by Alan Axelrod
19
October 16–18, 1859
John Brown Raids Harpers Ferry
Why it’s significant. John Brown’s raid on the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry in an attempt to arm and incite a slave rebellion, together with his subsequent trial and execution, hardened abolitionist forces in the North. Less well recognized is the effect Brown had on the South, which reorganized its militias for greater efficiency, thereby laying the foundation for the rapid creation of a Confederate army. Although many abolitionists denounced the raid at the time, many historians regard it as the spark that ignited the Civil War.
JOHN BROWN BEGAN fighting the Civil War in 1856, five years before the firing on Fort Sumter. He was born in 1800, at Torrington, Connecticut, of early American Puritan stock, and he held the immutable religious, moral, and ideological conviction that slavery was an evil and an abomination that could be ended only by armed insurrection. His first field of battle was Kansas.
Civil war erupted in Kansas even earlier, in 1854, with passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that year. The guerrilla violence there between pro- and anti-slavery factions became a national disgrace called “Bleeding Kansas.” Its cause, ultimately, was the failure of the founding fathers of the United States to resolve the issue of slavery before the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution were ratified in 1781 and 1788, respectively. From that point on, the addition of each new state threatened to upset the balance between the representation of slave and free states in Congress, especially in the Senate. The prospect of each new addition to the Union threw the nation into crisis. A series of legislative compromises were cobbled together in an effort to defuse national disputes that threatened to escalate into civil war.
In 1802, the Louisiana Purchase added a vast territory to the United States, destined eventually to be divided into states. In 1818–19, a portion of the purchase, the Missouri Territory, petitioned for statehood as a slave state. At the time, the Senate consisted of twenty-two senators from northern states and twenty-two from southern states. Adding a new slaveholding state would have shifted the balance. Seeking to blunt the impact of Missouri statehood, Representative James Tallmadge of New York introduced an amendment to the statehood bill calling for a ban on the further introduction of slavery into the state, while maintaining all slaves there in their current status. As for slaves subsequently born in the state, they would be automatically emancipated at age twenty-five. Thus slavery would gradually disappear in Missouri through natural attrition. The House passed the Tallmadge Amendment, but the Senate rejected it, setting off a tortured debate that produced, in March 1820, the Missouri Compromise. The compromise provided for the admission of Missouri as a slave state, but, at the same time, Maine (hitherto a part of Massachusetts) would enter as a free state, thereby maintaining the slave-free balance in Congress. Looking to the future, the Missouri Compromise also drew a line across the territory of the Louisiana Purchase at latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes. North of this demarcation, slavery would be permanently banned—except in the case of Missouri.
Nobody much liked the Missouri Compromise, but it postponed civil war until victory in the US-Mexican War (1846–1848) brought both more new territory and a new crisis to the United States. During the war, in 1846, Congress hoped to hasten the end of the conflict by appropriating $2 million to pay Mexico for what were termed “territorial adjustments.” Anti-slavery Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot introduced an amendment to the appropriation bill, the “Wilmot Proviso,” barring the introduction of slavery into any land acquired as a result of the Mexican War. This proposal provoked South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun to counter with four resolutions of his own: first, that all territories, including those acquired as a result of the war, were to be regarded as the common and joint property of the states; second, that Congress acts as an agent for the states and therefore can make no law discriminating among the states or depriving any state of its rights with regard to any territory; third, that the enactment of any national law regarding slavery violates the Ninth Amendment and its implied doctrine of states’ rights; and, fourth, that the people have the right to form their state governments as they wish. Having promulgated these resolutions, Calhoun warned that if they were rejected, civil war would result.
In the event, not only did the purchase of the Mexican land fail to take place, but the Wilmot Proviso was also defeated. Nevertheless, the Missouri Compromise began to break down, and Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan sought to replace it with the full implementation of a doctrine called “popular sovereignty.” This would remove federal authority over slavery altogether by providing for the organization of new territories without mention of slavery one way or the other. Only when the territory subsequently applied for statehood would the people of the territory itself vote the proposed state slave or free. The federal government would be obliged to abide by the decision of the people—their “popular sovereignty.” As for California, acquired as a result of the US-Mexican War, it would be admitted to the Union directly instead of going through the customary interim territorial status. Southerners objected, arguing that California would vote itself free, as would New Mexico, another territory acquired as a result of the war. To resolve these objections, Senators Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts proposed a whole new compromise. California would be admitted as a free state, but all of the other territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War would be subject to popular sovereignty. Clay and Webster added a provision closing the slave market in the District of Columbia, an international embarrassment in the nation’s capital, but to make this so-called Compromise of 1850 easier for the South to swallow, a new fugitive slave law was included, barring individuals and states from giving refuge to escaped slaves.
