Vermont to Honor John Brown October 16Posted on August 20, 2017

Series Name: Imperfect Heroes – John Brown. Oils on board by Peter Gullerud. From Alice Keesey Mecoy private collection

 Vermont to honor John Brown, as the first state to have a day set aside to honor the abolishtionist.  Local teacher Bradley Archer petitioned the state legislators to set aside October 16 (the date of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry) as John Brown Day. Archer said “It’s important to recognize that we’re the only state to celebrate John Brown.”

Vermont Senators Dick McCormack and Alison Clarkson sponsored the resolution initiated by Archer. The Woodstock Social Justice Initiative, a non profit associate, is planning to host a conference leading up to October 16th, and Archer is working with colleagues to create a curriculum about John Brown.

Civil War Tensions Brew as Vermont Celebrates Awkward Yankee HistoryAs Sen. Ben Sasse put it, ‘It feels like violence is coming’ By Bernie Quigley • 08/22/17 6:45am

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A homemade sign that says Heather Heyer Park rests at the base of the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that stands in the center of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Va. Heather Heyer was killed during a protest by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and members of the ‘alt-right.’ Mark Wilson/Getty Images

When the mainstream press operates as a horde—which it has done multiple times this past year—important details are left out.

One such detail was when President Donald Trump randomly asked about the Civil War this spring saying, “Why could that one not have been worked out?”

“President Trump mused in an interview that the Civil War could have been avoided if only Andrew Jackson had been around to stop it,” as The New York Times reported on the incident. “Jackson had been dead 16 years and long out of office when the war started in 1861.”

That Trump has come to model his presidency on Andrew Jackson is ridiculous. Jackson hated gilded city folk like Trump, and saw even Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as seekers of status and fame as great or greater than any of Europe’s monarchs. Steve Bannon likely tutored him on this. The idea of a rising “age of Jackson” had been around since Sarah Palin, who was actually Jacksonian.

The press might have panicked because Trump challenged one of their inherent, institutionalized assumptions by asking a question that needed to be asked, especially today.

Trump—or Bannon—possibly got the idea from a book review in The New York Times back in 2011 titled “Was the Civil War Necessary?,” which discussed David Goldfield’s America Aflame.

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The war was “America’s greatest failure,” Goldfield wrote.

“Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised,” Goldfield said as Tony Horwitz reports in a 2013 piece in The Atlantic. Given these equivocal gains and the immense toll in blood and treasure, “Was the war worth it? No.”

It might be a good time to ask because as monuments are coming down across America in opposition to slavery and the Civil War, Vermont is about “to formally celebrate the life of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who was hanged for treason in 1859.” The resolution will recognize October 16 as John Brown day.

John Brown might well be seen as the catalyst to the Civil War, the trickster figure who brought the chaos moment that would turn the tide and reformulate history. After Brown, there would be no turning back. Over a million Americans would be killed or maimed on American soil.

Is this the right approach? As monuments and memorials are coming down across America in a movement that surfaced at Washington and Lee University in July 2014, when black law students protested the battle flags of the Confederacy at Lee Chapel, a movement vastly amplified the following June after the tragedy of the AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, will Civil War symbolism begin in the near future to rise up again in opposition here in the North? Will a rising counterpoint advance a new cycle of Yankee contempt for Texas and the South that already runs sky high in New England?

Firebrand Brown was hung after his failed attempt to capture the United States arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, in hopes of jumpstarting the Civil War.

“In fact, it was so absurd,” Abraham Lincoln remarked, “that the slaves with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.”

“When news of the invasion was first flashed across the country, the most common reaction was that this was obviously the act of a madman, that John Brown was insane,” C. Vann Woodward, one of the most influential historians of the post war era, has written. In fact, “Brown’s maternal grandmother and his mother both died insane. His three aunts and two uncles, sisters and brothers of his mother, were intermittently insane, and so was his only sister, her daughter, and one of his brothers. Of six first cousins, all more or less mad, two were deranged from time to time, two had been repeatedly committed to the state asylum… Of John Brown’s immediate family, his first wife and one of his sons died insane, and a second son was insane at intervals.”

And Google these two phrases together and see what comes up. “John Brown” and “terrorist”, “John Brown: America’s first terrorist?” (National Archives), “Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?”, “John Brown: Villain or Hero?”, “John Brown: Hero or Terrorist?”, “John Brown: Domestic Terrorist or National Hero?” (The Atlantic) and so it goes.

As he left the White House, Bannon declared the Trump presidency “over.” It may well be, but the Bannon era is just beginning. New generations beyond the Millennials are beginning to rise, and there are suggestions that they follow their own lights and Bannon’s.

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Our’s is a precarious, teetering moment. Perhaps Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska described it best by suggesting the present day resembles the summer of 1967: “It feels like violence is coming.”

Vermont might reconsider the timing of this celebration day to yet another iconic Civil War warrior with questionable intent. What might be needed here and throughout is not a John Brown but maybe a Thich Nhat Hanh, the “Lotus in a sea of fire,” who led the Buddhist delegation in the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam war and brought peace to a world on fire in 1972.

Time to move on.

Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. 

Abolitionist Brown

Friday, August 18, 2017

Thanks to the efforts of a local history teacher, Vermont is about to become the first state to formally celebrate the life of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who was hanged for treason in 1859.

“I’ve been an admirer of Brown for a while,” said Bradley Archer, the teacher who successfully petitioned state legislators to recognize Oct. 16 as John Brown Day. “It’s important to recognize that we’re the only state to celebrate John Brown.”

The Connecticut-born Brown waged a long-term, and sometimes violent, campaign against pro-slavery forces in the American South, culminating in a raid against a federal armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia that failed to accomplish its immediate goal: the initiation of an armed slave revolt — but has been recognized as one of the key incidents leading up to the Civil War.

