History, Natural History & the Arts
The Last Days of John Brown is a multi-part series about the October 16, 1859 anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia that helped spark the Civil War.
This photograph of abolitionist and inventor Thaddeus Hyatt was sent to his Massachusetts lawyer and fellow abolitionist Samuel E. Sewall in April of 1860 from Hyatt’s cell in a jail in Washington, DC.
He wrote below his image, “Presented to his friend, Mon. S. E. Sewall, Washington Jail, April 21, 1860.” [Read more…] about Thaddeus Hyatt: Radical New York Abolitionist
This week marks the anniversary of John Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859. Had Brown escaped from Harpers Ferry rather than been captured he might well today be just a footnote, one of the tens of thousands that struggled to undermine the institution of slavery in America before the Civil War.
It’s often said that just one thing secured Brown’s place in the hearts of millions of Americans that came after him – his execution and martyrdom. There is another equally important reason Americans will celebrate the life of John Brown this week however – he was right that slavery would end at a heavy price. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Martyr, Revolutionary or Terrorist?
Following the capture of John Brown and his associates at Harpers Ferry they were first held in the armory’s guardhouse.
The next day, October 19th, 1859, they were taken to the County Jail in Charles Town, about eight miles away. On October 25th (after being questioned by Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, Virginia Senator James M. Mason, and Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio) John Brown was led into court for arraignment. He was manacled to Edwin Coppoc and escorted by some 80 militiamen with bayonets fixed. Brown was still suffering from his wounds and needed to be supported at the bench. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: A Speedy Trial
While John Brown waited to hang for leading the raid to free people enslaved near Harpers Ferry, Virginia, his compatriots were led to the Charles Town court and tried before Judge Andrew Parker. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Brown’s Fellow Prisoners
There were about 4 million slaves in the United States at the time of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859.
Slavery in the United States, and especially in the South, rested on complex and often convoluted political, social, and economic systems, enforced by violence.
Perhaps because forcing people to work for you for free was so dependent on violence, the South was continuously racked with fear – fear that the people one kept enslaved (or those enslaved by others) would rise up against them. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Southern Fears
For reasons of political expediency, Republicans in the North initially distanced themselves from John Brown and his raid to free people enslaved around Harper’s Ferry.
Many joined the chorus of (often pro-slavery) voices proclaiming Brown insane, no doubt in part to protect their own political party, for as John Brown’s biographer David S. Reynolds put it, “the implication was that Republicans, and by extension many Northerners, were lawbreakers who threatened national peace.”
The truth of course, was that Brown had probably already planned a raid into Virginia to free slaves there before the Republican Party was founded in 1854. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: The Famous Beard
Ten men were killed during John Brown’s anti-slavery raid in Virginia in October 1859. All but two were buried in a common grave on the Shenandoah River, Harpers Ferry.
The body of Jeremiah Anderson, who was bayoneted in the final storming of the engine house, was handed over to a local medical school – his last resting place remains unknown. Watson Brown’s body was given over to Winchester Medical College where it remained until Union troops recovered it during the Civil War and burned the school in reprisal. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Prisoners And Fugitives
As the first full day of John Brown’s raid dawned almost no one in the village of Harpers Ferry knew what was happening. Charles White for instance, a Presbyterian minister who had spent the evening the raid began on an island between the rifle works, and the armory and arsenal reported that he “knew nothing until daylight when the gentleman with whom we were staying came into our room and notified us.” [Read more…] about John Brown’s Defeat And Capture (The Last Days of John Brown Series)
October 16th is the anniversary of the anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry that ended in the trial and execution of John Brown of North Elba. You can read the entire “Last Days of John Brown” series here.
In 1859, John Brown and the men he led from atop a wagon loaded with supplies went undiscovered on their march from the Kennedy Farm to Harpers Ferry. John Cook and Charles Tidd went forward to cut the telegraphs wires into the village from the east and west.
As Brown reached the Ferry Bridge, he sent his most experienced men, Aaron Stevens and John Kagi, to the front of the small column and onto the bridge. There they encountered William Williams and held him.
[Read more…] about John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Day One (The Last Days of John Brown Series)
In early October, 1859 John Brown and his small militia were making their final preparations for a raid on the slaveholders of Virginia.
The time and place for a raid seem right even now. It was the harvest season in the south and the fields would be filled with disgruntled and overworked slaves bringing in the crops, a perfect opportunity to turn them to revolt.
Harpers Ferry was lightly guarded and the arsenal there contained about 100,000 muskets and rifles – enough to carry on a lengthy guerrilla war against southern slaveholders. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Final Harpers Ferry Preparations
One of the familiar attacks on John Brown (and by extension his anti-slavery legacy) involves his failed business ventures and accusations that he was a swindler and a drifter, roaming from place to place – only briefly and uneventfully staying in North Elba, Essex County, NY.
“Over the years before his Kansas escapade Brown had been a drifter, horse thief and swindler,” Columbia University historian John Garraty once wrote. Garraty served as the president of the Society of American Historians and was co-author of the high school history textbook The American Nation (he died in 2007).
A closer look at Brown and the his family, however, reveals an experience typical of many Americans, then and today, and the importance of North Elba in Brown’s plans for a raid into Virginia. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: North Elba
John Brown’s raid on the slaveholders of Virginia is often considered a hopeless fool’s errand, but it was far from it. Brown’s plan was simple enough: capture weapons and ammunition form the Harpers Ferry federal Armory, retire to the countryside and conduct nighttime border raids to free Southern slaves.
The principal goal of the actual raid was to free slaves, not attack and hold a Southern state. Brown, well-armed and experienced in the type of raid he was planning, was fairly confident in its success. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Pikes, Rifles, and Revolvers
John Brown has often come down to us as a lone nut, bent on an suicidal mission, but this is far from the truth.
Brown was part of a larger movement to free slaves that grew with passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (which required the return of escaped slaves to their masters with all its potential for torture and death at their hands) and the large Underground Railroad movement.
It’s little understood that Brown was intimate with northern politicians, industrialists, ministers, and folks from all walks of life, including the leading intellectuals of the era – the Transcendentalists. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: The Secret Six
The first week of September 1859 at the Kennedy farm, where John Brown (wearing a short beard as a disguise and using the name Isaac Smith) and his growing band were gathering, was a time of indecision and internal conflict. From Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Brown’s previous hideout, arms and supplies were being brought by wagon. Those at the Kennedy farm had known that they were to attack Virginia, but when Brown told them the target would be a federal armory, several balked. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: Black Soldiers
This is the story of the October 16, 1859 anti-slavery raid, during which John Brown led 19 men in an attack on the Harpers Ferry Armory.
He was afterward charged with murder, conspiring with enslaved people to rebel, and treason against Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state) and after a week-long trial was sentenced to death in early November.
Brown was hanged on December 2nd (John Wilkes Booth snuck in to watch) and his body was afterward carried to North Elba in Essex County, NY to “moulder in his grave.” [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: August 1859
Use your bank’s “bill pay” option (or just send a check)
Thanks for your support! These are difficult times. Without your support we cannot publish the Almanack.
*Donations are not tax deductible.
(Click the X in the top right corner this box to not see this message again for 7 days).