The Compromise of 1850 greatly diluted the Missouri Compromise and bought a few more years of uneasy peace. But in 1854, when Nebraska and Kansas applied for statehood, Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise altogether, replacing it with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which extended popular sovereignty to all new territories, not just those acquired from Mexico. The 1820 boundary between slavery and freedom was erased. In this way, legislators hoped to remove the federal government from the slavery issue once and for all.
That hope died aborning. Popular sovereignty was sure to result in a free state of Nebraska, but Kansas, to its south, could go either way. Thus the act was an open invitation to conflict, which came immediately in the form of a bloody guerrilla war within the territory of Kansas between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions.
“Bleeding Kansas” triggered debate throughout the country as proslavery Missourians and antislavery Iowans rushed across the Kansas territorial line in an effort to tilt the popular sovereignty majority one way or the other prior to the statehood vote. In the end, the incoming Missourians outnumbered the Iowans and installed a proslavery territorial legislature. Having done this, most of them returned to their permanent homes in Missouri whereas the Iowa newcomers remained in Kansas. The guerrilla war therefore escalated, and it was at this time that John Brown became the leader of an armed band calling itself the “Free Soil Militia.”
Born in Connecticut, Brown grew up in Ohio. His father was a tanner by trade, but John felt a religious calling and wanted to become a Congregationalist minister. Lacking the money for the required study and afflicted by a painful chronic inflammation of the eyes, Brown tried the tannery and farming instead. Failing at both, he began to drift—until he read of the death of one Elijah P. Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and passionate abolitionist who was killed by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois in 1837. Brown swore what he deemed a public oath: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!”
But cruel fate seemed to conspire against him. A federal court’s declaration of his bankruptcy in 1843 was followed by the deaths of four of his eleven children, from dysentery, during a few terrible day
s of that same year. After another failed farming venture, he moved with his family in 1848 to the Adirondack town of North Elba, New York, where a wealthy abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, was granting land to poor black men. Deciding to settle among them, Brown got by as a subsistence farmer until early in 1856, when he received a letter from his four adult sons, who had moved to Kansas. They wrote that they and their families were menaced daily by marauding proslavery gangs, who not only terrorized anti-slavery locals, but had also raided, pillaged, and burned Lawrence, the center of abolitionist activity in Kansas.
Galvanized into action, Brown moved out to Kansas to join his sons. He rose to leadership of the abolitionist Free Soil Militia there. He recruited his sons and two other militiamen, armed them with cavalry sabers, and set out on the night of May 24, 1856, to make a bloody raid against proslavery settlers along the Pottawatomie River. Brown and the others used their sabers to hack five unarmed settlers to death. This done, they rode back triumphantly to Lawrence, where John Brown claimed full responsibility for having avenged the “sack of Lawrence.”
From this point on, Brown built a reputation as an abolitionist crusader who would stop at nothing in the name of the cause. In the meantime, the so-called Topeka Constitution of 1855, which purported to create Kansas as a free state, was challenged in 1857 by a constitutional convention convened at Lecompton. The Lecompton Constitution proclaimed Kansas a slave state. Although the Free Soilers boycotted the ratification vote, President James Buchanan urged Kansans to ratify and Congress to approve the Lecompton Constitution and duly admit Kansas as a slave state. Neither the Senate nor the House meekly complied, however. Legislators ordered another vote. This one was boycotted by the proslavery faction. With both the Topeka and Lecompton Constitutions dead, a new document, the Wyandotte Constitution, was offered for ratification in 1859. It made Kansas a free state and was ratified by a margin of two to one. It was the constitution with which Kansas entered the Union on January 29, 1861, as a free state. Guerilla violence continued sporadically in Kansas throughout the Civil War.
While Kansas bled, another battle—this one bloodless yet just as bitter—was fought in the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Scott was a Virginia-born slave who had been sold to Dr. John Emerson of St. Louis, a US Army surgeon. Transferred by the army to Illinois and then to Wisconsin Territory, Emerson took Scott with him to each new post. After Emerson’s death in 1846, Scott returned to St. Louis and, aided by lawyers in the employ of an abolitionist group, he sued Emerson’s widow, in a Missouri court, for his freedom. He claimed that he was now a citizen of Missouri, a slave state that nevertheless had a long-standing practice of freeing slaves who had been longtime residents of free states. Because he had been a resident of Illinois, where slavery had been banned by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and also of Wisconsin Territory, where the provisions of the Missouri Compromise (in effect during his residence there) had made slavery illegal, he argued for his emancipation. When the Missouri court decided against him, Scott’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court. The chief justice, Roger B. Taney, was a pro-slavery Virginian, and a majority of the court were Southerners. Unsurprisingly, the court upheld the verdict of the Missouri court and decided against Dred Scott, Taney writing the majority opinion.