In May, the Vermont Legislature approved the formal declaration of John Brown Day, months before white supremacists protesting against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Va., resulted in a series of violent acts that culminated in the death of Heather Heyer.

The resolution was sponsored by state Sens. Dick McCormack, D-Bethel, and Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock.

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Archer said Charlottesville and the resolution are both part of a larger battle in American culture over which figures in the country’s past should be celebrated as American heroes, and which should be relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history.

“It’s strange to me that John Brown was executed for treason for his failed uprising at Harper’s Ferry, when Robert E. Lee, who actually committed treason against the United States, was freed and is celebrated with statues and monuments,” said Archer.

During the weekend leading up to John Brown Day, Archer and other members of the Woodstock Social Justice Initiative, a nonprofit activist association that he is a part of, plan to host a conference featuring activities and lectures related to Brown, his legacy and continuing issues of race and social justice.

Archer also said that he is working with colleagues at the Woodstock Union High School and Middle School to develop a Brown-based curriculum that will use the abolitionist as a subject to teach students about history and politics.

Today at noon, Archer and other members of the Woodstock Social Justice Initiative are hosting a demonstration in the Woodstock Green against white supremacy.

He said it’s important to make a symbolic gesture to help define the community’s values.

“They’re here,” he said of white supremacists. “People in Vermont of course hold those views. The idea behind the vigil is to really show who cares. I want to send a message that we care and that we think that peace is important and that free speech is important.”

Though Brown is usually associated with New York, where he founded a community of free black men, and Kansas, where he and followers fought violently with pro-slavery forces, he also has some Vermont ties.

Civil War historian Howard Coffin said that Brown used to leave the Lake Placid, N.Y., area to shop.

“He did that because the railroad came up the Vermont side, so the stores had more and better goods than the stores on the New York side,” Coffin said. “Information I found in the library of Vergennes indicated he may have been a fairly familiar figure in Vergennes in the latter to mid-part of the 1850s.”

Coffin also found that, prior to setting out for Kansas, Brown spent time in Cavendish, Vt., and he thinks he knows why.

“At the time, the governor of Vermont was Ryland Fletcher,” said Coffin. “Fletcher was an abolitionist, and he had gotten the Legislature to appropriate $20,000 to support anti-slavery settlers in Kansas, and quite a few Vermonters were going out there. Cavendish was Fletcher’s hometown. And so he was there, surely, to meet with Fletcher and try to get his hands on some of that $20,000. I don’t know if he did.”

Coffin said that the record shows Brown was already one of the leading voices in the abolitionist movement at the time, and drew large crowds talking about the evils of slavery.

Donald Wickman, a New York-based historian and museum director with Vermont roots, has documented the path that John Brown’s body took through Rutland and other Vermont communities after his execution.

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“Bardwell House is the hotel where his widow stayed,” Wickman said. “It faces the Rutland Plaza. After staying overnight in Rutland, he got an early start and went to Vergennes, where a large crowd came as they took him by ferry across to New York.”

Brown was buried in New York, along with several other men who fought alongside him at Harper’s Ferry, which is now in West Virginia.

Archer said that, though Brown used violence to achieve his goals, his goal of ending the institution of slavery justified his actions.

At the same time, more communities across the country are challenging traditions associated with Christopher Columbus, whose legacy has become more controversial, but who is still celebrated one week before Vermont’s John Brown Day, on Columbus Day.

“It’s important that it’s a week after. We can draw the contrast between the two,” he said. “Columbus was fighting for the enslavement, torture and kind of degradation of indigenous people and his own greed. John Brown was the yin to Columbus’ yang. He is what we should aspire to and what Columbus is rejecting.”

Coffin said he agreed that monuments of Confederate figures such as Lee should be taken down, if only for the sake of the country’s African-Americans.

“It symbolizes the worst of their American experience. It’s the American Holocaust. If they want those Southern monuments to come down, God bless them. The more that come down, the better,” he said.

Coffin said that Brown, by contrast, gave his life for the noblest of causes, at a time when public sentiment was bitterly divided.

“He was on the right side of things. Absolutely,” Coffin said. “Slavery was evil. And John Brown saw that.”

Mair speaks of ‘healing history’ at John Brown DayMay 8, 2017

Don and Vivian Papson, the founders of North Star Underground Railroad Museum, received their Spirit of John Brown Freedom award Saturday at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site.

Members of the Vermont-based farm worker rights activist group Justicia Migrante — originally from Chiapas, Mexico — received their Spirit of John Brown Freedom award Saturday.

Sierra Club President Aaron Mair kneeled at the grave of 19th-century abolitionist John Brown after laying a wreath with his daughter Olivia as part of John Brown Day May 6 at the state historic site in Lake Placid.

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LAKE PLACID — After listening to the words of other presenters and award recipients at John Brown Day, Sierra Club President Aaron Mair scrapped the multi-page speech he had prepared for the ceremony.

Rather, Mair’s speech centered around a term he had heard just moments prior from Don and Vivian Papson, the founders of North Star Underground Railroad Museum, who, like Mair, also received a John Brown Freedom Award Saturday.

“Healing history,” was the idea that struck him during the Papsons’ speech.

“But I’m going to toss (my speech) out the window, as I often do,” Mair said. “‘Cause I was going to talk a little bit about climate and the need for us to build this national climate movement and come together, but I want to talk about what this award means, this place, this space what it means in my life.

“Don said, ‘Well, to really appreciate history you must have that healing history,'” Mair continued. “And one of the things in my mission with the Sierra Club has been also to expand and make that place an inclusive space and place to talk about that healing history.”

