John Brown's Raid
Brown and the Raid
John Brown was active in the abolition movement for decades before the Civil War, and had earned a notorious reputation for his antislavery activities in Kansas during the 1850s. But he is best known to history for his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and his abortive attempt to spark a slave uprising, an event that helped transform the sectional crisis into a full-blown civil war in 1861.
In October 1859, Brown and a small band of followers seized the arsenal, intending to distribute the weapons to escaped slaves and thereby fashion a crusading army that would march south and end the institution of slavery once and for all. From the start, however, poor planning plagued Brown’s raid.
Though Brown and his men successfully occupied the arsenal, they became paralyzed when slaves failed to rally to them and quickly found themselves surrounded. Within hours, Brown was captured by federal troops and his supporters were either dead or in custody. Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason, murder, and conspiring with slaves to rebel. He was hanged that December.
What the Textbooks Say
Brown’s raid often appears in the narrative of the Civil War as the point of no return—the moment in which the country’s deep divide between free and slave interests polarized with the injection of violence. Textbooks tend to describe the responses to Brown’s raid and trial in binary terms, with Northerners and Southerners displaying unified, and starkly opposite, reactions.
Brown's raid often appears in the narrative of the Civil War as the point of no return. . . .
The Americans, a 2006 textbook, holds that in the North, “bells tolled, guns fired salutes, and huge crowds gathered to hear fiery speakers denounce the South.” The authors paint the Southern reaction with a similarly broad brush: “The response was equally extreme in the South, where mobs assaulted whites who were suspected of holding antislavery views.”
Another textbook, The American Vision, echoes this one-dimensional portrayal of the responses to the raid. The authors argue that “Many Northerners viewed Brown as a martyr in a noble cause,” citing Henry David Thoreau’s prediction that Brown’s execution “would strengthen abolitionist feeling in the North.” The Southern answer, according to the authors, was similarly united: “For most Southerners, however, Brown’s raid offered all the proof they needed that Northerners were actively plotting the murder of slaveholders. ‘Defend yourselves!’ cried Georgia senator Robert Toombs. ‘The enemy is at your door!’”
Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelly’s 2005 A History of the United States calls Brown’s raid “a wild plan.” Like other accounts, their characterization of the Northern response to the abortive insurrection glosses over the complexity of Northern sentiments. In the North, according to the authors, Brown’s “spirit marched on. Celebrated in song and legend, the impractical John Brown, who had not the force to hold a single arsenal, became a spirit leading thousands to risk their lives against slavery.”
The response to the attack on Harpers Ferry was more complex than textbooks usually convey.
Boorstin and Kelly go a step further in describing the Southern response, arguing that Southerners connected the raid with party politics in the North: in Northern eyes, Brown’s “rash exploit at Harpers Ferry seemed part of a widespread abolitionist plot, supported by the ‘black’ Republican party, to incite slave rebellion throughout the South.”
Indeed, Brown’s raid had a profound effect on the deepening sectional divide between North and South, and it infused the dispute with violence in a new and profound way. However, texts often ignore the complex and multifaceted response to Brown’s raid and the complicated way that it revealed not just divisions between the free and slaveholding sections of the nation, but also the important disagreements within those sections.
None of these textbook descriptions is inaccurate, but they are incomplete. While the responses they depict certainly characterize some Northerners and some Southerners, they overlook a variety of passionate and competing reactions, particularly in the North. It is difficult to capture the richness and variety of responses that Brown’s raid elicited in different parts of the nation in just a few sentences. In a country that numbered nearly 100 million people in 1859, and was composed of many competing economic, social, and political interests, the response to the attack on Harpers Ferry was more complex than textbooks usually convey.
Northern Reaction
Northern abolitionists, the most militant and vocal champions of the struggle to free enslaved African Americans immediately, might have been expected to uniformly lionize Brown with the aura of a saint. Indeed, many committed abolitionists responded in exactly this way. But even this group of passionate antislavery disciples did not display unified support of the raid.
