September 12, 2016 • 29 mins
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, set out to create an armed revolution of emancipated slaves. Instead, it became a tipping point leading to the U.S. Civil War.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building
your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer code
history at check out to get ten percent off Squarespace.
Build it Beautiful. Hey, I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and
we're the host of Stuff. You should know the podcast
that's right and if you're into understanding cool and unusual
and seemingly ordinary and even boring things that are made interesting,
(00:22):
you should check us out. Please and thank you. We're
on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, anywhere you get podcasts.
Welcome to Steph. You missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:46):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Sean Brown's
raid on Harper's Ferry has come up two different times
in recent episodes of our podcast. The first time within
our two parter on Harriet Tubman, and then it came
up at again in our episode on Mary Anne Shad Carrie.
And then it came up two different times on a
(01:06):
completely different podcast which is politically reactive with w Comal
Bell and Harrikondabolo and on as I said, on two
different episodes plus We've had a ton of listener request
to talk about this one as well, so it seems
like it's time for the world to have an episode
on John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry. There you go
(01:26):
for background. John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, on
May nine of eighteen hundred. His family were strict Calvinists,
and John's father, Owen, was a white abolitionist who believed
fervently that holding people in bondage was a sin against God.
In eighteen o five, Owen moved the family to Hudson, Ohio,
where he became deeply involved in the town's efforts in
(01:49):
the Underground Railroad, including sheltering escaping slaves in the family's barn.
There are still a bunch of houses and Hudson that
are still existing that we're tied to the under ground railroad,
and when he read the descriptions of them, his name
comes up over and over and over again. In eighteen
twenty one, John Brown married Diantha Lusk, with whom he
(02:10):
would have seven children before both she and their seventh
child died in eighteen thirty two. Then in eighteen thirty three,
Brown remarried Mary Day, who at that point was sixteen,
and the two of them would have another thirteen children.
There are also several sources that say they adopted a
previously enslaved child and then raised that child as their
(02:32):
own as well. Brown approached parenthood in a way that
was both strict and austere, including some corporal punishment that
could be described as cruel. In eighteen thirty seven, at
the memorial service for anti slavery newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy,
who had been murdered by a pro slavery mob, Brown
(02:53):
made a public vow. He stood before the congregation and said, quote,
here before God, in the presence of these witness, is
I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. This
devotion to ending slavery and his Calvinist upbringing would eventually
combine into a complete and utter certainty that he was
predestined to bring about slavery's end. It was a while
(03:17):
before he really put that belief into concrete action, though.
He and his family moved around a lot, and during
his life, Brown would live, among other places, in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kansas, Massachusetts,
and New York. He also moved from job to job,
doing everything from farming to land speculation to trading wool
to try to earn his money, and for the most part,
(03:39):
these efforts to make money were not particularly successful. In
in eighteen forty two he even wound up in federal
court as he went through a bankruptcy partially brought on
by the Panic of eighteen thirty seven. But as has
been the case with some of our other podcast subjects,
including Bronson Alcott and Harriet Tubman, he didn't let a
lack of money stop him from trying to put what
(04:00):
he did have towards causes that mattered to him. These efforts,
in many cases were ambitious. For example, Brown wanted to
expand the underground railroad into what he called the Subterranean Pathway,
and this would be an enormous effort that would take
advantage of the remote and difficult terrain of the Appalachian
Mountains to extend the underground railroads activities beyond the border
(04:24):
states and into the deep South. Under this plan, a
small group of operatives would raid plantations, liberate the people
enslave there, and then guide them into the mountains where
they could be secreted north. He hoped to free hundreds
of thousands of slaves in this way, but the subterranean
Passway wasn't just about freedom. As part of this plan,
(04:45):
some of these liberated people would become part of an
armed fighting force of free black people who would forcibly
end slavery in the South by raiding plantations and robbing
slave owners of their power and their workforce. Although a
lot of people remember the abolitionist movement in the United
States as being relatively nonviolent, Brown's focus on armed resistance
(05:09):
was not unique. So running parallel to the abolitionists who
did things like right right essays and deliver speeches and
work for legal reforms and help enslave people liberate themselves,
there were also radical abolitionists who thought that violence would
be required to bring slavery to an end. For example,
John Brown was one of the people who had helped
(05:31):
fund David Walker's Appeal, which was published in eighty nine.
Walker was a free black man from the South, and
his work Appeal was a radical anti slavery document that
called for enslaved people to rise up against their owners.
He wrote, quote, they want us for their slaves and
think nothing of murdering us. Therefore, if there is an
(05:52):
attempt made by us kill or be killed, and believe
this that it is no more harm for you to
kill a man who is trying to kill you than
it is for you to take a drink of water
when thirsty. Brown was also connected to Henry Highland Garnett,
who had been enslaved from birth before escaping with his
family at age nine. Garnett gave a speech at the
(06:13):
National Negro Convention in eighteen forty three that became known
as the Call to Rebellion. In this speech, he said, quote,
you cannot be more oppressed than you have been. You
cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die
freeman than live to be slaves. For Brown's part, his
(06:33):
belief that violence was required to bring an end to
slavery was tied directly to United States history. Rather than
putting pressure on Southern states to put a rapid ends
to slavery, the Northern States and the federal government had
a history of compromises and appeasing slave states in the
interest of keeping the South in the Union. One of
these was the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty, after
(06:56):
which Brown helped found the League of Gileadites, which was
a radical organization dedicated to protecting escaped slaves from slave catchers,
again through violent means if necessary. Another act that was
meant to appease slave states led John Brown to shift
from violent rhetoric to actual violence. And this is where
(07:17):
some of the things we're talking about are going to
get a little bit gruesome. So just so you know,
we will get into that. After a brief sponsor break,
in eighteen fifty four, Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska Act.
