John Brown | Biography, Harpers Ferry, & Pottawatomie Massacre (2024)

John Brown (born May 9, 1800, Torrington, Connecticut, U.S.—died December 2, 1859, Charles Town, Virginia [now in West Virginia]) was a militant American abolitionist whose raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), in 1859 made him a martyr to the antislavery 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 barely 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, New York, on land donated by the New York antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith. Long a 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 assist antislavery forces struggling for control there, a conflict that became known as Bleeding Kansas. 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), Brown concluded that he had a divine mission to take vengeance. Three days later he led a nighttime retaliatory raid on a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, in which five men were dragged out of their cabins and hacked to death. After this raid, which became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, 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 Black and white supporters in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, at which he announced his intention of establishing in the Maryland and Virginia 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 in chief of this paper government while gaining the moral and financial support of Gerrit Smith and several prominent Boston abolitionists. In addition to Smith, this group, later referred to as the “Secret Six,” comprised physician and educator Samuel Gridley Howe, teacher and later journalist Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, industrialist George L. Stearns, and ministers Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker. Some of them had provided financial support for Brown’s efforts in Kansas, and they would back his next and most famous undertaking, too.

In the summer of 1859, with an armed band of 16 white and 5 Black abolitionists, Brown set up a headquarters in a rented farmhouse in Maryland, across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry, the site of a federal armoury. On the night of October 16, he quickly took the armoury 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 contingency of troops under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee, including a small force of U.S. Marines that had broken into the armoury and overpowered Brown and his comrades. Brown himself was wounded, and 10 of his followers (including two sons) were killed. He was tried for murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and was convicted and hanged (John Wilkes Booth, later Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was present at the execution as a militiaman.) .

Although Brown failed to spark a general slave revolt, the high moral tone of his defense helped to immortalize him and to hasten the war that would bring emancipation. Noting that the gaze of Europe was fixed on America, French novelist Victor Hugo wrote that Brown’s hanging would “open a latent fissure that will finally split the Union asunder.” As they marched into battle during the Civil War, Union soldiers sang a song called “John Brown’s Body” that would later provide the tune for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

John Brown died that the slaves might be free,

But his soul goes marching on.