On Sunday, October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of twenty-one men came out of the dark night to change American history. “The terror of all Missouri,” as the New York Times had called the fifty-nine-year-old abolitionist, was known nationally as a leader of the antislavery movement—and a zealot who had murdered at least five pro-slavery men in cold blood. His stated purpose that night was to seize the federal armory and its thousands of weapons in the quiet town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, expecting it to be the spark that ignited a rebellion of slaves in the region. In fact, he would start a war that would inflame the entire nation.
While history records that the Civil War began early in the morning of April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops began shelling Union-occupied Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina’s, harbor, many historians believe war became inevitable the night of John Brown’s raid. Today Brown is remembered mostly for the verse “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave … his soul is marching on,” but his daring raid at Harpers Ferry put the nation on the path that would lead to the bloodiest war in American history.
When abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his attempt to ignite a slave rebellion, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that his execution would make “the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
Decades earlier the founding fathers had successfully managed to weave together the thirteen colonies into a nation without resolving the momentous debate over slavery. Since an English ship, the White Lion, sailing under a Dutch flag in 1619, had traded the first twenty enslaved Africans to the Jamestown colonists in exchange for food and supplies, Americans had wrestled with the moral and economic implications of treating human beings as property. The agrarian South, with its tobacco economy, relied on slave labor far more than the industrialized North. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to begin banning slavery, passing a law that moved exceedingly slowly toward emancipation. After long and bitter debates that threatened to tear apart the newly won country, the delegates attending the 1787 Constitutional Convention passed the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining a state’s representation in Congress but gave those slaves no rights. Slaves were property to be bought, sold, and worked until they died—and all of their children were born into slavery.
With schoolteacher Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin, the so-called engine that could rapidly clean seeds from raw cotton, cotton replaced tobacco as the South’s most profitable crop—and required even more slaves to pick it. America’s 1790 census recorded almost seven hundred thousand slaves, a number that increased by more than half a million in the next two decades. By 1850 it was estimated there were more than three million slaves in the United States, and one in four Southerners owned slaves.
While New England’s textile industry had once depended on slave labor, the Northern states had mostly abolished slavery by 1804—although in some cases the statutes remained legally in force. In 1808 Congress outlawed the importation of slaves from Africa, but the domestic slave trade, the exchange of existing slaves and their families, continued to flourish in the South.
The Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, arranged a tenuous peace between pro- and antislavery interests, by dividing the twenty-two states equally into slave and free states. But while Northern politicians continued to speak out publicly and mostly ineffectually against slavery, others began taking covert action. The abolitionist movement created the Underground Railroad, a vast network of way stations consisting of hiding places in caves and in cellars, beneath church floors and in barn lofts, through which “conductors” guided escaping slaves trying desperately to make their way north to freedom. Among these conductors and stationmasters were legendary figures such as Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who risked her life leading hundreds of others to freedom, as well as common folk such as the parents of teenager James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, whose small farm in Homer, Illinois, served as a way station. The penalties for working on this railroad were severe; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it a federal crime to assist escaping slaves and included large fines and possible imprisonment for offenders.
In 2020 Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who led hundreds of others to freedom on the Underground Railroad, will become the first woman since Martha Washington to appear on American currency when she replaces slaveholder Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
England peacefully abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833, but this “peculiar institution,” as Southerners referred to it, remained the foundation of the Southern agricultural economy. The issue threatened to rip the country apart; Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke for most Northerners when he said, “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”
In 1851, a Connecticut woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing a serial for the antislavery magazine the National Era, in which she “painted a word picture of slavery” based loosely on actual stories. A year later her more-than-forty-installment series was published as the two-volume book Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Its portrayal of the brutal realities of American slavery shocked the world. The book became a best seller in the United States, Europe, and Asia, eventually being translated into sixty languages; stage plays based on the story—Tom shows—were immensely popular. By the end of the century Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold more copies than any book other than the Bible, and it is credited with forcing many Americans to face the true horrors of the slave trade. “I wrote what I did,” she explained, “… because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity—because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”
Public consciousness had been raised, but still the nation was divided. When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which allowed residents of those territories to vote to decide whether they would enter the Union as slave states or free states, real fighting finally broke out. The bill, sponsored by Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, was an attempt at compromise. Instead, it further split Congress between the antislavery North and pro-slavery South, and caused the demise of the once-powerful Whig Party, which in turn led to the formation of the new and strongly antislavery Republican Party. And it ignited the long-lasting guerrilla war that journalist Horace Greeley named, sadly, Bleeding Kansas.