(07:37):
So for a little bit of context, if you don't remember,
under the Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty, Congress had maintained
a balance between slave states and free states by admitting
Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state,
and then also by drawing a line at parallel thirty
six degrees thirty minutes north. Uh uh, and that was
basically a border for slavery. Slavery would be outlawed when
(08:01):
new states north of that line entered the Union. However,
the Kansas Nebraska Act up ended that previous compromise, and
it instead allowed new states to decide whether to allow
slavery when they joined the Union by popular vote. Nebraska
is north of Kansas, and most people considered that territory
(08:21):
pretty well decided on being a free state when it
entered the Union. Kansas, however, was not nearly so certain,
and as a result, people both in favor of and
against slavery flooded to Kansas to try to sway the
vote one way or another. Kansas became a literal battleground,
and the result was a period of violent conflict that
(08:42):
came to be known as Bleeding Kansas. John Brown was
one of the people, specifically one of the anti slavery
people who went to Kansas to fight. He actually followed
in the wake of five of his sons who had
already moved there, and he arrived with a wagon full
of swords and rifles in eighteen fifty five. In December
(09:04):
of that year, he led a fighting force as he
and his neighbors went to defend the town of Lawrence,
which was a an anti slavery town, from a pro
slavery invasion. The following May, Brown's father died, and at
about the same time, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner had been
caned on the Senate floor. There's an episode about that
(09:26):
incident in the archives. Brown was simultaneously grief stricken over
his father and outraged over Charles Sumner. And at about
the same time, pro slavery forces returned to Lawrence and
sacked it. And when he was urged to act with
caution and restraint, Brown said, quote caution, caution, Sir, I
am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is
(09:48):
nothing but the word of cowardice. On May eighteen fifty six,
Brown led a small party in dragging five pro slavery
men out of their cabins and hacking them to death
in retribution for the sacking of Lawrence. This would come
to be known as the Potawatomie massacre. John Brown's involvement
(10:08):
in these murders had multiple consequences. Two of his sons,
who had not participated but were distraught at what their
father had done, had psychological breakdowns. Another son, Frederick, who
had participated, was killed in the aftermath, and a lot
of the rest of the abolitionist community was actually horrified
by what he had done. But Brown was steadfast in
(10:31):
that action he had taken, and the murders were a
tipping point in Kansas as pro slavery forces sought retribution
and federal troops went from community to community on a
relentless search for Brown and his party. Brown, on the
other hand, evaded capture, which in his mind solidified his
idea that he could similarly evade capture in the Appalachian
(10:54):
Mountains as part of his subterranean passway strategy. He just
needed weapons and a few men, and he left Kansas
to find them. In January of eighteen fifty eight, he
started meeting with some of the most prominent black abolitionist leaders,
including Frederick Douglas and Harriet's hu Been. With Douglas, he
drafted a constitution for a provisional government of the Community
(11:18):
of Liberated Slaves that he was hoping to build, of
which he hoped that Frederick Douglas would be president. He
then went to Chatham, Ontario, which is home of Mary
Anne shad Carry, which is how that came up previously
to plan the raid that would launch this movement. His
target for the raid was Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Virginia was
(11:39):
a slave state and Harper's Ferry was in a strategic
position where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers meet. It was
also home to a federal arsenal that he planned to
use to arm his fighters, many of whom would be
liberated slaves, as well as an iron works, a munitions factory,
and other industries that would be useful for a growing rebellion.
(11:59):
This arounding counties were home to about eighteen thousand enslaved people,
as well as sympathetic white residents of the nearby Appalachian Mountains,
all of whom he hoped to bring into his cause. Yeah,
a lot of the people he was supposed or that
he was hoping to draw from in terms of white support,
were from what is now West Virginia, which was much
(12:21):
more anti slavery than the other rest of Virginia, and
that is why West Virginia s seceeded from Virginia during
all of this. Having planned this raid out while he
was in Chatham, he started connecting with other abolitionists in
New York and Massachusetts to try to get the money
to carry out this plan. He ultimately got financial backing
(12:45):
from a group of wealthy abolitionists who came to be
known as the Secret Six. These were George L. Steam's,
Garrett Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sandborn and
Samuel Gridley. How but then things got derailed. A little
mercenary Hugh Forbes threatened to expose the plan, which caused
(13:06):
Brown to return to Kansas to try to avoid suspicion.
He stayed for six months, and when he left, sort
of as a proof of concept, he liberated a Missouri
slave named Jim Daniels and his family, along with a
handful of people enslaved on nearby plantations, and he sheltered
them in Kansas for a month before a looting, capture
and slave catchers to guide them to Canada. With this
(13:30):
success under his belt, Brown got back to the task
of raiding Harper's Ferry. He rented a house across the
border in Maryland as a base of operations. He bought
rifles and pikes and basically started outfitting the slave army
that he believed would come to join him at Harper's
Ferry as soon as they learned what he was doing.
He also enlisted Harriet's heman to travel through the area's
(13:53):
plantations and spread the word and enlist the help of
the enslaved people in the surrounding counties. The actual raid
began on October sixteenth of eighteen fifty nine, and Brown
was fifty nine years old at the time. His force
was smaller than originally planned. It was twenty two people total,
three of them left behind at the rented house in
(14:13):
Maryland to receive liberated slaves. So Brown and nineteen men
made their way into Harper's Ferry by night, cut the
telegraph lines and took control of the railroad station and
the musket factory and rifle works, which were essentially unguarded.