Horace Greeley’s antislavery New-York Tribune referred to the “deplorable affair” as “the work of a madman.” To William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, the raid was “misguided, wild, and apparently insane,” though Garrison conceded that in spirit it was a “well intended effort.” Clearly, not every abolitionist concurred with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandiose statement that Brown would make “the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
Not every abolitionist concurred with Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandiose statement that Brown would make “the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
Among more mainstream Northerners, responses to Brown’s raid were even more varied. In cities, many Northern wage laborers found Brown’s vision of a bloody and abrupt end to slavery and the establishment of a racially equal society profoundly threatening. The image of millions of illiterate, unskilled African Americans living amongst them, competing with them for jobs, and driving down wages was not a welcome one for this large constituency in the North.
The new Republican Party in the North struggled even more severely with the fallout of Brown’s raid and trial. Members of the party found themselves confronted with a particularly difficult conundrum. Their party’s appeal was almost purely sectional: its uncompromising opposition to the expansion of slavery meant that it received virtually no support in the South. While Brown’s violent attack on the South’s “peculiar institution” might seem on the surface consistent with the most important plank in their political platform, Brown’s decidedly extralegal tactics were wholly inconsistent with the party’s emphasis on lawful challenge to the legitimacy of slavery. Brown’s attempt to incite a violent uprising against white Southerners and his attack upon a federal installation threatened to become a dangerous political liability for the fledgling party.
In the North, Republicans’ political opponents in the Democratic Party sought to discredit them by associating Brown’s raid with their antislavery policies. In response, Republican politicians (including Abraham Lincoln, then pursuing the party’s nomination for the presidency) urgently sought to distance themselves from Brown, characterizing his attack on federal property as a dangerous prelude to insurrection.
In his speech at Cooper Union just months after Brown’s execution, Lincoln argued that “John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harpers Ferry enterprise.” A Republican newspaper in the Midwest dismissed the raid as “the attempt of an insane old man and his handful of confederates,” fixing the blame not on Republican policies but on the Democrats’ own support for the extension of slavery past its existing borders.
Southern Reaction
To some Southerners, Brown’s behavior was that of an aberrant lunatic.
The Southern response to Brown’s raid was far more homogenous, but it, too, contained some significant variation. White Southerners vilified Brown, almost without exception; his attempt to ignite an armed rebellion of enslaved African Americans played upon some of their deepest and most feverish fears. Even their hatred, however, contained shades of difference. To some Southerners, Brown’s behavior was that of an aberrant lunatic. For most Southerners, however, Brown’s fanatic and violent attack on their “peculiar institution” was all too typical of what they imagined to be unified Northern popular opinion.
A handful of Southerners (including Virginia’s governor Henry Wise, who visited Brown in his jail cell while he awaited execution) tempered their disgust for Brown’s means and goals with a grudging respect for Brown’s physical courage, the strength of his convictions, and his steadfast refusal to plead insanity in the hopes of sparing his own life. Even as they despised the cause in which Brown employed these traits, a few Southerners thought that those qualities gave Brown more in common with their Southern ideals of manhood than with the milquetoast, mercenary souls they imagined populated the North.
Changing Beliefs
Depicting responses to Brown’s raid sharply and strictly according to section also implies a static set of beliefs about slavery and its place in the nation. In fact, those attitudes changed over time, often dramatically. Northern men who flooded recruiting stations in the spring of 1861 went to war primarily to restore Constitutional authority in the rebellious states, not to destroy slavery. The majority of those volunteers had little sympathy for enslaved African Americans and in 1861, most would have refused to join a war presented principally as a crusade against slavery.
After several years of war, however, this began to change. Brown’s belief that slavery was a national crime that would only be purged “with Blood” began to appear less the ranting of a madman and more the vision of a prophet. With the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the growing Northern consensus that the Confederacy could only be defeated through the destruction of slavery, even the rank and file of the Union Army channeled Brown’s abolitionist spirit as they marched into battle to the anthem “John Brown’s Body.”
Complex Responses
It is important to remember that when Brown ascended the gallows, the war was still nearly a year and a half away.
Close reading of primary sources from the weeks and months following the raid reveals far more variety in opinion than is usually accounted for in traditional textbook narratives. That version of the story allows for more complex responses to Brown’s raid both between and within the two sections. Interpretations that emphasize only two facets of that response—with Northerners uniformly embracing Brown as a hero, and Southerners condemning him as a dangerous lunatic—emphasize the sectional differences and imply a far higher degree of unity within each section than actually existed.