Mair, the Papsons and Vermont-based farm worker human rights activist group Justicia Migrante — originally from Chiapas, Mexico — were honored Saturday with the Spirit of John Brown Freedom Awards on a sunny, yet at times rainy and windy, afternoon at the homestead of the nineteenth century abolitionist.

“We must own that history, because you can not enlist humanity if you do not own your history,” Mair said.

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Don and Vivian Papson, the founders of North Star Underground Railroad Museum, receive their Spirit of John Brown Freedom award Saturday at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in Lake Placid.

RE-ENACTMENT OF JOHN BROWN�S FUNERAL

Documents prepared July 10, 1997for a Re-enactment scheduled for July 12, 1997

I undertook the writing of this re-enactment paper for my friends on the Vermont Committee on the Underground Railroad. The pictures were taken on October 2, 2000, by the author.

1. Home of Joshua Young at 98 South Willard St., Burlington, Vt.

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Rev. Young states that he met young Lucius Bigelow on the streets of Burlington on Wednesday, December 7, 1859. Lucius said, "It is now known that the body of John Brown will cross the lake at Vergennes. I want exceedingly to go to his funeral. Only say you will go with me as my companion and my guest, and we will take the next train." Young replied, "I will meet you at the station at four o’clock." Rev. Young went home and told his wife, "I shall go over to that funeral." "Joshua," she said, "is it wise?" "It may not be wise," he answered, "but I am going anyway."

2. Ferry at Panton, Vt.

(This is not the actual spot where the original ferry operated. The ferry was a few miles south, just outside of Vergennes.) At the train station in Vergennes, Vt., Young and Bigelow learned that the funeral procession had passed through the day before and was now nearing its destination. The two men left hurriedly for the ferry, but by the time they reached the ferry landing, a "noreaster" had hit Lake Champlain and crossing the lake was impossible. When Young and Bigelow told the ferryman that they intended to go to John Brown’s funeral, the ferryman said he thought John Brown deserved his fate. Lucius asked, "Why, do you know any evil of him?" He replied, "No, but a great deal of good. I knew John Brown well; he has crossed this ferry with me a hundred times, and a more honest, upright, fair man does not exist; we all like him, but he had no business meddling with other people’s niggers." Young and Bigelow argued with the ferryman for hours trying to get him to change his mind.

Finally, the storm broke up, the clouds cleared away and the moon lit up the waters of the lake. At this point, Rev. Young said, "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera. See, Mr. Ferryman! God’s full-orbed moon has thrown a bridge of silver across the lake; He bids us go, and who shall hinder?" The ferryman said, "Well, I will call my man and if he will get up and help me we will see what we can do." They were soon on their way to Barber’s Point in New York.

3. Barber�s Point, NY

Just after they landed at Barber’s Point near Westport, Young and Bigelow saw a light at the farmhouse. They went to the farmhouse and knocked on the door. A young man opened the door. "John Browns funeral," either Young or Bigelow said in haste. "We want someone to take us to Elizabethtown, if no further." The youth said, "I will if father is willing." Father was, and the three of them were soon off to Elizabethtown by wagon or carriage.

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4. Adirondack Center Museum, Elizabethtown, NY

Rest stop and point of considerable interest. Check out the herb gardens in back, and be sure to look at the large contour map to see where you have been and where you are going. I also recommend the exhibits of the museum, especially the 19th century collections of tools, toys, and old vehicles. They also have a gallery which features work by local artists and photographers. In Elizabethtown, Young and Bigelow stopped to change the horses before continuing on the 25 mile journey to North Elba.

5. Home and Farm of John Brown in North Elba, NY

Young and Bigelow arrived in this house cold and shivering on the morning of December 8, 1859. Wendell Phillips greeted them and said to Rev. Young, "Rev. Young, you are a minister; admiration for this dead hero and sympathy with his bereaved family must have brought you here, journeying all night through the cold rain and over the dismal mountains to reach this place. It would give Mrs. Brown and the other widows great satisfaction if you would perform the usual service of a clergyman on this occasion." Young replied that he would.

6. Graves of John Brown and His Sons, North Elba, NY

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This is the place where we intended to hold the re-enactment of the funeral which took place mostly in the house. Each section of the funeral appears below in the order used for the original services:

HYMN: BLOW YE THE TRUMPET, BLOW

Words by Charles WesleySung to the tune of LENOX.

Blow ye the trumpet, blow!The gladly solemn soundLet all the nations know,To earth’s remotest bound.

Chorus: The year of jubilee is come! (2x)Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

Jesus, our great high priest,Hath full atonement made;Ye weary spirits, rest;Ye mournful souls, be glad. Chorus.

Extol the Lamb of God,The all atoning Lamb;Redemption in his bloodThroughout the world proclaim. Chorus.

The gospel trumpet hear,The news of heavenly grace;And, saved from earth, appearBefore your Savior’s face. Chorus.

SPONTANEOUS PRAYER OF REV. YOUNG RECORDED IN THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE FOR DEC. 12, 1859

Almighty and most merciful God! we lift our souls unto thee, and bow our hearts to the unutterable emotions of his impressive hour. O God, Thou alone art our sufficient help. Open Thou our lips and our mouth shall show forth thy praise. Thou art speaking unto us; in those grand and majestic scenes of nature, so in the great and solemn circumstances which have brought us together. Our souls are filled with awe and are subdued to silence, as we think of the great, reverential, heroic soul, whose mortal remains we are now to commit to the earth, "dust to dust," while his spirit dwells with God who gave it, and his memory is enshrined in every pure and holy heart. At his open grave, as standing by the altar of Christ, the divinest friend and Savior of Man, may we consecrate ourselves anew to the work of Truth, Righteousness and Love, forevermore to sympathize with the outcast and the oppressed, with the humble and the least of our suffering fellow-men.

