On October 16, 1859, John Brown, a fierce abolitionist, led a company of twenty-one men in an assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia with the intent of arming the region’s enslaved Blacks and sparking a widespread uprising. (The town resides now in West Virginia, which joined the Union as a free state in June of 1863.) Local citizens and militia battled Brown to a standoff until a federal force arrived, led by Col.
