2013

John Browns Body

ld Osawatomie John Brown, now sporting a long, gray beard and bearing the alias Shubel Morgan, had returned to Kansas. He had been in Chatham, Ontario in May 1859 meeting with 12 white and 24 black abolitionists, including Harriet Tubman; they had been discussing a plot of Browns for a violent revolution

to free the slaves. Back in Kansas, John Brown was again causing trouble. Answering a plea for help from a slave who was to be sold at auction, Brown, his sons, and others crossed over into Missouri, freed the slave (along with five of his fellow slaves) and stole some horses and a wagon. Proceeding to another farm, Browns party freed five more slaves, killing a white man who opposed them. When the government placed a $500 bounty on Browns head, the old abolitionist fled again to Canada. In Canada, Brown met with New England abolitionists who had become convinced that only violence could free the slaves. Brown laid out his plan. He would capture the federal arsenal and gun factory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and establish it as the center of a fugitive slave republic, from whence he would lead a general slave insurrection. Compelling, charismatic, with blue-gray eyes flaming with zeal, the gaunt John Brown stirred the hearts of his hearers. Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, and Samuel Gridley Howe supported his desperate plan. But Frederick Douglass said he would not have no part in it. It was night on October 16, 1859 when John Brown with 13 whites (including three of his sons) and five blacks assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Killing an army major, they seized the arsenal and then proceeded to round up the prominent citizens of the town. Fifty slaves, freed by Brown, joined him in the railroad roundhouse where, the next day, the Jefferson Guards of the Virginia state militia besieged them. A bitter fight ensued in which, one by one, Browns men
John Brown, 1859

fell dead around him. Brown was the coldest and firmest man I ever saw in defying danger and death, wrote Lewis Washington, one of the besieged who

survived. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm and to sell their lives as dearly as they could. It was a hopeless defense. The next day, October 18, Colonel Robert E. Lee and a contingent of United States marines battered down the doors of the roundhouse and took a wounded Brown and three others prisoner. Lee delivered them to Richmond, where they were to stand trial for treason. Brown refused the insanity defense his lawyer had prepared for him, and the court condemned him to death.

Unruffled and unrepentant, Brown addressed the court: Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done! No general slave revolt followed Browns action or his execution by hanging on December 2, 1859. The South, however, reeled with fear of slave insurrection and blamed the radical agitation of abolitionists for Brown. Though northern leaders like Lincoln, Douglas, and Seward condemned Browns raid, the South could not, or would not, put any confidence in their sincerity. What southerners heard were the voices of abolitionists, who, for years had condemned all slave holders as immoral monsters, proclaiming Brown a martyr a man they thought would, if he could, have bathed the South in blood. They heard the voice of a man as respectable as Ralph Waldo Emerson, proclaiming Brown that new saint. Browns death, said Emerson, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.