We pray for these afflicted ones this sadly bereaved and afflicted family. O! God, cause the oppressed to go free; break any yoke and prostrate the pride and prejudice that dare to lift

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themselves up; and O! hasen on the day when no more wrong or injustice shall be done in the earth; when all men shall love one another with pure hearts, fervently, and love with all their strength; which we ask in the name and as the disciples of Jesus Christ. Amen.

FUNERAL ORATION OF WENDELL PHILLIPS

How feeble words seem here! How can I hope to utter what your hearts are full of? I fear to disturb the harmony which his life breathes round this home. One and another of you, his neighbors, say, "I have known him five years," "I have known him ten years." It seems to me as if we had none of us known him. How our admiring, loving wonder has grown, day by day, as he has unfolded trait after trait of earnest, brave, tender, Christian life! We see him walking with radiant, serene face to the scaffold, and think what an iron hear, what devoted faith! We take up his letters, beginning "My dear wife and children, every one," see him stoop on his way to the scaffold and kiss that negro child,--and this iron heart seems all tenderness. Marvellous old man! We have hardly said it when the loved forms of his sons, in the bloom of young devotion, encircle him, and we remember he is not alone, only the majestic centre of a group. Your neighbor farmer went, surrounded by his household, to tell the slaves there were still hearts and right arms ready and nerved for their service. From this roof four, from a neighboring roof two, to make up that score of heroes. How resolute each looked into the face of Virginia, how loyally each stood at his forlorn post, meeting death cheerfully, till that master-voice said, "It is enough." And these weeping children and widow seem so lifted up and consecrated by long, single-hearted devotion to his great purpose, that we dare, even at this moment, to remind them how blessed they are in the privilege of thinking that in the last throbs of those brave young hearts, which lie buried on the banks of the Shenandoah, thoughts of them mingled with love to God and hope for the slave.

He has abolished slavery in Virginia. You may say this is too much. Our neighbors are the last men we know. The hours that pass us are the ones we appreciate the least. Men walked Boston streets, when night fell on Bunker Hill, and pitied Warren, saying, "Foolish man! Thrown away his life! Why didn’t he measure his means better?" Now we see him standing colossal on the blood-stained sod, and severing that day the tie which bound Boston to Great Britain. That night George III, ceased to rule in New England. History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harpers Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months, a year or two. Still, it is timber, it only breathes, it does not live, hereafter. Men say, "How coolly brave!" But matchless courage seems the least of his merits. How gentleness graced it! When the frightened town wished to bear off the body of the Mayor, a man said, "I will go, Miss Fowke, under their rifles, if you will stand between them and me." He knew he could trust their gentle respect for woman. He was right. He went in the thick of the fight and bore off the body in safety. That same girl flung herself between Virginia rifles and your brave young Thompson. They had no pity. The pitiless bullet reached him, spite of woman’s prayers, though the fight had long been over.

How God has blessed him! How truly he may say, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course." Truly he has finished, done his work. God granted him the privilege to look on his work accomplished. He said, "I will show the South that twenty men can take possession of a town, hold it twenty-four hours, and carry away all the slaves who wish to escape.

" Did he not do it? On Monday night he stood master of Harpers Ferry, could have left unchecked with a score or a hundred slaves. The wide sympathy and secret approval are shown

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by the eager, quivering lips of lovers of slavery, asking, "O, why did he not take his victory and go away?" Who checked him at last? Not startled Virginia. Her he had conquered. The Union crushed, seemed to crush him. In reality God said, " That work is done; you have proved that a Slave State is only fear in the mask of despotism; come up higher, and baptize by your martyrdom a million hearts into holier life." Surely such a life is no failure. How vast the change in men’s hearts! Insurrection was a harsh, horrid word to million a month ago. John Brown went a whole generation beyond it, claiming the right for white men to help the slave to freedom by arms. And now men run up and down, not disputing his principle, but trying to frame excuses for Virginia’s hanging of so pure, honest, high-hearted, and heroic a man. Virginia stands at the bar of the civilized world on trial. Round her victim crowd the apostles and martyrs, all the brave, high souls who have said, "God is God," and trodden wicked laws under their feet.

As I stood looking at his grandfather’s gravestone, brought here from Connecticut, telling, as it does, of his death in the Revolution, I thought I could hear our hero-saint saying, "My father’s gave their swords to the oppressor, the slave still sinks before the pledged force of this nation. I give my sword to the salve my father forgot." If any swords ever reflected the smile of Heaven, surely it was those drawn at Harper s Ferry. If our God is ever the Lord of Hosts, making one man chase a thousand, surely that little band might claim him for their captain. Harpers Ferry was no single hour, standing alone, taken out from a common life, it was the flowering out of fifty years of single-hearted devotion. He must have lived wholly for one great idea, when these who owe their being to him, and these whom love has joined to the circle, group so harmoniously around him, each accepting serenely his and her part.

I feel honored to stand under such a roof. Hereafter you will tell children standing at your knees, "I saw John Brown buried, I sat under his roof." Thank God for such a master. Could we have asked a nobler representative of the Christian North putting her foot on the accursed system of slavery? As time passes, and these hours float back into history, men will see against the clear December sky that gallows, and round it thousands of armed men guarding Virginia from her slaves. On the other side, the serene brow of the calm old man, as he stoops to kiss the child of a forlorn race. Thank God for our emblem. May he soon bring Virginia to blot out hers in repentant shame, and cover that hateful gallows and soldiery with thousands of broken fetters.