Then they abducted some of the area's most notorious slave
owners and they took them to the engine house the
(14:34):
train station as hostages. There was only one fatality in
that original takeover, and that was a free black porter
who had been working at the train station with a
telegraph lines cut. The biggest source of news out of
Harper's Ferry overnight was a train that came through at
the station after Brown ticket over, which they actually allowed
(14:55):
to pass, even though it meant risking that the people
aboard would take to the authorities of what was happening,
which they did. Soon rumors started to spread that John
Brown had taken Harper's Ferry, first with fifty people, and
then with a hundred, and then with two hundred and
By morning, it was clear to people living there that
Brown had indeed taken over several strategic points, and the
(15:18):
town started to muster a resistance. At first, this resistance
was mostly in the form of militia and local farmers
and slave owners, but at the same time, the vast
wave of support Brown had expected just did not materialize.
There were several reasons for this. One was that so
much time had passed between the meeting in Chatham, Ontario
(15:39):
and the raid that a lot of the black population
that had been interested in helping had lost interest or
they had just lost touch with Brown and his allies.
Another was that Harriet Tubman couldn't be found when Brown
decided to go ahead with the raid. The historical record
is not entirely clear on why they couldn't locate her,
but she may have been ill. Yeah, she had already
(16:00):
done some preliminary uh searching slash work through the plantations
of the area to spread the word of what was coming.
But they had expected her to be on hand to
rally support further when the raid actually happened, and they
just couldn't find her. Even though there is evidence that
a few enslaved people from nearby did join the raid.
(16:22):
It was definitely not the ground swell of massive support
that Brown had been expecting. So soon he and his
raiders were surrounded and pinned in at both the train
station and the musket factory and rifle works. Two attempts
to send somebody to call for a ceasefire under a
white flag both failed. The second person sent was actually
(16:44):
Brown's son, Watson, who was shot and killed. Some of
Brown's men tried to flee their positions via the Shenandoah
and Potomac rivers, leading to their being shot, some of
them while still in the water. And meanwhile, Brown and
the men he was holed up within the engine house
of the train station drilled holes in the door that
they could shoot through, hoping to hit their attackers, and
(17:06):
they were mostly unsuccessful, although one shot did hit Harper's
Ferry Mayor Fontaine Beckham. With Beckham's death, any support that
Brown's raid might have had among Harper's Ferries residents just evaporated.
A mob stormed the hotel where William Thompson, which was
the first man that had been sent out for a ceasefire,
(17:26):
was being held. They shot him in the head and
threw him into the Potomac. Eventually, President James Buchanan dispatched
marines under the command of Robert E. Lee to restore order.
At that point, Harper's ferry streets were mombed with both
trained fighters and angry rabble trying to get it. Brown's
men in the engine house, all but four of whom
(17:47):
were by that point injured or dead. After arriving around midnight,
Lee sent j EV Stewart, who would go on to
become Lee's own cavalry commander on the Southern side in
the Civil War, to the engine house under a white
flag to negotiate. Stewart promised Brown protection from the mob
and a fair trial if he would let the hostages go.
(18:09):
Brown refused. He wanted himself and his surviving men to
be allowed to go back to Maryland with the hostages
as basically as a strategic point, and then they would
free the hostages once they were safely back in Maryland.
With negotiations at an impass, Lee sent men to batter
down the door. The morning of the eighteen, marines swarmed
(18:32):
the engine house, killing some of Brown's few remaining men
and taking others prisoner. Brown was hit with a sword
and only survived because the sword happened to hit a
buckle that he was wearing. In the end of the
original crew of nineteen men, ten had been killed or
mortally wounded, two of them being Brown's sons, and five
had been taken prisoner. There were also six civilian deaths,
(18:56):
the mayor, to townspeople, to enslaved people that belong to
the hostages, and the porter that had been killed at
the train station. Here's how the official report described it. Quote,
A fanatical man, stimulated to recklessness and desperation by the
constant teachings and intemperate appeals of wild and treasonable enthusiasts,
(19:18):
unrestrained by the Constitution and the laws of the land,
by the precepts of religion, by appeals of humanity or
of mercy, formed a conspiracy to make a sudden descent
upon the people of Harper's Ferry, to rob the arsenal,
plunder public property, and stir up servile insurrection. With that
(19:39):
brief recap from the official report, we will take a
brief word from a sponsor before we talk about the
raids aftermath. After their capture, Brown and his surviving men
(19:59):
were put on trial. The charges were murder, treason, and
conspiring with negroes to produce insurrection. That trial began on October,
just ten days after the raid. All of the men
were found guilty, and the penalty for all of the
charges was death. John Brown was hanged on December two
of eighteen fifty nine. Before his hanging, he handed a
(20:22):
guard a note that read, quote, I John Brown am
now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land
will never be purged away, but with blood. Among those
present were Roberty Lee Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth.
Measured by whether it launched an armed slave resistance that
(20:42):
freed thousands of slaves and forcibly rested control of the
South from slave owners, as had been the original plan.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferria was a complete failure.
Measured by whether it launched an armed slave resistance that
freed thousands of slaves and forcibly rested control of the
South from slave owners, as had been the original plan.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was a complete failure,
(21:05):
but measured by its ultimate effect on the progression of
slavery in the United States, it's a completely different story
the same way that those murders of five pro slavery
settlers in Kansas that we talked about earlier had sparked
a tide of violence there. The raid at Harper's Ferry
inflamed passions, tensions, and violence around slavery and the relationships
(21:27):
between slave and free states in many circles. In the North,
John Brown became a martyr, especially as he was eloquent
and steadfast in his denunciations of slavery while on trial,
and people doubled down on their efforts to abolish the institution.
But in the South, people were terrified. The idea of
a slave insurrection was already a source of fear in
(21:50):
a lot of the South, and in some places, white
slave owners and the rest of the white population were
vastly outnumbered by enslaved people, so the idea that these
people might unite and violently overthrow their owners was petrifying.