Pro-slavery gunslingers, known as Border Ruffians or bushwhackers, raced into the Kansas territory from Missouri, where they were met by the equally violent abolitionist Jayhawkers. What has on occasion been called the first battle of the Civil War took place on May 21, 1856, when as many as eight hundred men rode into the newly formed antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, terrified the residents, and destroyed several buildings—although the only fatality was the result of an accident, when a building collapsed.
For half a century politicians had been able to find ways to compromise about slavery, but they were running out of solutions. In May 1856, angry words became violent deeds in Congress when pro-slavery congressman Preston Brooks from South Carolina viciously attacked Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, smashing him on his head and shoulders with his cane, stopping only when the cane broke into pieces. It took Sumner three years to recover from his injuries—while Brooks became a hero in the South and received new canes from his admirers.
Abolitionists found their own hero three days later in Osawatomie, Kansas. John Brown was the Bible-quoting father of twenty children who had moved to Kansas to fight to end slavery. The son of strict Calvinists, he grew up among mostly Native American families in western Ohio. When he was twelve years old, he watched helplessly as a young slave boy was beaten and forced to sleep in the cold wearing only rags, an experience that he later wrote transformed him into “a most determined Abolitionist.” He helped escaping slaves flee north to Canada, promoted black education, and insisted that his two black employees sit by him in his Congregational church—for which he was expelled. At an antislavery meeting when he was thirty-seven years old he stated, “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!”
This 1860 lithograph portrays five significant events in the violent life of John Brown. The figure in the bottom center appears to be the spirit of America in mourning.
He later befriended Frederick Douglass, the best-known black man in America, who himself had escaped from slavery in Maryland to become a legendary defender of human rights and who described Brown as “in sympathy a black man … and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
When Brown learned of the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, and the attack on Senator Sumner, he vowed to retaliate, telling his followers that it was their sacred duty to “strike terror in the hearts of the pro-slavery people.” On the night of May 24, Brown’s seven-man raiding party, including four of his sons, attacked pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Carrying rifles, knives, and swords, the Pottawatomie Rifles, as Brown called his militia, dragged victims out of their homes and hacked them to death, killing five men in what would become known as the Pottawatomie Massacre. As a member of that raiding party later dispassionately recalled, “The old man Doyle and two sons were called out and marched some distance from the house.… Old John Brown drew his revolver and shot the old man Doyle in the forehead, and [his] two youngest sons immediately fell upon the younger Doyles with their short two-edged swords.” Brown was indicted for murder but was able to evade capture—and almost instantly became a revered figure in the abolitionist movement.
Frederick Douglass, photographed at age sixty-one, escaped slavery to become a leader of the abolitionist movement and one of the most celebrated men in America. “No man,” he wrote, “can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
The Supreme Court further inflamed the already fervent abolitionists with its decision in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case. Scott was a slave who had lived for a time with his owner in the free state of Illinois and the territory of Minnesota—and when his owner died and he became the possession of the widow, he sued for his freedom. Ironically, a substantial portion of his legal fees was paid by the sons of his original owner, one of them an antislavery Missouri congressman named Henry Taylor Blow. After a Missouri state court ruled that Scott was still legally bound because he had not sued for his freedom while living in a nonslave state, his case slowly made its way to the Supreme Court.
Several similar cases decided at the state level had freed the petitioning slaves, establishing the doctrine of “once free, forever free.” But five of the nine Supreme Court justices hearing the Dred Scott case came from slave-owning families. The eleven-year legal battle was concluded in March 1857, when Chief Justice Roger Taney issued what scholars often consider the single worst verdict in Supreme Court history, ruling that an African-American could never be a citizen and therefore Scott had no standing to sue for his freedom in a federal court, and, more important, that the federal government had no right to regulate slavery in any territory acquired after the signing of the Constitution. Slaves were property, Taney wrote in the majority opinion. “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The court went even farther than that, declaring that slave owners were protected by the Fifth Amendment guarantee that citizens could not be deprived of their property “without due process of the law.” As a result, the court found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and slavery could not legally be prohibited anywhere in the federal territories.