By stressing the differences between the two sections and implying uniformity of opinion within them, that binary portrayal fits comfortably within a narrative in which the Civil War had become all but inevitable by January 1860. It is important to remember that when Brown ascended the gallows, the war was still nearly a year and a half away. Treating the raid as a point of no return discounts the serious attempts to derail the crisis through political negotiation during that period, and threatens to overemphasize Southern unity towards the remedy of secession. Only the states of the Deep South seceded immediately in response to Lincoln’s election. States in the Upper South region, which maintained many connections to the North, maintained their allegiance to the Union for months after November 1860.
Chicago Press and Tribune (1859)
Annotation
This early editorial comes from a Democratic newspaper in Illinois: home of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and a state with mixed attitudes towards both the institution of slavery and its future. The urban areas of northern Illinois concentrated more anti-slavery sentiment, while the lower part of the state evinced deeper connections to the slaveholding South, particularly along the border with Kentucky.
The editorial acknowledges that some will discount the raid due to its modest scale, but casts such arguments as an illusion and the raid as “the presage of the future storm, that shall desolate the whole land, if the people give this abolition doctrine their approval.” Abolitionist doctrine, which according to the editors seeks to define the tension between the free and slaveholding sections of the nation as an “irrepressible conflict,” becomes in this view the root cause of Brown’s actions. Brown himself could thus be linked to the Republican politicians William Seward and Salmon Chase for whom, the editorial argues, Brown and his men simply served as the advance column.
Primary Source(s)
We give full particulars to-day of the late extraordinary proceedings at Harper's Ferry, Va. They will attract general attention, and create great sensation in all parts of the Union. It will be seen that more detailed and authentic accounts sustain entirely the view we yesterday took in commenting upon it. It was an abolition plot to free the negroes of Maryland and Virginia at the point of the bayonet. The leader of it was so-called "Ossawatomie Brown," one of the abolitionists who figured with LANE and MONTGOMERY in the murderous forays in Kansas. Men may well be surprised at the reckless boldness and daring of this operation: He must have taken courage from the late elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and supposed that he would have not only the moral, but the physical backing of these two great states in stirring up a servile war in the two states of Maryland and Virginia.
The "irrepressible conflict" of the free and slave states, which is preached by the Republican leaders as an orthodox doctrine, is well calculated to lead to such results. This affair at Harper's Ferry is but the "cloud in the distance no bigger than a man's hand," but it is the presage of the future storm, that shall desolate the whole land, if the people give this abolition doctrine their approval. It necessarily tends to servile insurrection, civil war and disunion. BROWN and his followers are but the advance column of the partisan disciples of SEWARD and CHASE, who are burning to make a practical application of the "irrepressible conflict doctrine. They stand ready to deluge the land in blood to carry out their fanatical views; and the momentous question is, do the majority of the people of the free states sympathize with them?
The danger of having a Republican-abolition President can now be readily appreciated. Such a President, having his sympathies with the insurrectionists, would be slow to move in arresting their outrages. Delay, indecision and coldness would encourage the very parties against whom he should exert promptly the physical and moral power of the government. And the very fact that there was a President with such sympathies would encourage insurrection all through the slave states. It is for the people, North and South, to say if those things shall be.
Charleston Mercury (1859)
Annotation
The Charleston Mercury published in the capitol of South Carolina, a notorious hotbed of secessionism and the first state to formally depart the Union after Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860. This early editorial attempts to parse the events at Harpers Ferry in its first paragraph, providing details about the planning and conspirators to impatient readers. White South Carolinians were particularly keen for such information; in 1860, South Carolina’s proportion of enslaved African Americans was the largest in the Union, and their fears of a violent slave insurrection accordingly high.
The editorial closes with an ominous warning about the raid’s significance for the future, labeling it “profoundly symptomatic of the future of the Union with our sectional enemies.” To the editors at the Mercury, Brown’s attempt to ignite a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry offered incontrovertible proof of the existence in the North of “men ready to engage in adventures upon the peace and security of the southern people, however heinously and recklessly."
