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Even then, the authorities remained unsure of Brown’s true purpose.Īt this point, Brown had accomplished his first objectives. After Brown allowed a train stopped at the station to proceed, the conductor wired the president of the B&O railroad who then wired President James Buchanan and the governor of Virginia. Many Harpers Ferry residents attributed the noise to bandits or workers going on strike. Source: Library of Congressĭespite the gunshots, news of the raid spread slowly. Brown and his fellow raiders crossed the railroad bridge on the left side of the image. His daughter Anne and daughter-in-law Martha served as lookouts and helped deflect suspicion as more and more men traveled to the farm and Brown gathered intelligence about the area.Ī view of Harpers Ferry from Maryland. Brown and his raiders made their headquarters at the Kennedy Farm in Western Maryland, five miles from Harpers Ferry. During a nighttime meeting outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, abolitionist Frederick Douglass bluntly told Brown that he was walking into “a steel trap.” Despite Douglass’s misgivings, Shields Green, a self-liberated freedman who had accompanied Douglass to the meeting, decided to join the raid. Not everyone in the anti-slavery camp supported Brown’s plan. A group of six financiers, known as the Secret Six, provided a majority of the funding for the raid. Brown planned to steal weapons there before traveling south through the Appalachian Mountains to raid plantations and arm enslaved people. After the Chatham Convention, Brown began planning his war against slavery in earnest and soon determined that the federal armory at Harpers Ferry would be his first target. The plan of government was meant to exist alongside the US Constitution up until the United States abolished slavery. There they drew up a provisional constitution for a new government and named Brown commander in chief. In 1858, Brown, several of his followers, and 34 Black abolitionists gathered in Chatham, Canada.

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Crook, a veteran of Bloody Kansas Dangerfield Newby, a formerly enslaved man whose wife and children remained in captivity Osborne Perry Anderson, a free Black man living in Canada and Francis Jackson Meriam, the grandson of a prominent abolitionist who joined Brown despite being blind in one eye. In addition to three of his sons, other volunteers included John E. Now a wanted fugitive, he had come to believe that for slavery to end, he would need to take the fight to the enslavers. Source: Library of CongressĪfter masterminding the escape of several enslaved people from Missouri to Canada, Brown began planning his next move. His time in the territory helped convince Brown to open a new front in the war against slavery. Pro-slavery and free soil forces clash in Kansas. During the battle, pro-slavery forces killed his son, Frederick. Brown then participated in the unsuccessful defense of the antislavery community in the town of Osawatomie, earning himself the nickname Osawatomie Brown. The victims had no chance to defend themselves, and the violence shocked many free soil adherents. On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown and a group of accomplices raided the cabins of several of their pro-slavery neighbors and brutally murdered five men. After a spate of violent attacks by pro-slavery attacks on free soilers, Brown, shocked, horrified, and worried about his family’s safety, decided to strike back. Brown traveled to Kansas at the urging of his sons to aid the free state cause. At the time, the territory was engulfed in a brutal conflict called, “Bleeding Kansas,” which pitted settlers who wanted Kansas to join the Union as a slaveholding state against “free soilers” who wanted it to enter as a free state. After taking the town, the group would march into the mountains to commence a guerrilla war against slavery itself, with the hope of creating an army of the self-liberated that would compel the United States to end the institution once and for all.Ī lifelong abolitionist, Brown had never fired a weapon at another person before he traveled to Kansas in the early 1850s. Led by abolitionist John Brown, their goal was to reach the federal armory and arsenal in Harpers Ferry, a town in present-day West Virginia (at the time, part of Virginia).

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Past darkened farms, houses, and buildings, the group quietly pushed a wagon full of weapons. On the night of October 16, 1859, a group of 22 men made their way along a winding road in western Maryland. An extremely devout man, John Brown saw slavery as a war against the enslaved and believed it went against both the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.