Perhaps fittingly, ten weeks after the decision was issued, Congressman Henry Blow purchased Scott’s freedom, as well as that of his wife and two daughters, for $750. Dred Scott found work as a porter in a Saint Louis hotel but lived as a free man for only nine months, dying of tuberculosis in 1858 at age sixty-three.
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney, as photographed by Mathew Brady.
Rather than settling the issue, as many had hoped it would, the Dred Scott decision propelled the nation into a crisis. The clever compromises of the past that had held the Union together tenuously no longer were possible. Fifteen months after the decision, former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln delivered one of his greatest speeches to the state Republican convention in Springfield, Illinois, warning that with this ruling, the court had taken away from states the right of self-determination and that eventually slavery could be imposed upon the entire nation. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
When the slave Dred Scott sued for his freedom because he had lived in slave-free areas, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (photographed at left by Mathew Brady) wrote in his 1857 decision that blacks had no constitutional rights and could be “bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was published weekly and was one of the most popular publications in the country. Featuring the Scott family on its cover demonstrated the significance of this decision.
The seven debates in 1858 between Republican Abraham Lincoln and his rival for an Illinois Senate seat, Democrat Stephen Douglas, riveted the nation. Lincoln, seen here speaking in September in Charleston, Illinois, believed the issues they discussed were so important that they would continue to be debated long after “these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.”
Those words marked the beginning of Lincoln’s campaign for the Senate against two-term Democratic incumbent Stephen Douglas. Throughout the fall of 1858 Lincoln and Douglas met in seven historic debates that riveted the nation and set the stage for the presidential election two years later, when they would meet again. Their positions on slavery actually were much more different than is commonly accepted. “The Little Giant,” as the five-foot-four Stephen A. Douglas was known, was a towering political figure who strongly supported the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the belief that voters in each state and territory should decide for themselves contentious issues such as slavery. Although personally he was opposed to the institution, he argued that majority rule was the essence of democracy and the very foundation on which this nation had been founded. “If there is any one principle dearer and more sacred than all others in free governments,” he proclaimed, “it is that which asserts the exclusive right of a free people to form and adopt their own fundamental law, and to manage and regulate their own internal affairs and domestic institutions.” For that reason, he argued against President James Buchanan’s efforts to strong-arm Kansas into the Union as a slave state—a political position that resulted in his gaining supporters from the opposition Republicans in Congress.
Lincoln was not yet the Great Emancipator he was to become. While he believed slavery was morally wrong and a violation of the constitutional declaration that “all men are created equal,” he was not an abolitionist. He argued that slavery should be prohibited in new states and territories, but he did not advocate outlawing it where it existed. In fact, as he said during the fourth debate, “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” Basically, he believed free black men and women should have the right to work and be paid a fair wage, move without restriction in society, and make their own decisions. He did not support giving freed slaves the right to vote, serve on juries, hold political office, or marry whites. In fact, for a time he supported colonization, suggesting that slaves be freed and sent to the African nation of Liberia. Given the strife that existed between the races, he said in 1862, it would be “better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Interest in the hours-long debates was so intense that many newspapers printed the entire texts. Although Douglas won the Senate election, Lincoln gained the national recognition and support that would result in his becoming the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1860.
All those fancy words and highfalutin ideas had little impact on fightin’ men like John Brown. While Lincoln and Douglas were busy speechifying and Stowe was writing her books and plays, Brown was taking action. He intended to start an uprising that would lead to the end of slavery. He proved his capabilities in the winter of 1858, when he liberated twelve slaves from two farms in Verona, Missouri, and led them on a hazardous eighty-two-day, thousand-mile journey to freedom in Canada.
That raid settled most doubts about Brown. As abolitionist Gerrit Smith said, “I was once doubtful in my own mind as to Captain Brown’s course. I now approve of it heartily.” Brown secured the intellectual and financial backing of many Northern abolitionists, among them Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a group of businessmen, ministers, and teachers known as the Secret Six—all of whom purportedly did not know his precise plan, which was to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, believing that this would initiate an uprising of slaves throughout the South. Among the people with whom he shared his dream was his friend Frederick Douglass. Brown had stayed in Douglass’s Rochester, New York, home, where he had drafted a provisional constitution for Virginia that he intended to put in place after the successful uprising.