What lesson shall those lips teach us? Before that still, calm brow let us take a new baptism. How can we stand here without a fresh and utter consecration? These tears! how shall we dare even to offer consolation? Only lips fresh from such a vow have the right to mingle their words with your tears. We envy you your nearer place to these martyred children of God. I do not believe slavery will go down in blood. Ours is the age of thought. Hearts are stronger than swords. That last fortnight! How sublime its lesson! the Christian heart said amen to John Brown. His words, they are stronger even than his rifles. These crushed a State. Those have changed the thoughts of millions, and will yet crush slavery. Men said, "Would he had died in arms!" God ordered better, and granted to him and the slave those noble prison hours, that single hour of death; granted him a higher than the solder s place, that of teacher; the echoes of his rifles have died away in the hills, a million hearts guard his words. God bless this roof, make it bless us.

We dare not say bless you, children of this home! you stand nearer to one whose lips God touched, and we rather bend for your blessing. God make us all worthier of him whose dust we lay among these hills he loved. Here he girded himself and went forth to battle. Fuller success

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than his heart ever dreamed God granted him. He sleeps in the blessing of the crushed and the poor, and men believe more firmly in virtue, now that such a man has lived. Standing here, let us thank God for a firmer faith and fuller hope.

AT THIS POINT, ANOTHER HYMN WAS SUNG WHILE THE COFFIN WAS PLACED ON A TABLE OUTSIDE THE HOUSE AND OPENED. AFTERWARD, THE COFFIN WAS SEALED AGAIN AND CARRIED TO THE GRAVE FOR BURIAL.

REV. YOUNGS QUOTATION FROM PAUL WHILE STANDING BESIDE THE OPEN GRAVE:

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the righteous judge shall give me at that day, and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.

John Brown Farm State Historic Site

High in New York State's Adirondack Mountains is the home and grave of abolitionist John Brown. Many Americans know the song "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave," but most do not associate the words with this simple farm at North Elba, New York.

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and his followers assaulted the U.S. Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, planning to use the captured arms in an extensive campaign for the liberation of the slaves in the South. Brown was captured on October 18, 1859, imprisoned at Charlestown, Virginia, tried by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and hanged on December 2, 1859. His body was returned to North Elba and was buried in front of his home on December 8, 1859. The remains of several of Brown's followers, who fought and died at Harper's Ferry, were moved to this small graveyard in 1899.

Brown's final prophesy--"I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done,"--was soon to be realized in the Civil War.

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John Brown’s Day of ReckoningThe abolitionist’s bloody raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago set the stage for the Civil War

October 2009

Harpers Ferry, Virginia, lay sleeping on the night of October 16, 1859, as 19 heavily armed men stole down mist-shrouded bluffs along the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah. Their leader was a rail-thin 59-year-old man with a shock of graying hair and penetrating steel-gray eyes. His name was John Brown. Some of those who strode across a covered railway bridge from Maryland into Virginia were callow farm boys; others were seasoned veterans of the guerrilla war in disputed Kansas. Among them were Brown's youngest sons, Watson and Oliver; a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina; an African-American student at Oberlin College; a pair of Quaker brothers from Iowa who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Brown; a former slave from Virginia; and men from Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana. They had come to Harpers Ferry to make war on slavery.

The raid that Sunday night would be the most daring instance on record of white men entering a Southern state to incite a slave rebellion. In military terms, it was barely a skirmish, but the incident electrified the nation. It also created, in John Brown, a figure who after a century and a half remains one of the most emotive touchstones of our racial history, lionized by some Americans and loathed by others: few are indifferent. Brown's mantle has been claimed by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Timothy McVeigh, Socialist leader Eugene Debs and abortion protesters espousing violence. "Americans do not deliberate about John Brown—they feel him," says Dennis Frye, the National Park Service's chief historian at Harpers Ferry. "He is still alive today in the American soul. He represents something for each of us, but none of us is in agreement about what he means."

"The impact of Harpers Ferry quite literally transformed the nation," says Harvard historian John Stauffer, author of The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. The tide of anger that flowed from Harpers Ferry traumatized Americans of all persuasions, terrorizing Southerners with the fear of massive slave rebellions, and radicalizing countless Northerners, who had hoped that violent confrontation over slavery could be indefinitely postponed. Before Harpers Ferry, leading politicians believed that the widening division between North and South would eventually yield to compromise. After it, the chasm appeared unbridgeable. Harpers Ferry splintered the Democratic Party, scrambled the leadership of the Republicans and produced the conditions that enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to defeat two Democrats and a third-party candidate in the presidential election of 1860.

"Had John Brown's raid not occurred, it is very possible that the 1860 election would have been a regular two-party contest between antislavery Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats," says City University of New York historian David Reynolds, author of John Brown: Abolitionist. "The Democrats would probably have won, since Lincoln received just 40 percent of the popular vote, around one million votes less than his three opponents." While the Democrats split over slavery, Republican candidates such as William Seward were tarnished by their association with abolitionists; Lincoln, at the time, was regarded as one of his party's more conservative options.

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"John Brown was, in effect, a hammer that shattered Lincoln's opponents into fragments," says Reynolds. "Because Brown helped to disrupt the party system, Lincoln was carried to victory, which in turn led 11 states to secede from the Union. This in turn led to the Civil War."

Well into the 20th century, it was common to dismiss Brown as an irrational fanatic, or worse. In the rousing pro-Southern 1940 classic film Santa Fe Trail, actor Raymond Massey portrayed him as a wild-eyed madman. But the civil rights movement and a more thoughtful acknowledgment of the nation's racial problems have occasioned a more nuanced view. "Brown was thought mad because he crossed the line of permissible dissent," Stauffer says. "He was willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of blacks, and for this, in a culture that was simply marinated in racism, he was called mad."

Brown was a hard man, to be sure, "built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships," in the words of his close friend, the African-American orator Frederick Douglass. Brown felt a profound and lifelong empathy with the plight of slaves. "He stood apart from every other white in the historical record in his ability to burst free from the power of racism," says Stauffer. "Blacks were among his closest friends, and in some respects he felt more comfortable around blacks than he did around whites."