The South tried to downplay Brown's raid as unimportant in
an effort to dismiss it, while simultaneously being completely horrified
(22:13):
at what it could spell for the future. On a
more practical level, many parts of the South renewed their
call from militia membership and military drills of those militia,
so that when the Civil War did begin, those militias
that had been created under the idea of fighting up
potential John Brown inspired rebellion if it was necessary, were
(22:34):
already there and trained and ready to go to war.
It was also one of many events that happened in
the late eighteen fifties that stoked political passions over the
issue of slavery. The Democrats split over the issue of
slavery in the eighteen sixty election, with pro and anti
slavery factions each putting forth candidates for presidency and neither
(22:55):
securing a necessary two thirds majority At the party convention,
after a series of efforts to unite the party, the
Democratic Party nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas, while the Southern
Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, and both Douglas and Breckinridge
presented themselves as the official party candidates. Meanwhile, an entire
(23:16):
other party, the Constitutional Union Party, nominated former Senator John
Bell of Tennessee, to be their candidate for president, and
in the end it was Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee,
who won this four way election with only a hundred
and eighty electoral votes and just shy of the popular vote.
As a consequence of Lincoln's election, eleven Southern states seceded
(23:39):
from the Union, which directly led to the Civil War.
Fifty years after the raid, Frederick Douglas would say that
John Brown quote began the war that ended American slavery
and made this a free republic. There are a lot
of historians who basically think without this lightning point of
Harper's ferry, there would not have been that four way
(24:00):
split in the election that ultimately led Lincoln to be elected,
not with a whole majority of the popular vote. And
for decades, even a century after the raid, historical accounts
painted Brown as mentally unstable, with descriptions being full of
words like delusional and madman. But really Brown was methodical
(24:22):
and well researched in this whole idea. He had studied
other uprisings, including net Turner's rebellion in the Haitian Revolution,
and he had also studied guerilla resistance to military forces
in both Europe and the United States, including in the
colonial era. Today, some historical depictions of him have shifted
a little bit to be uh more, including of language
(24:46):
like fiercely devoted rather than unhinged and insane, even when
he was alive at first, as news of the raid
was spreading, even in the North where it's sort of
reinvigorated abolition as a cause. Um, at first, there were
people who were like that Ban is not in his
(25:09):
right mind. Mind and sentiment shifted about him as he
continually made these like steadfast and very eloquent denunciations of
slavery during his trial. UM. So the idea that everybody
thought that he was like mentally unwell even at the
(25:30):
time was not totally accurate. Um. Harriet Tubman in particular
described him as being the only white person that she
ever met who actually thought that slavery was a life
or death issue that really needed to be treated that way. Um.
And even like even in the more recent past, uh,
(25:51):
you see divisions and how people talk about John Brown
and like whether his ideas were good and whether he
uh was was making sense in a methodical way or
whether he was sort of flying off in this delusional fervor. Um.
Like the Malcolm X talked about if you if you
(26:12):
meet a white person who says that they are in
favor of black power, find out what they think about
John Brown. I think that's one of the things that
sort of led to the in the Politically Reactive podcast
that we talked about early earlier in the top of
the show, UM was that they were talking about John
Brown white people and this idea of people who are
that fervently devoted and that ready to put their own
(26:33):
lives on the line no matter what to end slavery.
So he's a complicated person. Yeah, I feel like we
I feel like we barely scratched the surface of his
complicated nous. Uh. And what people thought about him then
and now. Uh, some less complicated listener man would be
stupendous if he got it so much less complicated. It's
(26:54):
about Margarine, uh. Nicholas wrote and said, rate stuff you
missed in history pod on butter and Margarine. I was
struck by your discussion of margarine sold with coloring consumers
would add at home. One explanation not mentioned in the pod.
Consumers wanted to appear to be able to afford butter,
so coloring at home was attractive. This is similar to
(27:16):
stories of people refilling Coca Cola bottles with pepsi when
serving guests because Coke was the more expensive, higher class product.
I would be interested in a pot about the history
of people disguising cheap products as expensive project products, not
for profit, like the butter fraud, but for social comparison
purposes to impress the neighbors. Perhaps the epitome of this
(27:38):
was fifty claim in his bankruptcy proceedings that the piles
of hundred dollar bills and his social media posts were
rented money to appear to be living a certain lifestyle.
Thanks for your work, Nick, Thank you Nick. We got
a handful of notes along these lines about how um
like they had family members who would refill the butter
container with colored margarine and be like, WI tell your
(28:00):
grandma to make it look like they had been able
to shell out the money for butter. I had not
heard about this um, this fifty cent story, and I
went to look into it, and I didn't find um
the idea that he had rented hundred dollar bills. But
I did find a lot, like a lot of claims
at his bankruptcy court where he was like, no, I
just rented all those luxury cars and all this jewelry
(28:23):
is also rented, Like I've been renting all of this
stuff I don't actually own any of it as part
of his defense in those proceedings. So um, thank you
to Nick for that email, and thank you for the
folks who have written to us. Some of you have
some of you with your own family stories about your
own family members, members who were like, I'm just gonna
shape this margarine into the shape of a stick of butter,
(28:47):
put it on the table when we have people over
for company. If you would like to write to us,
we're a history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed in
History and on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler
at miss is missed in History dot tumbler dot com.
We're also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss
in History. We have an Instagram at missed in History. Also,
(29:09):
you can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff Works dot com and learn about almost anything
your heart desires. And you can also come to our website,
which is missing history dot com to find show notes
of all of our episodes and archive of all of
our episodes. The show notes are for the episode Holly
and I have worked on. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot
com or missed in history dot com For more on
(29:37):
this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot com
This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building
your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer code
history at check out to get ten percent off Squarespace.