Primary Source(s)
From the accounts given of the Harper's Ferry business, it would seem that it was concocted two months since at the Ohio State Fair, by Brown and other confederates, and that its object was to raise the slaves in that country, kill all persons interferring or in the way, and carry them off to freedom north of the Mason and Dixon's line. The number of whites directly concerned—only twenty-three—is small for the great preparations made in arms and ammunition. It is stated that recruits from the North were expected, but did not arrive in time, Brown having been precipitate in his movement. Three of the whites are said to have escaped with four hundred negros.
As we anticipated, the affair, in its magnitude, was quite exaggerated; but it fully establishes the fact that there are at the North men ready to engage in adventures upon the peace and security of the southern people, however heinously and recklessly, and capable of planning and keeping secret their infernal designs. It is a warning profoundly symptomatic of the future of the Union with our sectional enemies.
Citation
Secession Era Editorials Project. "The Insurrection." Charleston Mercury, October 21, 1859. Accessed March 2, 2012.
Nashville Republican Banner (1859)
Annotation
Nashville’s newspaper took a decidedly moderate stance towards Brown’s raid in this editorial, suggesting that the root cause of the attempted uprising was the ceaseless agitation on the subject of slavery from both sides, North and South. The editors of the Banner urged Southerners not to be caught in an impassioned, emotional response to the raid but rather to give the event “that calm reflection and careful consideration that it deserves.”
The Banner’s editorial is also noteworthy in its prescription for the future, particularly given the paper’s location in a slaveholding Southern state (albeit one with more ambivalence toward the institution than states in the deep South). The editors caution their readers against the “folly of the Southern people in their incessant demand for more slavery legislation,” suggesting that anti-slavery agitation in the North would wither quickly in the absence of such agitation.
Primary Source(s)
We are at length enabled to lay before our readers a connected and apparently truthful, narrative of the late revolutionary movement in and around Harper's Ferry. It can no longer be doubted that the object of the conspirators was the liberation of the slaves in Virginia and Maryland. It is gratifying to record that the energy of President Buchanan and Governor Wise, the activity of the soldiery and the zeal of the citizens have crushed out the conspiracy before it could attain the huge dimensions of a revolution. But though the movement resulted so disastrously to the insurgents and met with so little sympathy from the negro population, for whose benefit it was designed, it will nevertheless prove a valuable lesson to the people of the South, if they give it that calm reflection and careful consideration that it deserves.
This attempt to excite an insurrection among the slaves is one of the natural results of the agitation of the slavery question, originated and so persistently kept up by designing politicians, both of the North and the South for partisan purposes. It can be traced to no other cause, and unless the people of both sections rise in the majesty of their strength and put an end at once to this mischievous agitation, the page that records the bloody events of the last two days, will be but a preface to the history of a civil war in which the same scenes will be re-enacted on a larger scale, and end in the dissolution of our glorious Union.
In the language of the New York Herald, "we have before us some of the ripening fruits of that mischievous reopening of the slavery agitation in 1854, commenced by Douglas and Pierce as Presidential candidates for the decisive vote of the South in the Cincinnati Convention. There would have been no invitation to them to fight out the slavery issue, face to face, on the soil of Kansas. And this man Brown was only a discharged guerilla free State soldier from the border ruffian scenes of that bloody Territory. Flushed with the success of the war for freedom there, and rendered daring, reckless, and an abolition monomaniac, by the scenes of violence and blood through which he had passed, he believed the time at hand for carrying the Kansas war for freedom into the hearts of the Southern States."
The folly of the Southern people in their incessant demand for more slavery legislation is exhibited in a strong light by this view of the subject, and should convince them of the impolicy of further agitation. By ceasing the agitation in the South, an end will be put to the discussion of this subject in the North. As long as we agitate the North will do the same, and though only seventeen men of the entire North were engaged in the conspiracy, there is no telling how many may engage in the next plot unless the subject of slavery ceases to be a matter of discussion among demagogues. The people have the means in their hands of putting an end to this evil, by resolutely refusing to elevate men to political office who seek to ride into power by incendiary appeals to sectional prejudices.
Citation
Secession Era Editorials Project. "The Harper's Ferry Riot." Nashville Republican Banner, October 24, 1859. Accessed March 2, 2012.