Brown was born with the century, in 1800, in Connecticut, and raised by loving if strict parents who believed (as did many, if not most, in that era) that righteous punishment was an instrument of the divine. When he was a small boy, the Browns moved west in an ox-drawn wagon to the raw wilderness of frontier Ohio, settling in the town of Hudson, where they became known as friends to the rapidly diminishing population of Native Americans, and as abolitionists who were always ready to help fugitive slaves. Like many restless 19th-century Americans, Brown tried many professions, failing at some and succeeding modestly at others: farmer, tanner, surveyor, wool merchant. He married twice—his first wife died from illness—and, in all, fathered 20 children, almost half of whom died in infancy; 3 more would die in the war against slavery. Brown, whose beliefs were rooted in strict Calvinism, was convinced that he had been predestined to bring an end to slavery, which he believed with burning certitude was a sin against God. In his youth, both he and his father, Owen Brown, had served as "conductors" on the Underground Railroad. He had denounced racism within his own church, where African-Americans were required to sit in the back, and shocked neighbors by dining with blacks and addressing them as "Mr." and "Mrs." Douglass once described Brown as a man who "though a white gentleman, is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery."

In 1848, the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith encouraged Brown and his family to live on land Smith had bestowed on black settlers in northern New York. Tucked away in the Adirondack Mountains, Brown concocted a plan to liberate slaves in numbers never before attempted: A "Subterranean Pass-Way"—the Underground Railroad writ large—would stretch south through the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains, linked by a chain of forts manned by armed abolitionists and free blacks. "These warriors would raid plantations and run fugitives north to Canada," says Stauffer.

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"The goal was to destroy the value of slave property." This scheme would form the template for the Harpers Ferry raid and, says Frye, under different circumstances "could have succeeded. [Brown] knew that he couldn't free four million people. But he understood economics and how much money was invested in slaves. There would be a panic—property values would dive. The slave economy would collapse."

Political events of the 1850s turned Brown from a fierce, if essentially garden-variety, abolitionist into a man willing to take up arms, even die, for his cause. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which imposed draconian penalties on anyone caught helping a runaway and required all citizens to cooperate in the capture of fugitive slaves, enraged Brown and other abolitionists. In 1854, another act of Congress pushed still more Northerners beyond their limits of tolerance. Under pressure from the South and its Democratic allies in the North, Congress opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery under a concept called "popular sovereignty." The more northerly Nebraska was in little danger of becoming a slave state. Kansas, however, was up for grabs. Pro-slavery advocates—"the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with Revolvers, Bowie Knives, Rifles & Cannon, while they are not only thoroughly organized, but under pay from Slaveholders," John Brown Jr. wrote to his father—poured into Kansas from Missouri. Antislavery settlers begged for guns and reinforcements. Among the thousands of abolitionists who left their farms, workshops or schools to respond to the call were John Brown and five of his sons. Brown himself arrived in Kansas in October 1855, driving a wagon loaded with rifles he had picked up in Ohio and Illinois, determined, he said, "to help defeat Satan and his legions."

In May 1856, pro-slavery raiders sacked Lawrence, Kansas, in an orgy of burning and looting. Almost simultaneously, Brown learned that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the most outspoken abolitionist in the U.S. Senate, had been beaten senseless on the floor of the chamber by a cane-wielding congressman from South Carolina. Brown raged at the North's apparent helplessness. Advised to act with restraint, he retorted, "Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice." A party of Free-Staters led by Brown dragged five pro-slavery men out of their isolated cabins on eastern Kansas' Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with cutlasses. The horrific nature of the murders disturbed even abolitionists. Brown was unrepentant. "God is my judge," he laconically replied when asked to account for his actions. Though he was a wanted man who hid out for a time, Brown eluded capture in the anarchic conditions that pervaded Kansas. Indeed, almost no one—pro-slavery or antislavery—was ever arraigned in a court for killings that took place during the guerrilla war there.

The murders, however, ignited reprisals. Pro-slavery "border ruffians" raided Free- Staters' homesteads. Abolitionists fought back. Hamlets were burned, farms abandoned. Brown's son Frederick, who had participated in the Pottawatomie Creek massacre, was shot dead by a pro-slavery man. Although Brown survived many brushes with opponents, he seemed to sense his own fate. In August 1856 he told his son Jason, "I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause."

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By almost any definition, the Pottawatomie killings were a terrorist act, intended to sow fear in slavery's defenders. "Brown viewed slavery as a state of war against blacks—a system of torture, rape, oppression and murder—and saw himself as a soldier in the army of the Lord against slavery," says Reynolds. "Kansas was Brown's trial by fire, his initiation into violence, his preparation for real war," he says. "By 1859, when he raided Harpers Ferry, Brown was ready, in his own words, ‘to take the war into Africa'—that is, into the South."

In January 1858, Brown left Kansas to seek support for his planned Southern invasion. In April, he sought out a diminutive former slave, Harriet Tubman, who had made eight secret trips to Maryland's Eastern Shore to lead dozens of slaves north to freedom. Brown was so impressed that he began referring to her as "General Tubman." For her part, she embraced Brown as one of the few whites she had ever met who shared her belief that antislavery work was a life-and-death struggle. "Tubman thought Brown was the greatest white man who ever lived," says Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.

Having secured financial backing from wealthy abolitionists known as the "Secret Six," Brown returned to Kansas in mid-1858. In December, he led 12 fugitive slaves on an epic journey eastward, dodging pro-slavery guerrillas and marshals' posses and fighting and defeating a force of United States troops. Upon reaching Detroit, they were ferried across the Detroit River to Canada. Brown had covered nearly 1,500 miles in 82 days, proof to doubters, he felt sure, that he was capable of making the Subterranean Pass-Way a reality.