Build it Beautiful. Hey, I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and
we're the host of Stuff. You should know the podcast
that's right and if you're into understanding cool and unusual
and seemingly ordinary and even boring things that are made interesting,
(00:22):
you should check us out. Please and thank you. We're
on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, anywhere you get podcasts.
Welcome to Steph. You missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:46):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Sean Brown's
raid on Harper's Ferry has come up two different times
in recent episodes of our podcast. The first time within
our two parter on Harriet Tubman, and then it came
up at again in our episode on Mary Anne Shad Carrie.
And then it came up two different times on a
(01:06):
completely different podcast which is politically reactive with w Comal
Bell and Harrikondabolo and on as I said, on two
different episodes plus We've had a ton of listener request
to talk about this one as well, so it seems
like it's time for the world to have an episode
on John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry. There you go
(01:26):
for background. John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, on
May nine of eighteen hundred. His family were strict Calvinists,
and John's father, Owen, was a white abolitionist who believed
fervently that holding people in bondage was a sin against God.
In eighteen o five, Owen moved the family to Hudson, Ohio,
where he became deeply involved in the town's efforts in
(01:49):
the Underground Railroad, including sheltering escaping slaves in the family's barn.
There are still a bunch of houses and Hudson that
are still existing that we're tied to the under ground railroad,
and when he read the descriptions of them, his name
comes up over and over and over again. In eighteen
twenty one, John Brown married Diantha Lusk, with whom he
(02:10):
would have seven children before both she and their seventh
child died in eighteen thirty two. Then in eighteen thirty three,
Brown remarried Mary Day, who at that point was sixteen,
and the two of them would have another thirteen children.
There are also several sources that say they adopted a
previously enslaved child and then raised that child as their
(02:32):
own as well. Brown approached parenthood in a way that
was both strict and austere, including some corporal punishment that
could be described as cruel. In eighteen thirty seven, at
the memorial service for anti slavery newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy,
who had been murdered by a pro slavery mob, Brown
(02:53):
made a public vow. He stood before the congregation and said, quote,
here before God, in the presence of these witness, is
I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. This
devotion to ending slavery and his Calvinist upbringing would eventually
combine into a complete and utter certainty that he was
predestined to bring about slavery's end. It was a while
(03:17):
before he really put that belief into concrete action, though.
He and his family moved around a lot, and during
his life, Brown would live, among other places, in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kansas, Massachusetts,
and New York. He also moved from job to job,
doing everything from farming to land speculation to trading wool
to try to earn his money, and for the most part,
(03:39):
these efforts to make money were not particularly successful. In
in eighteen forty two he even wound up in federal
court as he went through a bankruptcy partially brought on
by the Panic of eighteen thirty seven. But as has
been the case with some of our other podcast subjects,
including Bronson Alcott and Harriet Tubman, he didn't let a
lack of money stop him from trying to put what
(04:00):
he did have towards causes that mattered to him. These efforts,
in many cases were ambitious. For example, Brown wanted to
expand the underground railroad into what he called the Subterranean Pathway,
and this would be an enormous effort that would take
advantage of the remote and difficult terrain of the Appalachian
Mountains to extend the underground railroads activities beyond the border
(04:24):
states and into the deep South. Under this plan, a
small group of operatives would raid plantations, liberate the people
enslave there, and then guide them into the mountains where
they could be secreted north. He hoped to free hundreds
of thousands of slaves in this way, but the subterranean
Passway wasn't just about freedom. As part of this plan,
(04:45):
some of these liberated people would become part of an
armed fighting force of free black people who would forcibly
end slavery in the South by raiding plantations and robbing
slave owners of their power and their workforce. Although a
lot of people remember the abolitionist movement in the United
States as being relatively nonviolent, Brown's focus on armed resistance
(05:09):
was not unique. So running parallel to the abolitionists who
did things like right right essays and deliver speeches and
work for legal reforms and help enslave people liberate themselves,
there were also radical abolitionists who thought that violence would
be required to bring slavery to an end. For example,
John Brown was one of the people who had helped
(05:31):
fund David Walker's Appeal, which was published in eighty nine.
Walker was a free black man from the South, and
his work Appeal was a radical anti slavery document that
called for enslaved people to rise up against their owners.
He wrote, quote, they want us for their slaves and
think nothing of murdering us. Therefore, if there is an
(05:52):
attempt made by us kill or be killed, and believe
this that it is no more harm for you to
kill a man who is trying to kill you than
it is for you to take a drink of water
when thirsty. Brown was also connected to Henry Highland Garnett,
who had been enslaved from birth before escaping with his
family at age nine. Garnett gave a speech at the
(06:13):
National Negro Convention in eighteen forty three that became known
as the Call to Rebellion. In this speech, he said, quote,
you cannot be more oppressed than you have been. You
cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die
freeman than live to be slaves. For Brown's part, his
(06:33):
belief that violence was required to bring an end to
slavery was tied directly to United States history. Rather than
putting pressure on Southern states to put a rapid ends
to slavery, the Northern States and the federal government had
a history of compromises and appeasing slave states in the
interest of keeping the South in the Union. One of
these was the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty, after
(06:56):
which Brown helped found the League of Gileadites, which was
a radical organization dedicated to protecting escaped slaves from slave catchers,
again through violent means if necessary. Another act that was
meant to appease slave states led John Brown to shift
from violent rhetoric to actual violence. And this is where
(07:17):
some of the things we're talking about are going to
get a little bit gruesome. So just so you know,
we will get into that. After a brief sponsor break,
in eighteen fifty four, Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska Act.