Lincoln's Cooper Union address (1860)
Annotation
Abraham Lincoln delivered his speech at New York’s Cooper Union in February 1860, several months after Brown’s execution and several months before he received the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency. In the address, Lincoln outlined his attitudes towards slavery—principally that it must not be extended into the territories, a position Lincoln argued the founding generation had endorsed. In the middle section of the address, Lincoln responded to Southern claims that the Harpers Ferry raid was a Republican plot (a claim for which there was scant evidence) and to the equally damaging claim that Brown’s actions were a logical outgrowth of the Republican Party’s policies concerning slavery.
While the Cooper Union Address is not as frequently quoted as his inaugural addresses of 1861 and 1865 or his speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery in 1863, it remains a critical part of his political ascent. Several historians have argued that the Cooper Union address, more than any other speech, catapulted Lincoln to the presidency.
Primary Source(s)
. . . .You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.
Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held to and made by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair. When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections. The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves. Surely, this does not encourage them to revolt. True, we do, in common with "our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live," declare our belief that slavery is wrong; but the slaves do not hear us declare even this. For anything we say or do, the slaves would scarcely know there is a Republican party. I believe they would not, in fact, generally know it but for your misrepresentations of us, in their hearing. In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.
Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the Republican party was organized. What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which, at least three times as many lives were lost as at Harper's Ferry? You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was "got up by Black Republicanism." In the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive slave insurrection is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the indispensable connecting trains.
Much is said by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true. A plot for an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favorite master or mistress, would divulge it. This is the rule; and the slave revolution in Hayti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances. The gunpowder plot of British history, though not connected with slaves, was more in point. In that case, only about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by consequence, averted the calamity. Occasional poisonings from the kitchen, and open or stealthy assassinations in the field, and local revolts extending to a score or so, will continue to occur as the natural results of slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I think, can happen in this country for a long time. Whoever much fears, or much hopes for such an event, will be alike disappointed.
In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many years ago, "It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up."
Mr. Jefferson did not mean to say, nor do I, that the power of emancipation is in the Federal Government. He spoke of Virginia; and, as to the power of emancipation, I speak of the slaveholding States only. The Federal Government, however, as we insist, has the power of restraining the extension of the institution - the power to insure that a slave insurrection shall never occur on any American soil which is now free from slavery.
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things.
And how much would it avail you, if you could, by the use of John Brown, Helper's Book, and the like, break up the Republican organization? Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling - that sentiment - by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation?
But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.
That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.
When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events. . . .
Primary Source Annotated Bibliography
PBS. American Experience: John Brown’s Holy War.
A companion website to the PBS American Experience film John Brown’s Holy War, the site contains primary source documents along with interactive maps and timelines.
West Virginia Archives and History. "His Soul Goes Marching On”: The Life and Legacy of John Brown.
The West Virginia Archives and History online exhibit “His Soul Goes Marching On”: The Life and Legacy of John Brown includes scores of transcribed primary source documents, including letters from Brown, his sons, and supporters, newspaper clippings, and speeches. It provides an especially rich and detailed picture of the years between 1850 and 1860.
University of Missouri-Kansas City. Famous Trials: John Brown.
Sponsored by the University of Missouri-Kansas City, this site focuses on Brown’s imprisonment and trial, providing transcripts of trial testimony, Brown’s Provisional Constitution, and Brown’s own letters from prison.
Secondary Source Annotated Bibliography
Earle, Jonathan, ed. John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008.
This slim volume provides short essays about Brown’s life, abolitionism, the Harpers Ferry raid, and his trial, along with a plethora of primary-source documents concerning Brown’s life and legacy.
Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
The second half of a two-volume work on the growth of the sectional divide during the antebellum period, Freehling offers fresh insight into the ways that Brown’s raid affected Southerners, particularly those agitating for secession.
Potter, David. The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
For decades the standard political history of 1850s America, Potter provides context for Brown’s 1859 raid and explores some of its effects on various groups of Americans, North and South.
Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New York: Knopf, 2005.
The definitive modern biography of Brown, Reynolds places Brown’s views and actions in rich context and provides critical insight into the consequences of his actions at Harpers Ferry and their effect on subsequent events.
Historian Christopher Hamner teaches at George Mason University, serves as Editor-in-Chief of Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800, and is the author of Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776-1945.