With his "Secret Six" war chest, Brown purchased hundreds of Sharps carbines and thousands of pikes, with which he planned to arm the first wave of slaves he expected to flock to his banner once he occupied Harpers Ferry. Many thousands more could then be armed with rifles stored at the federal arsenal there. "When I strike, the bees will swarm," Brown assured Frederick Douglass, whom he urged to sign on as president of a "Provisional Government." Brown also expected Tubman to help him recruit young men for his revolutionary army, and, says Larson, "to help infiltrate the countryside before the raid, encourage local blacks to join Brown and when the time came, to be at his side—like a soldier." Ultimately, neither Tubman nor Douglass participated in the raid. Douglass was sure the venture would fail. He warned Brown that he was "going into a perfect steel trap, and that he would not get out alive." Tubman may have concluded that if Brown's plan failed, the Underground Railroad would be destroyed, its routes, methods and participants exposed.

Sixty-one miles northwest of Washington, D.C., at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, Harpers Ferry was the site of a major federal armory, including a musket factory and rifle works, an arsenal, several large mills and an important railroad junction. "It was one of the most heavily industrialized towns south of the Mason-Dixon line," says Frye. "It was also a cosmopolitan town, with a lot of Irish and German immigrants, and even Yankees who worked in the industrial facilities." The town and its environs' population of 3,000 included about 300 African-Americans, evenly divided between slave and free. But more than 18,000 slaves—the "bees" Brown expected to swarm—lived in the surrounding counties.

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As his men stepped off the railway bridge into town that October night in 1859, Brown dispatched contingents to seize the musket factory, rifle works, arsenal and adjacent brick fire-engine house. (Three men remained in Maryland to guard weapons that Brown hoped to distribute to slaves who joined him.) "I want to free all the negroes in this state," he told one of his first hostages, a night watchman. "If the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood." Guards were posted at the bridges. Telegraph lines were cut. The railroad station was seized. It was there that the raid's first casualty occurred, when a porter, a free black man named Hayward Shepherd, challenged Brown's men and was shot dead in the dark. Once key locations had been secured, Brown sent a detachment to seize several prominent local slave owners, including Col. Lewis W. Washington, a great-grandnephew of the first president.

Early reports claimed that Harpers Ferry had been taken by 50, then 150, then 200 white "insurrectionists" and "six hundred runaway negroes." Brown expected to have 1,500 men under his command by midday Monday. He later said he believed that he would eventually have armed as many as 5,000 slaves. But the bees did not swarm. (Only a handful of slaves lent Brown assistance.) Instead, as Brown's band watched dawn break over the craggy ridges enclosing Harpers Ferry, local white militias—similar to today's National Guard—were hastening to arms.

First to arrive were the Jefferson Guards, from nearby Charles Town. Uniformed in blue, with tall black Mexican War-era shakos on their heads and brandishing .58-caliber rifles, they seized the railway bridge, killing a former slave named Dangerfield Newby and cutting Brown off from his route of escape. Newby had gone north in a failed attempt to earn enough money to buy freedom for his wife and six children. In his pocket was a letter from his wife: "It is said Master is in want of money," she had written. "I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted, for their [sic] has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you."

As the day progressed, armed units poured in from Frederick, Maryland; Martinsburg and Shepherdstown, Virginia; and elsewhere. Brown and his raiders were soon surrounded. He and a dozen of his men held out in the engine house, a small but formidable brick building, with stout oak doors in front. Other small groups remained holed up in the musket factory and rifle works. Acknowledging their increasingly dire predicament, Brown sent out New Yorker William Thompson, bearing a white flag, to propose a cease-fire. But Thompson was captured and held in the Galt House, a local hotel. Brown then dispatched his son, Watson, 24, and ex-cavalryman Aaron Stevens, also under a white flag, but the militiamen shot them down in the street. Watson, although fatally wounded, managed to crawl back to the engine house. Stevens, shot four times, was arrested.

When the militia stormed the rifle works, the three men inside dashed for the shallow Shenandoah, hoping to wade across. Two of them—John Kagi, vice president of Brown's provisional government, and Lewis Leary, an African-American—were shot dead in the water. The black Oberlin student, John Copeland, reached a rock in the middle of the river, where he threw down his gun and surrendered. Twenty-year-old William Leeman slipped out of the engine house, hoping to make contact with the three men Brown had left as backup in Maryland. Leeman plunged into the Potomac and swam for his life. Trapped on an islet, he was shot dead as he tried to surrender. Throughout the afternoon, bystanders took potshots at his body.

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Through loopholes—small openings through which guns could be fired—that they had drilled in the engine house's thick doors, Brown's men tried to pick off their attackers, without much success. One of their shots, however, killed the town's mayor, Fontaine Beckham, enraging the local citizenry. "The anger at that moment was uncontrollable," says Frye. "A tornado of rage swept over them." A vengeful mob pushed its way into the Galt House, where William Thompson was being held prisoner. They dragged him onto the railroad trestle, shot him in the head as he begged for his life and tossed him over the railing into the Potomac.

By nightfall, conditions inside the engine house had grown desperate. Brown's men had not eaten for more than 24 hours. Only four remained unwounded. The bloody corpses of slain raiders, including Brown's 20-year-old son, Oliver, lay at their feet. They knew there was no hope of escape. Eleven white hostages and two or three of their slaves were pressed against the back wall, utterly terrified. Two pumpers and hose carts were pushed against the doors, to brace against an assault expected at any moment. Yet if Brown felt defeated, he didn't show it. As his son Watson writhed in agony, Brown told him to die "as becomes a man."