(07:37):
So for a little bit of context, if you don't remember,
under the Missouri Compromise of eighteen twenty, Congress had maintained
a balance between slave states and free states by admitting
Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state,
and then also by drawing a line at parallel thirty
six degrees thirty minutes north. Uh uh, and that was
basically a border for slavery. Slavery would be outlawed when
(08:01):
new states north of that line entered the Union. However,
the Kansas Nebraska Act up ended that previous compromise, and
it instead allowed new states to decide whether to allow
slavery when they joined the Union by popular vote. Nebraska
is north of Kansas, and most people considered that territory
(08:21):
pretty well decided on being a free state when it
entered the Union. Kansas, however, was not nearly so certain,
and as a result, people both in favor of and
against slavery flooded to Kansas to try to sway the
vote one way or another. Kansas became a literal battleground,
and the result was a period of violent conflict that
(08:42):
came to be known as Bleeding Kansas. John Brown was
one of the people, specifically one of the anti slavery
people who went to Kansas to fight. He actually followed
in the wake of five of his sons who had
already moved there, and he arrived with a wagon full
of swords and rifles in eighteen fifty five. In December
(09:04):
of that year, he led a fighting force as he
and his neighbors went to defend the town of Lawrence,
which was a an anti slavery town, from a pro
slavery invasion. The following May, Brown's father died, and at
about the same time, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner had been
caned on the Senate floor. There's an episode about that
(09:26):
incident in the archives. Brown was simultaneously grief stricken over
his father and outraged over Charles Sumner. And at about
the same time, pro slavery forces returned to Lawrence and
sacked it. And when he was urged to act with
caution and restraint, Brown said, quote caution, caution, Sir, I
am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is
(09:48):
nothing but the word of cowardice. On May eighteen fifty six,
Brown led a small party in dragging five pro slavery
men out of their cabins and hacking them to death
in retribution for the sacking of Lawrence. This would come
to be known as the Potawatomie massacre. John Brown's involvement
(10:08):
in these murders had multiple consequences. Two of his sons,
who had not participated but were distraught at what their
father had done, had psychological breakdowns. Another son, Frederick, who
had participated, was killed in the aftermath, and a lot
of the rest of the abolitionist community was actually horrified
by what he had done. But Brown was steadfast in
(10:31):
that action he had taken, and the murders were a
tipping point in Kansas as pro slavery forces sought retribution
and federal troops went from community to community on a
relentless search for Brown and his party. Brown, on the
other hand, evaded capture, which in his mind solidified his
idea that he could similarly evade capture in the Appalachian
(10:54):
Mountains as part of his subterranean passway strategy. He just
needed weapons and a few men, and he left Kansas
to find them. In January of eighteen fifty eight, he
started meeting with some of the most prominent black abolitionist leaders,
including Frederick Douglas and Harriet's hu Been. With Douglas, he
drafted a constitution for a provisional government of the Community
(11:18):
of Liberated Slaves that he was hoping to build, of
which he hoped that Frederick Douglas would be president. He
then went to Chatham, Ontario, which is home of Mary
Anne shad Carry, which is how that came up previously
to plan the raid that would launch this movement. His
target for the raid was Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Virginia was
(11:39):
a slave state and Harper's Ferry was in a strategic
position where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers meet. It was
also home to a federal arsenal that he planned to
use to arm his fighters, many of whom would be
liberated slaves, as well as an iron works, a munitions factory,
and other industries that would be useful for a growing rebellion.
(11:59):
This arounding counties were home to about eighteen thousand enslaved people,
as well as sympathetic white residents of the nearby Appalachian Mountains,
all of whom he hoped to bring into his cause. Yeah,
a lot of the people he was supposed or that
he was hoping to draw from in terms of white support,
were from what is now West Virginia, which was much
(12:21):
more anti slavery than the other rest of Virginia, and
that is why West Virginia s seceeded from Virginia during
all of this. Having planned this raid out while he
was in Chatham, he started connecting with other abolitionists in
New York and Massachusetts to try to get the money
to carry out this plan. He ultimately got financial backing
(12:45):
from a group of wealthy abolitionists who came to be
known as the Secret Six. These were George L. Steam's,
Garrett Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sandborn and
Samuel Gridley. How but then things got derailed. A little
mercenary Hugh Forbes threatened to expose the plan, which caused
(13:06):
Brown to return to Kansas to try to avoid suspicion.
He stayed for six months, and when he left, sort
of as a proof of concept, he liberated a Missouri
slave named Jim Daniels and his family, along with a
handful of people enslaved on nearby plantations, and he sheltered
them in Kansas for a month before a looting, capture
and slave catchers to guide them to Canada. With this
(13:30):
success under his belt, Brown got back to the task
of raiding Harper's Ferry. He rented a house across the
border in Maryland as a base of operations. He bought
rifles and pikes and basically started outfitting the slave army
that he believed would come to join him at Harper's
Ferry as soon as they learned what he was doing.
He also enlisted Harriet's heman to travel through the area's
(13:53):
plantations and spread the word and enlist the help of
the enslaved people in the surrounding counties. The actual raid
began on October sixteenth of eighteen fifty nine, and Brown
was fifty nine years old at the time. His force
was smaller than originally planned. It was twenty two people total,
three of them left behind at the rented house in
(14:13):
Maryland to receive liberated slaves. So Brown and nineteen men
made their way into Harper's Ferry by night, cut the
telegraph lines and took control of the railroad station and
the musket factory and rifle works, which were essentially unguarded.
