Once Brown lit the fuse, less with his actions than with the moral clarity of his words, Southerners were unable to extinguish it. “They could kill him,” Douglass told his audience, “but they could not answer him.” In the war that followed, the Union’s armies had “found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted to do on a small one.” Douglass therefore regarded Harpers Ferry, not Fort Sumter, as the true start of the nation’s great conflict. “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”