Soon perhaps a thousand men—many uniformed and disciplined, others drunk and brandishing weapons from shotguns to old muskets—would fill the narrow lanes of Harpers Ferry, surrounding Brown's tiny band. President James Buchanan had dispatched a company of Marines from Washington, under the command of one of the Army's most promising officers: Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee. Himself a slave owner, Lee had only disdain for abolitionists, who "he believed were exacerbating tensions by agitating among slaves and angering masters," says Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. "He held that although slavery was regrettable, it was an institution sanctioned by God and as such would disappear only when God ordained it." Dressed in civilian clothes, Lee reached Harpers Ferry around midnight. He gathered the 90 Marines behind a nearby warehouse and worked out a plan of attack. In the predawn darkness, Lee's aide, a flamboyant young cavalry lieutenant, boldly approached the engine house, carrying a white flag. He was met at the door by Brown, who asked that he and his men be allowed to retreat across the river to Maryland, where they would free their hostages. The soldier promised only that the raiders would be protected from the mob and put on trial. "Well, lieutenant, I see we can't agree," replied Brown. The lieutenant stepped aside, and with his hand gave a prearranged signal to attack. Brown could have shot him dead—"just as easily as I could kill a mosquito," he recalled later. Had he done so, the course of the Civil War might have been different. The lieutenant was J.E.B. Stuart, who would go on to serve brilliantly as Lee's cavalry commander.

Lee first sent several men crawling below the loopholes, to smash the door with sledgehammers. When that failed, a larger party charged the weakened door, using a ladder as a battering ram, punching through on their second try. Lt. Israel Green squirmed through the hole to find himself beneath one of the pumpers. According to Frye, as Green emerged into the darkened room, one of the hostages pointed at Brown. The abolitionist turned just as Green lunged forward with his saber, striking Brown in the gut with what should have been a death blow. Brown fell, stunned but astonishingly unharmed: the sword had struck a buckle and bent itself double. With the sword's hilt, Green then hammered Brown's skull until he passed out. Although severely injured, Brown would survive. "History may be a matter of a quarter of an inch," says Frye. "If the blade had struck a quarter inch to the left or right, up or down, Brown would have been a corpse, and there would have been no story for him to tell, and there would have been no martyr."

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Meanwhile, the Marines poured through the breach. Brown's men were overwhelmed. One Marine impaled Indianan Jeremiah Anderson against a wall. Another bayoneted young Dauphin Thompson, where he lay under a fire engine. It was over in less than three minutes. Of the 19 men who strode into Harpers Ferry less than 36 hours before, five were now prisoners; ten had been killed or fatally injured. Four townspeople had also died; more than a dozen militiamen were wounded.

Only two of Brown's men escaped the siege. Amid the commotion, Osborne Anderson and Albert Hazlett slipped out the back of the armory, climbed a wall and scuttled behind the embankment of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the bank of the Potomac, where they found a boat and paddled to the Maryland shore. Hazlett and another of the men whom Brown had left behind to guard supplies were later captured in Pennsylvania and extradited to Virginia. Of the total, five members of the raiding party would eventually make their way to safety in the North or Canada.

Brown and his captured men were charged with treason, first-degree murder and "conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection." All of the charges carried the death penalty. The trial, held in Charles Town, Virginia, began on October 26; the verdict was guilty, and Brown was sentenced on November 2. Brown met his death stoically on the morning of December 2, 1859. He was led out of the Charles Town jail, where he had been held since his capture, and seated on a small wagon carrying a white pine coffin. He handed a note to one of his guards: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with blood." Escorted by six companies of infantry, he was transported to a scaffold where, at 11:15, a sack was placed over his head and a rope fitted around his neck. Brown told his guard, "Don't keep me waiting longer than necessary. Be quick." These were his last words. Among the witnesses to his death were Robert E. Lee and two other men whose lives would be irrevocably changed by the events at Harpers Ferry. One was a Presbyterian professor from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, who would earn the nickname "Stonewall" less than two years later at the Battle of Bull Run. The other was a young actor with seductive eyes and curly hair, already a fanatical believer in Southern nationalism: John Wilkes Booth. The remaining convicted raiders would be hanged, one by one.

Brown's death stirred blood in the North and the South for opposing reasons. "We shall be a thousand times more Anti-Slavery than we ever dared to think of being before," proclaimed the Newburyport (Massachusetts) Herald. "Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified," Henry David Thoreau opined in a speech in Concord on the day of Brown's execution, "This morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light." In 1861, Yankee soldiers would march to battle singing: "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on."

On the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, "this was the South's Pearl Harbor, its ground zero," says Frye. "There was a heightened sense of paranoia, a fear of more abolitionist attacks—that more Browns were coming any day, at any moment. The South's greatest fear was slave insurrection. They all knew that if you held four million people in bondage, you're vulnerable to attack."

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Militias sprang up across the South. In town after town, units organized, armed and drilled. When war broke out in 1861, they would provide the Confederacy with tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers. "In effect, 18 months before Fort Sumter, the South was already declaring war against the North," says Frye. "Brown gave them the unifying momentum they needed, a common cause based on preserving the chains of slavery."

Fergus M. Bordewich, a frequent contributor of articles on history, is profiled in the "From the Editor" column.

Harpers Ferry, the site of a federal armory at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, was one of the most heavily industrialized towns in the South. Brown and his men stole

into town after dark on October 16, 1859. (Library of Congress) Brown was a hard man "built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships," in the words of his close friend, the African-American orator Frederick Douglass. (Library of Congress)

Brown's trial lasted six days. He was charged with three capital crimes: treason, murder and "conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection." (

At the gallows, Brown told a guard, "Don't keep me waiting...Be quick." Those would be his last words, though his deeds still reverberate today. (Library of Congress)

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