In October 1859, John Brown, the scourge of Kansas, made his second contribution to the unfolding sectional drama. Gathering a group of eighteen followers, white and black, he staged an attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, a town on the Potomac River upstream from Washington. Having boned up on guerrilla tactics, he planned to seize the federal arsenal there; arm the slaves, whom he thought would flock to his side; and then establish a black republic in the mountains of Virginia.
Simply by overpowering a few night watchmen, Brown and his men occupied the arsenal and a nearby rifle factory. They captured several hostages, one of them Colonel Lewis Washington, a great-grandnephew of George Washington. But no slaves came forward to join them. Federal troops commanded by Robert E. Lee soon trapped Brown’s men in an engine house of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. After a two-day siege in which the attackers picked off ten of his men, Brown was captured.
No incident so well illustrates the role of emotion and irrationality in the sectional crisis as does John Brown’s raid. Over the years before his Kansas escapade, Brown had been a drifter, horse thief, a swindler, and several times a bankrupt, a failure in everything he attempted. After his ghastly Pottawatomie murders it should have been obvious to anyone that he was both a fanatic and mentally unstable: Some of the victims were hacked to bits with a broadsword. Yet numbers of high-minded Northerners, including Emerson and Thoreau, had supported Brown and his antislavery “work” after 1856. White Southerners reacted to Harpers Ferry with equal irrationality, some with a rage similar to Brown’s. Dozens of hapless Northerners in the southern states were arrested, beaten, or driven off. One, falsely suspected of being an accomplice of Brown, was lynched.
Brown’s fate lay in the hands of the Virginia authorities. Ignoring his obvious derangement, they charged him with treason, conspiracy, and murder. He was speedily convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.
Yet “Old Brown” had still one more contribution to make to the developing sectional tragedy. Despite the furor he had created, cool heads everywhere called for calm and denounced his attack. Most Republican
After John Brown's capture, Emerson called him ”a martyr” who would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Brown's principled radicalism found favor during the Depression decade of the 1930s. John Stewart Curry's mural, completed in 1943, depicted the demented John Brown in the pose of Christ on the cross. The image offended the Kansas legislature, which had commissioned Curry to portray Kansas history in a "sane and sensible manner.”
Source: Kansas State Historical Society, Copy and Reuse Restrictions apply.
That politics was always a rough business is shown in this cartoon, which shows Lincoln, assisted by an African American (who carries a basket of liquor bottles) while Douglas is backed by some Irish pols, who have a basket overflowing with cash. John Breckinridge thumbs his nose at the combatants as he hustles up the hill toward the White House.
Politicians repudiated him. Even execution would probably not have made a martyr of Brown had he behaved like a madman after his capture. Instead, an enormous dignity descended on him as he lay in his Virginia jail awaiting death.
Whatever his faults, he truly believed in racial equality. He addressed blacks who worked for him as “Mister” and arranged for them to eat at his table and sit with his family in church.
This conviction served him well in his last days. “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. . . millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,” he said before the judge pronounced sentence, “I say, let it be done.”
This John Brown, with his patriarchal beard and sad eyes, so apparently incompatible with the bloody terrorist of Pottawatomie and Harpers Ferry, led thousands in the North to ignore his past and treat him almost as a saint.
And so Brown, hanged on December 2, 1859, became to the North a hero and to the South a symbol of northern ruthlessness. Soon, as the popular song had it, Brown’s body lay “a-mouldering in the grave,” and the memory of his bloody act did indeed go “marching on.”
•••-[Read the Document John Brown's Address Before Sentencing at Www. myhistorylab. com
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