Then they abducted some of the area's most notorious slave
owners and they took them to the engine house the
(14:34):
train station as hostages. There was only one fatality in
that original takeover, and that was a free black porter
who had been working at the train station with a
telegraph lines cut. The biggest source of news out of
Harper's Ferry overnight was a train that came through at
the station after Brown ticket over, which they actually allowed
(14:55):
to pass, even though it meant risking that the people
aboard would take to the authorities of what was happening,
which they did. Soon rumors started to spread that John
Brown had taken Harper's Ferry, first with fifty people, and
then with a hundred, and then with two hundred and
By morning, it was clear to people living there that
Brown had indeed taken over several strategic points, and the
(15:18):
town started to muster a resistance. At first, this resistance
was mostly in the form of militia and local farmers
and slave owners, but at the same time, the vast
wave of support Brown had expected just did not materialize.
There were several reasons for this. One was that so
much time had passed between the meeting in Chatham, Ontario
(15:39):
and the raid that a lot of the black population
that had been interested in helping had lost interest or
they had just lost touch with Brown and his allies.
Another was that Harriet Tubman couldn't be found when Brown
decided to go ahead with the raid. The historical record
is not entirely clear on why they couldn't locate her,
but she may have been ill. Yeah, she had already
(16:00):
done some preliminary uh searching slash work through the plantations
of the area to spread the word of what was coming.
But they had expected her to be on hand to
rally support further when the raid actually happened, and they
just couldn't find her. Even though there is evidence that
a few enslaved people from nearby did join the raid.
(16:22):
It was definitely not the ground swell of massive support
that Brown had been expecting. So soon he and his
raiders were surrounded and pinned in at both the train
station and the musket factory and rifle works. Two attempts
to send somebody to call for a ceasefire under a
white flag both failed. The second person sent was actually
(16:44):
Brown's son, Watson, who was shot and killed. Some of
Brown's men tried to flee their positions via the Shenandoah
and Potomac rivers, leading to their being shot, some of
them while still in the water. And meanwhile, Brown and
the men he was holed up within the engine house
of the train station drilled holes in the door that
they could shoot through, hoping to hit their attackers, and
(17:06):
they were mostly unsuccessful, although one shot did hit Harper's
Ferry Mayor Fontaine Beckham. With Beckham's death, any support that
Brown's raid might have had among Harper's Ferries residents just evaporated.
A mob stormed the hotel where William Thompson, which was
the first man that had been sent out for a ceasefire,
(17:26):
was being held. They shot him in the head and
threw him into the Potomac. Eventually, President James Buchanan dispatched
marines under the command of Robert E. Lee to restore order.
At that point, Harper's ferry streets were mombed with both
trained fighters and angry rabble trying to get it. Brown's
men in the engine house, all but four of whom
(17:47):
were by that point injured or dead. After arriving around midnight,
Lee sent j EV Stewart, who would go on to
become Lee's own cavalry commander on the Southern side in
the Civil War, to the engine house under a white
flag to negotiate. Stewart promised Brown protection from the mob
and a fair trial if he would let the hostages go.
(18:09):
Brown refused. He wanted himself and his surviving men to
be allowed to go back to Maryland with the hostages
as basically as a strategic point, and then they would
free the hostages once they were safely back in Maryland.
With negotiations at an impass, Lee sent men to batter
down the door. The morning of the eighteen, marines swarmed
(18:32):
the engine house, killing some of Brown's few remaining men
and taking others prisoner. Brown was hit with a sword
and only survived because the sword happened to hit a
buckle that he was wearing. In the end of the
original crew of nineteen men, ten had been killed or
mortally wounded, two of them being Brown's sons, and five
had been taken prisoner. There were also six civilian deaths,
(18:56):
the mayor, to townspeople, to enslaved people that belong to
the hostages, and the porter that had been killed at
the train station. Here's how the official report described it. Quote,
A fanatical man, stimulated to recklessness and desperation by the
constant teachings and intemperate appeals of wild and treasonable enthusiasts,
(19:18):
unrestrained by the Constitution and the laws of the land,
by the precepts of religion, by appeals of humanity or
of mercy, formed a conspiracy to make a sudden descent
upon the people of Harper's Ferry, to rob the arsenal,
plunder public property, and stir up servile insurrection. With that
(19:39):
brief recap from the official report, we will take a
brief word from a sponsor before we talk about the
raids aftermath. After their capture, Brown and his surviving men
(19:59):
were put on trial. The charges were murder, treason, and
conspiring with negroes to produce insurrection. That trial began on October,
just ten days after the raid. All of the men
were found guilty, and the penalty for all of the
charges was death. John Brown was hanged on December two
of eighteen fifty nine. Before his hanging, he handed a
(20:22):
guard a note that read, quote, I John Brown am
now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land
will never be purged away, but with blood. Among those
present were Roberty Lee Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth.
Measured by whether it launched an armed slave resistance that
(20:42):
freed thousands of slaves and forcibly rested control of the
South from slave owners, as had been the original plan.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferria was a complete failure.
Measured by whether it launched an armed slave resistance that
freed thousands of slaves and forcibly rested control of the
South from slave owners, as had been the original plan.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was a complete failure,
(21:05):
but measured by its ultimate effect on the progression of
slavery in the United States, it's a completely different story
the same way that those murders of five pro slavery
settlers in Kansas that we talked about earlier had sparked
a tide of violence there. The raid at Harper's Ferry
inflamed passions, tensions, and violence around slavery and the relationships
(21:27):
between slave and free states in many circles. In the North,
John Brown became a martyr, especially as he was eloquent
and steadfast in his denunciations of slavery while on trial,
and people doubled down on their efforts to abolish the institution.
But in the South, people were terrified. The idea of
a slave insurrection was already a source of fear in
(21:50):
a lot of the South, and in some places, white
slave owners and the rest of the white population were
vastly outnumbered by enslaved people, so the idea that these
people might unite and violently overthrow their owners was petrifying.