The major premise on which Taney denied the appeal was his contention that neither a free “Negro” nor a slave was a citizen of the United States and therefore had no legal standing to bring suit. This decision should have closed the case, but Taney was interested in doing much more than settling a particular case involving a particular fugitive slave. The decision he wrote went on to hold the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. True, Congress had already repealed it, but, as Scott’s attorneys had argued, it was the law of the land when their client was transported to free territory. Taney decided that the Missouri Compromise violated the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against the government’s depriving persons of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law and that, therefore, it was unconstitutional, null, and void even prior to its repeal. In effect, the Supreme Court decided that the Missouri Compromise never lawfully conferred the authority to exclude slavery from the territories or anywhere else. “The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution,” Taney wrote. “It is the opinion of the court that the [Missouri Compromise,] which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void.” This meant that the federal government had no authority to limit, much less abolish, slavery, which was protected by the Fifth Amendment as a property right subject to due process.
The Dred Scott decision outraged abolitionists and others as well. Many Americans were aghast that the highest court in the land had used the Bill of Rights to ensure that a class of human beings remained in chains. That was bad enough. But the decision did even worse. By declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, it foreclosed all federal legislation that sought to limit slavery. Worse still, by defining slavery as strictly a property issue and therefore protected by the Fifth Amendment, the Taney opinion lawfully required every official of every state to actively protect the ownership of slaves. In short, the Taney opinion took slavery beyond the possibility of compromise—at least until such time as the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery in the United States. The likelihood of Congress passing such an amendment was near zero. The possibility that such an amendment, even if passed, would be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by special ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states was precisely zero. In the end, the Dred Scott decision meant that the only way the slave states would agree to abolishing slavery was if they were forced to do so by violence.
There was talk of war, but for the most part, it was just talk. However, one man, John Brown, had stopped talking. The Dred Scott decision had the force of law, but the law, Brown held, was immoral, a violation of higher law, God’s law. In Kansas, he had proved himself willing to spill blood to achieve justice in the eyes of God. He would do it again. Recruiting the backing of six prominent abolitionists—Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, George L. Stearns, and Gerrit Smith (on whose land Brown lived)—Brown financed a plan to seize the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia), obtain guns and ammunition from it, and use them to arm local Virginia slaves. They would rise up, and their uprising—Brown convinced himself—would incite many other slaves to do likewise. With a general slave insurrection under way, people of conscience across the nation would join with their black brothers and act to crush the slaveholders once and for all. The uprising would not stop until the South had renounced slavery.
“One man and God can overturn the universe,” John Brown proclaimed. And, on October 16, 1859, he led a party of sixteen whites and five blacks in a nighttime raid on Harpers Ferry. The armory, almost entirely unguarded, was readily overrun, as was the nearby Hall’s Rifle Works. Brown was well aware that the government would soon act to recover its stronghold. He therefore took hostage some sixty residents of Harpers Ferry, among them the great-grand-nephew of George Washington. As he, the hostages, and most of his raiders holed up in the arsenal, Brown assigned two of his African American raiders to rouse the slaves in the vicinity of the town. Brown had no doubt that he would soon be at the head of an army of many thousands.
The two men rode off, and the hours ticked away. Yet no slaves rallied to the cause. Sometime before daybreak, numerous residents of Harpers Ferry took up positions around the arsenal and began opening fire. When Brown’s men returned fire, the first man they hit was a free black resident of the town. He succumbed to his wounds.
Throughout the morning and afternoon of October 17, Brown, his followers, and his hostages lay under siege by the townspeople. After two of Brown’s sons were killed, the surviv
ing raiders betook themselves and their hostages to the firehouse adjacent to the armory. It was a good place from which to mount a defense.
President James Buchanan was about as far from being a man of action as one could possibly be. At a loss as to how he should cope with the raid, he summoned the army’s top general, Winfield Scott, who told him that Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee was nearby, at Arlington, attending to his late father-in-law’s estate. Acting on Scott’s advice, Buchanan gave Lee command of the nearest available troops. They were militiamen, a handful of regular army soldiers, and a company of US Marines dispatched from their barracks at Eighth and I Streets in Washington. Lee’s second in command of this ad hoc force was an army cavalry lieutenant, James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart.
Lee and his command arrived at Harpers Ferry on the evening of October 17. He found the townspeople frantic, fearing a massive slave rebellion, and clamoring for immediate action. Lee, who had not had time to change out of his civilian clothes and into a uniform, looked more like a distinguished professor than a military officer. He did not allow the anxious citizens to pressure him into imprudent action. With the evening light failing, he did not want to risk storming the arsenal in the dark and quite likely shooting hostages by accident. He decided to wait until first light, at which time he would send Lieutenant Jeb Stuart under a flag of truce to talk with Brown and demand his surrender. Lee instructed Stuart to wave his hat if Brown refused to surrender.
