One hundred and 52 years ago this month, a 59-year-old man named John Brown who may or may not have been a lunatic led an almost unbelievably improbable attack on the U.S. Armory in Harpers Ferry, at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. An intelligent but rootless man who had wandered innumerable times between the Northeast and Midwest, Brown believed that he had been put on earth to lead America’s slaves to freedom. After considering any number of ways in which to initiate that process, he fixed on Harpers Ferry — which was then still in Virginia, as West Virginia was not created until 1863, when Union loyalists broke away from Virginia — because he believed that an attack there would inspire slaves in Northern Virginia to rise against their masters.
It didn’t exactly work out that way. Though Brown and his army of two dozen did indeed surprise the guards at the armory on the night of Oct. 16, 1859, and seize control of it, their triumph was exceptionally short-lived, the slave rebellion never materialized, and only a few of them lived to tell the tale. As Tony Horwitz writes in this vivid retelling of the twice-told tale, what Brown “called ‘the great work of my life’ had just ended in abject failure. Instead of a months-long campaign reaching across the South, his attack had withered in thirty-two hours, a stone’s throw inside Virginia. The climactic battle lasted five minutes, with the insurrectionists’ brick citadel breached and its commander beaten to the floor with a parade-ground sword.”
Horwitz believes, though, that the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was right when he wrote to a friend: “His raid into Virginia looks utterly lacking in common sense — a desperate self-sacrifice for the purpose of giving an earthquake shock to the slave system, and thus hastening the day for a universal catastrophe.” Brown “had told Frederick Douglass . . . [that] he thought ‘something startling’ was just what the nation needed,” and Harpers Ferry delivered it. Undoubtedly the Civil War would have occurred if Brown had never left Kansas, and his attack at Harpers Ferry “failed in military terms, but it had clearly evoked the deepest terror of white Virginians — that slaves would rise up and slaughter them, just as Nat Turner’s band had done in 1831.” As one Virginia farmer said of his neighbors: “They are panic stricken & fear their own shadows.”
The raid’s reverberations were felt across the South and the North: “Nationally, Harpers Ferry and its aftermath had exposed a gaping crevasse; nothing now seemed capable of bridging it. The ‘knell of the Union’ that Jefferson had first heard forty years earlier, during the debate over Missouri, could no longer be hushed.” The nation was irrevocably divided. If on the one hand Brown’s raid had spread fear through the white South and a determination to defend slavery at all costs, its end — with Brown’s conviction and hanging — gave the North a martyr, celebrated first in the song “John Brown’s Body,” with its striking opening line (“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave”), and then, using the same melody-, Julia Ward Howe’s even more striking “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which never mentions Brown but was inspired by him, and inspired the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who marched to and sang it.
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