uniforms, Booth decided to play soldier and tag along. “He was a remarkably handsome man, with a winning personality and would regale us around the camp fire with recitations from Shakespeare,” wrote a member of Booth’s adopted unit, the Richmond Grays. In later years, Booth would theatrically inflate the extent of his service in Jefferson County. He
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More telling, perhaps, was another comment Salmon made in the same interview: “Father’s idea in his Harper’s Ferry movement, was to agitate the slavery question. Not to create an insurrection. The intention of the pikes was to strike terror—to make agitation.” This disturbance, Salmon said, would spark the great conflict Brown believed was necessary to end slavery. “He wanted to bring on the war. I have heard him talk of it many times.”
A LITTLE BEFORE ELEVEN o’clock, Brown’s jailers wrapped a cord around him, pinioning his arms just above the elbows, and escorted him from the building. Waiting outside was the wagon of an undertaker and furniture maker who occupied a building just beside the prison. In the bed of the open wagon lay a black walnut coffin enclosed in a poplar box. This was to be Brown’s seat for his tumbrel ride.
The site chosen for Brown’s execution was a forty-acre field of rye and corn stubble at the edge of Charlestown. It was not only convenient to the jail but also almost bare of trees or other landmarks, “so as to prevent any one being able to recognize it thereafter,” wrote Andrew Hunter, who had helped select it. The authorities wanted to ensure that the site of Brown’s hanging wouldn’t become hallowed ground. To that end, the scaffold was erected on the morning of the execution and taken down immediately after.
“When he come he was black in the face for they slung him in the coffin with all his clothes on with his head under his shoulder and the rope he was hung with in the coffin.”
But one eulogist, the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, spoke eloquently to the hanged man’s legacy. “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harper’s Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,—it does not live,—hereafter.”
“John Brown, and a thousand John Browns, can invade us, and the Government will not protect us,” Jefferson Davis proclaimed in his December 8 speech to the Senate. If “we are not to be protected in our property and sovereignty, we are therefore released from our allegiance, and will protect ourselves out of the Union.” Davis also issued a chilling threat: “To secure our rights and protect our honor we will dissever the ties that bind us together, even if it rushes us into a sea of blood.”
Brown was indeed no Republican, and Lincoln no abolitionist. Though the two men shared certain traits, including a Calvinist upbringing on the frontier, Lincoln had very different views on race and emancipation. Born in the slave state of Kentucky, he believed the institution would die of its own accord, and he favored resettling freed blacks in Africa, just as Jefferson and others had proposed decades earlier. “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he stated during his 1858 debates with Stephen
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Lincoln had many political assets, including his “Rail-Splitter” image of backwoods self-reliance. But his deft handling of the slavery issue, amid the fallout from Harpers Ferry, did much to secure his surprise, third-ballot victory over Seward at the Republican convention in May 1860. The party also wrote into its platform Lincoln’s rebuke of Brown, adopting a resolution to “denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”
Six other Deep South states quickly followed South Carolina out of the Union. In formal declarations explaining their secession, the states often cited Harpers Ferry and made clear their core grievance. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” Mississippians stated. “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.” In February 1861, the secessionists formed the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis as president. They also adopted a “Provisional Constitution,” outlining the laws of their
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Through six months of war, Abraham Lincoln had held to his long-standing pledge of noninterference with slavery in the South. He was fighting to preserve the Union, not to free slaves. For Lincoln, this wasn’t simply a matter of principle or constitutional duty. The northern public wasn’t ready to fight for emancipation, and he needed the support of slaveholding border states such as Maryland and Kentucky, which hadn’t seceded and were crucial to the war effort.
Still, Lincoln wouldn’t budge from his policy. Fugitive slaves were “contraband of war”—property seized from the enemy—and nothing more. He would not wage a war for liberation. “Emancipation,” the president declared in December 1861, “would be equivalent to a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.”
BY WAR’S END, BROWN’S prophecy before the gallows would also be fulfilled. And it was Lincoln, yet again, who recapitulated Brown’s vision, that the “crimes of this guilty land” could only be purged with blood. The president echoed this most eloquently in March 1865, after four years of battle and the deaths of over 600,000 men. “This mighty scourge of war,” he said, was the “woe due” the nation for slavery. If God willed that the carnage continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then this was the true and righteous judgment of the
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Americans had howled at the absurdity of Brown’s constitution, particularly its provision for blacks holding political office. A decade later, one of the signatories to Brown’s document, Isaac Shadd, joined the first wave of black officeholders in the Reconstruction South, rising to the speakership of the Mississippi House of Representatives.
The next year she found a way, returning south as a teacher of freed slaves in Union-held territory in Virginia. While there, she attended a black Sunday school that had been established on the seized plantation of Henry Wise, the former governor who had been so intent on hanging her father. His now freed slaves were among those being educated at missionary schools on his property.
The treason charge was eventually dropped, and Wise ultimately renounced the institution he had fought so hard to defend. “God knew that we could be torn away from our black idol of slavery only by fire and blood and the drawn sword of the destroying angel of war,” he stated in 1866, sounding very much like the man he’d hanged in 1859.
She lived in California until her death twenty years later, in relative comfort and peace. But there was one gruesome postscript to her loss at Harpers Ferry. In 1882, when Mary was visiting Chicago, an Indiana doctor offered to return the remains of her son Watson, who had been killed near the engine house and carried off for dissection and display at the medical school in Winchester. The doctor had served in Virginia during the war and recovered Watson’s remains before Union troops burned the medical school to the ground in 1862.
