John+Brown's+Raid+On+Harper's+Ferry

=**John Brown's Raid On Harpers Ferry **= By Justin Chander and Michael Gusev

Harper Weekly's illustration of U.S. Marines attacking John Brown's "Fort."

= Introduction = On the evening of October 16th, 1859, a white abolitionist named John Brown led an attack on a small town in Virginia called Harpers Ferry. Over the course of the following three days, Brown and his men were apprehended and captured by Col. Robert E. Lee. However, the result of Brown's actions changed the public controversy of slavery in the United States forever.

The Plot
The raid was originally conceived by John Brown as a catalyst for a slave uprising in the South; Brown was a white abolitionist raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. His original plan was to capture the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, which was one of the largest arsenals in the country at the time -- the other largest was in Springfield, Massachusetts, but this was too far north to be an effective example to the southern slave owners -- and use the vast amount of weaponry there to start a massive revolt across all slave states by slowly fighting his way into the mountains and making forays into the plains while gradually traveling southward. Brown requested the help of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, two African-American abolitionists and civil rights activists, but both declined: Tubman was unable because of an illness, whereas Douglass believed that the plan was doomed from the start, stating that the federal government was far too strong for Brown's ragtag team to go up against.

Brown’s plan was not to conduct a sudden raid and then escape to the mountains. Instead, his plan was to use those rifles and pikes he captured at the arsenal, to instill fear in Virginia slaveholders. He believed that on the first night of action two to five hundred black adherents would join his line. He ridiculed that the militia and regular army that might oppose him. Then he would send agents to nearby plantations, rallying the slaves. He planned to hold Harpers Ferry for a short time, expecting that as many volunteers would join him, and then he would move Southward in order to rally more slaves that wanted to be free, and increase supplies.

The Raid
Brown rented a farmhouse a few miles from Harpers Ferry and made his preparations. Many abolitionist groups sent him weapons and ammunition. His team consisted of only 22 people, mostly white men but also including freed and former slaves. On October 16th, 1859, John Brown led the raid on Harpers Ferry. The squadron captured several buildings in Harpers Ferry, as well as a few watchmen and other hostages. Whereas Brown had originally hoped that several hundred slaves from neighboring plantations would join the raid on the first night, no slaves joined. When Brown allowed a B & O Railroad train to continue after having been apprehended, the train staff alerted the authorities, and this was the start of Brown's downfall.

As the villagers and slave-owners of Harpers Ferry and the neighboring towns circled in on Brown, he was forced to sequester his faction into smaller and smaller confines, eventually taking a small engine house, today known as John Brown's Fort. News traveled to the White House, and Buchanan sent a detachment of U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. The resulting standoff was a complete fiasco on Brown's side. Brown was cornered in by the marines, and had refused to surrender, so the marines broke in the Engine House, and ended up killing John Brown. The rest of the raiders that were still alive were taken prisoner.

Connection To The Civil War
Although Brown and many of his men were soon executed, the raid started a widespread fear of Northern opposition to slavery, and many slave-owners began an effort to train and prepare their plantations for an onslaught of raids. This trend gained momentum and eventually morphed into an effort to militarize the South in defense of a possible Northern invasion. This set the stage for the Civil War. The event ignited a widening rift between the commercialized North and agrarian South. The general distrust between the two parts of the country formed the potent but dormant conditions for the Civil War.John Brown's raid, while a failure to begin a rebellion from within the South by the slaves, started the conversion from social distrust to militarized distrust between the North and South U.S., which eventually led to the outbreak of the Civil War. Therefore, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was the definitive primary cause of the Civil War. A fter his execution, John Brown became the country's most polarizing symbol and greatly increased the animosity between the supporters of slavery and the abolitionists. After John Brown, the South became even more fanatical in the defense of slavery. To his supporters, John Brown was a saint who died in the noble cause of ending slavery; to his opponents, he was an insane murderer. All in all, his extremist actions caused an extreme change in the once-peaceful opposing views of slavery, ultimately leading up to the Civil War.

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**Primary Sources: ** [] - "Master List Of John Brown and Harper Ferry Newspaper Articles." [] - "Eyewitness Accounts Of The Raid, The Capture, and The Trials." [] - "John Brown's Last Prophecy - Letter From Mahala Doyle."

**Secondary Sources: ** [] - "People & Events - John Brown." [] - "The Kennedy Farmhouse - John Brown."

Mormons!