American Legends: The Life of John Brown

By Charles River Editors

In 1859 he began to set a new plan in motion that he hoped would create a full scale slave uprising in the South. Brown’s plan relied on raiding Harpers Ferry, a strategically located armory in western Virginia that had been the main federal arms depot after the Revolution. Given its proximity to the South, Brown hoped to seize thousands of rifles and move them south, gathering slaves and swelling his numbers as he went. The slaves would then be armed and ready to help free more slaves, inevitably fighting Southern militias along the way.

Brown traveled to Harper's Ferry that summer under an assumed name and waited for his recruits, but he struggled to get even 20 people to join him. Rather than call off the plan, however, Brown went ahead with it, and that Fall, he and his men used hundreds of rifles to seize the armory at Harper’s Ferry. However, the plan went haywire from the start, and word of his attack quickly spread. Local pro-slavery men formed a militia and pinned Brown and his men down while they were still at the armory.

The fallout from John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was intense. Southerners had long suspected that abolitionists hoped to arm the slaves and use violence to abolish slavery, and Brown's raid seemed to confirm that. Meanwhile, much of the northern press praised Brown for his actions. In the South, conspiracy theories ran wild about who had supported the raid, and many believed prominent abolitionist Republicans had been behind the raid as well. Brown’s raid has often been considered one of the main precursors to the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Sep 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781475322316

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