JOHN BROWN’S RAID

National Park Service History Series Office of Publications, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.

John Brown's Fort, Harpers Ferry

The text of this booklet was prepared by the staff of the Office of Publications and is based on National Park Service reports by William C. Everhart and Arthur L. Sullivan.

National Park Handbooks are published to support the National Park Service’s management programs and to promote understanding and enjoyment of the more than 350 National Park System sites, which represent important examples of our country’s natural and cultural inheritance. Each handbook is intended to be informative reading and a useful guide before, during, and after a park visit. More than 100 titles are in print. They are sold at parks and can be purchased by mail from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402.

Harpers Ferry National Historical Park is administered by the National Park Service, US. Department of the Interior. A superintendent, whose address is Harpers Ferry, WV 25425, is in immediate charge.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

“All through the conflict, up and down

Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown,

One ghost, one form ideal;

And which was false and which was true,

And which was mightier of the two,

The wisest sibyl never knew.

For both alike were real.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

June 14, 1882

This view of Harpers Ferry from Maryland Heights in 1859 appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper shortly after John Brown’s raid brought the town to national prominence.

JOHN BROWN’S RAID

Through the gloom of the night, Sunday, October 16, 1859, a small band of men tramped silently behind a horse-drawn wagon down a winding Maryland road leading to Harpers Ferry, Va. From the shoulder of each man hung loosely a Sharps rifle, hidden by long gray shawls that protected the ghostly figures against the chilling air of approaching winter. A slight drizzle of rain veiled the towering Blue Ridge Mountains with an eerie mist. Not a sound broke the stillness, save the tramping feet and the creaking wagon.

Side by side marched lawyer and farmer, escaped convict and pious Quaker, Spiritualist and ex-slave, joined in common cause by a hatred of slavery. Some had received their baptism of fire in “Bleeding Kansas,” where a bitter 5-year war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions left death and destruction in its wake and foreshadowed a larger conflict to come. Most were students of guerrilla tactics; all were willing to die to free the slaves.

This strange little force, five Negroes and 14 whites, was the “Provisional Army of the United States,” about to launch a fantastic scheme to rid the country of its “peculiar institution” once and for all, a scheme conjured up by the fierce-eyed, bearded man seated on the wagon—“Commander in Chief” John Brown. He was the planner, the organizer, the driving force, the reason why these men were trudging down this rough Maryland road to an uncertain fate.

THE ROAD TO HARPERS FERRY

This man who would electrify the Nation and bring it closer to civil war by his audacious attack on slavery was born at Torrington, Conn., on May 9, 1800, the son of Owen and Ruth Mills Brown. The Browns were a simple, frugal, and hard-working family. They had a deep and abiding interest in religion, and from earliest childhood John Brown was taught the value of strong religious habits. He was required, along with his brothers and sisters, to participate in daily Bible reading and prayer sessions. “Fear God & keep his commandments” was his father’s constant admonition. It was also his father who taught him to view the enslavement of Negroes as a sin against God.

The future abolitionist and martyr in the cause of Negro freedom was born in this stark, shutterless farmhouse in Torrington, Conn. He lived here only 5 years. In 1805 his father, Owen Brown (above), sold the farm and moved the family west to Ohio.

In 1805 the Browns, like many other families of the period, moved west to Ohio. There, in the little settlement of Hudson, about 25 miles south of Cleveland, John grew to manhood. He received little formal education; most of what he learned came from what he afterwards called the “School of adversity.” He cared little for studies, preferring life in the open. Consistently choosing the “hardest & roughest” kinds of play because they afforded him “almost the only compensation for the confinement & restraints of school,” he was extremely proud of his 3 ability to “wrestle, & Snow ball, & run, & jump, & knock off old seedy Wool hats.”

John Brown probably never saw a slave auction, portrayed here in an illustration from the 1852 edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but his horror and hatred of slavery made its destruction the “greatest or principle object” of his life.

When John was 8 years old his mother died, and for awhile he believed that he would never recover from so “complete & permanent” a loss. His father remarried, but John never accepted his stepmother emotionally and “continued to pine after his own Mother for years.”

An indifferent student, and “not ... much of a schollar” anyway, John quit school and went to work at his father’s tannery. Owen Brown, who had been a tanner and a shoemaker before moving to Hudson, had already taught his son the art of dressing leather from “Squirel, Raccoon, Cat, Wolf, or Dog Skins,” and John soon displayed remarkable ability in the trade. When the War of 1812 broke out, Owen contracted to supply beef to the American forces in Michigan. He gave John the task of rounding up wild steers and other cattle in the woods and then driving them, all by himself, to army posts more than 100 miles away. Contact with the soldiers and their profanity and lack of discipline so disgusted young Brown that he later resolved to pay fines rather than take part in the militia drills required of all Hudson males of a certain age.

It was during the war, or so Brown later claimed, that he first came to understand what his father meant about the evil of slavery. He had just completed one of his cattle drives and was staying with a “very gentlemanly landlord” who owned a slave about the same age as John. The Negro boy was “badly clothed, poorly fed ... & beaten before his eyes with Iron Shovels or any other thing that came first to hand.” 4 Outraged by this, John returned home “a most determined Abolitionist” swearing “Eternal war with Slavery.”

John Brown had not yet grown his famous beard when this picture was taken in Kansas in 1856. Though 3 years away from the deed that would make his name immortal, he had already begun his private war against slavery.