The South tried to downplay Brown's raid as unimportant in
an effort to dismiss it, while simultaneously being completely horrified
(22:13):
at what it could spell for the future. On a
more practical level, many parts of the South renewed their
call from militia membership and military drills of those militia,
so that when the Civil War did begin, those militias
that had been created under the idea of fighting up
potential John Brown inspired rebellion if it was necessary, were
(22:34):
already there and trained and ready to go to war.
It was also one of many events that happened in
the late eighteen fifties that stoked political passions over the
issue of slavery. The Democrats split over the issue of
slavery in the eighteen sixty election, with pro and anti
slavery factions each putting forth candidates for presidency and neither
(22:55):
securing a necessary two thirds majority At the party convention,
after a series of efforts to unite the party, the
Democratic Party nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas, while the Southern
Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, and both Douglas and Breckinridge
presented themselves as the official party candidates. Meanwhile, an entire
(23:16):
other party, the Constitutional Union Party, nominated former Senator John
Bell of Tennessee, to be their candidate for president, and
in the end it was Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee,
who won this four way election with only a hundred
and eighty electoral votes and just shy of the popular vote.
As a consequence of Lincoln's election, eleven Southern states seceded
(23:39):
from the Union, which directly led to the Civil War.
Fifty years after the raid, Frederick Douglas would say that
John Brown quote began the war that ended American slavery
and made this a free republic. There are a lot
of historians who basically think without this lightning point of
Harper's ferry, there would not have been that four way
(24:00):
split in the election that ultimately led Lincoln to be elected,
not with a whole majority of the popular vote. And
for decades, even a century after the raid, historical accounts
painted Brown as mentally unstable, with descriptions being full of
words like delusional and madman. But really Brown was methodical
(24:22):
and well researched in this whole idea. He had studied
other uprisings, including net Turner's rebellion in the Haitian Revolution,
and he had also studied guerilla resistance to military forces
in both Europe and the United States, including in the
colonial era. Today, some historical depictions of him have shifted
a little bit to be uh more, including of language
(24:46):
like fiercely devoted rather than unhinged and insane, even when
he was alive at first, as news of the raid
was spreading, even in the North where it's sort of
reinvigorated abolition as a cause. Um, at first, there were
people who were like that Ban is not in his
(25:09):
right mind. Mind and sentiment shifted about him as he
continually made these like steadfast and very eloquent denunciations of
slavery during his trial. UM. So the idea that everybody
thought that he was like mentally unwell even at the
(25:30):
time was not totally accurate. Um. Harriet Tubman in particular
described him as being the only white person that she
ever met who actually thought that slavery was a life
or death issue that really needed to be treated that way. Um.
And even like even in the more recent past, uh,
(25:51):
you see divisions and how people talk about John Brown
and like whether his ideas were good and whether he
uh was was making sense in a methodical way or
whether he was sort of flying off in this delusional fervor. Um.
Like the Malcolm X talked about if you if you
(26:12):
meet a white person who says that they are in
favor of black power, find out what they think about
John Brown. I think that's one of the things that
sort of led to the in the Politically Reactive podcast
that we talked about early earlier in the top of
the show, UM was that they were talking about John
Brown white people and this idea of people who are
that fervently devoted and that ready to put their own
(26:33):
lives on the line no matter what to end slavery.
So he's a complicated person. Yeah, I feel like we
I feel like we barely scratched the surface of his
complicated nous. Uh. And what people thought about him then
and now. Uh, some less complicated listener man would be
stupendous if he got it so much less complicated. It's
(26:54):
about Margarine, uh. Nicholas wrote and said, rate stuff you
missed in history pod on butter and Margarine. I was
struck by your discussion of margarine sold with coloring consumers
would add at home. One explanation not mentioned in the pod.
Consumers wanted to appear to be able to afford butter,
so coloring at home was attractive. This is similar to
(27:16):
stories of people refilling Coca Cola bottles with pepsi when
serving guests because Coke was the more expensive, higher class product.
I would be interested in a pot about the history
of people disguising cheap products as expensive project products, not
for profit, like the butter fraud, but for social comparison
purposes to impress the neighbors. Perhaps the epitome of this
(27:38):
was fifty claim in his bankruptcy proceedings that the piles
of hundred dollar bills and his social media posts were
rented money to appear to be living a certain lifestyle.
Thanks for your work, Nick, Thank you Nick. We got
a handful of notes along these lines about how um
like they had family members who would refill the butter
container with colored margarine and be like, WI tell your
(28:00):
grandma to make it look like they had been able
to shell out the money for butter. I had not
heard about this um, this fifty cent story, and I
went to look into it, and I didn't find um
the idea that he had rented hundred dollar bills. But
I did find a lot, like a lot of claims
at his bankruptcy court where he was like, no, I
just rented all those luxury cars and all this jewelry
(28:23):
is also rented, Like I've been renting all of this
stuff I don't actually own any of it as part
of his defense in those proceedings. So um, thank you
to Nick for that email, and thank you for the
folks who have written to us. Some of you have
some of you with your own family stories about your
own family members, members who were like, I'm just gonna
shape this margarine into the shape of a stick of butter,
(28:47):
put it on the table when we have people over
for company. If you would like to write to us,
we're a history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed in
History and on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler
at miss is missed in History dot tumbler dot com.
We're also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss
in History. We have an Instagram at missed in History. Also,
(29:09):
you can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff Works dot com and learn about almost anything
your heart desires. And you can also come to our website,
which is missing history dot com to find show notes
of all of our episodes and archive of all of
our episodes. The show notes are for the episode Holly
and I have worked on. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot
com or missed in history dot com For more on
(29:37):
this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.