Weeks before the raid Douglass met secretly with Brown in a stone quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to try to dissuade him. Harpers Ferry was bordered by rivers and mountains, he warned; it was “a perfect steel trap” and he worried that Brown would not get out of there alive.
But Brown would not be deterred, telling Douglass, “I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I want you to help hive them.” Apparently he intended to remain in Harpers Ferry only long enough to collect sufficient weapons. Then he would retreat into a stronghold deep in the Allegheny Mountains, where he would build his army and launch guerrilla raids on plantations.
John Brown’s dream that his raid might convince slaves to throw off their chains and fight for their freedom was not completely irrational. Less than three decades earlier in Southampton County, Virginia, a thirty-one-year-old literate slave named Nat Turner had led a murderous uprising of an estimated seventy enslaved and freed blacks. Turner, who believed he was ordained to “slay my enemies with their own weapons,” began with six followers, but that number grew rapidly as he cut a bloody trail through the countryside, freeing slaves and killing almost every white man, woman, and child they encountered. By the time the rebellion was put down, as many as seventy whites had been murdered. Rumors spread rapidly that the rebellion was widespread, that “armies” of slaves were marching, indiscriminately killing whites with axes, shovels, and other farm tools. Retaliation was swift and brutal; soldiers and terrified white citizens randomly attacked and killed blacks. No one knows how many people died as a result of the uprising, certainly hundreds of both slaves and free blacks were killed by soldiers and mobs—many of them having no connection to the rebellion. Although the insurrection was quelled in only two days, Turner successfully eluded capture for two months. When apprehended, he was sentenced quickly and hanged, and his corpse was skinned and ripped apart, then burned to leave no trace of him to be martyred. Several of his followers were decapitated and their heads were mounted on stakes as a warning to any slaves who might follow their course.
Nat Turner’s rebellion forever changed the relationship between slaves and their owners. It is doubtful that slave owners, overseers, or most Southern whites ever again felt completely safe with their slaves. Harsh laws were passed as a result in some states, making it illegal to teach slaves to read or to allow them to preach, carry a gun, hunt, or own livestock.
John Brown also had learned important lessons from Nat Turner’s failure—and spent years planning the details of his attack. In addition to Frederick Douglass, he received considerable assistance from the remarkable Harriet Tubman. “General Tubman,” as Brown called her, was more militant than Douglass. After escaping from a plantation in Maryland in 1849 by following the North Star into free Pennsylvania, she returned to the South nineteen times to conduct slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. If one of her passengers faltered or threatened to go back, she was known to take out a pistol and warn, “Dead Negroes tell no tales. You’ll be free or die.” Her daring missions made her famous—she became known as “the Moses of her people”—and provoked plantation owners to offer a $40,000 bounty for her capture. Tubman supposedly helped Brown plan his mission by raising funds, recruiting men, and providing intelligence about the railroad in Virginia. According to legend, while Douglass refused to participate in the actual raid, Harriet Tubman did intend to go with John Brown—but illness made it impossible and saved her life.
On that Sunday night in 1859, John Brown led a group of sixteen white men, four free black men, and one fugitive slave, armed mostly with new Sharps breech-loading rifles, across the Potomac River into Virginia. United in their hatred of slavery, they had joined Brown’s “provisional army” for a variety of personal reasons. Former slave Dangerfield Newby, for example, hoped the raid would allow him to rescue his wife from slavery. Aaron Stevens was a man on the run; after he’d been sentenced to death for mutiny and assaulting an officer while serving in the 1st United States Dragoons, President Franklin Pierce commuted his sentence to three years of hard labor. Stevens had escaped from Fort Leavenworth, changed his name, and became a colonel in the Kansas militia—and then he met John Brown.
Moving quickly on a cold, dark, rainy night, the raiders cut the telegraph lines and seized the bridges leading into Harpers Ferry, isolating the small town. The few night watchmen offered no resistance as the raiding party captured the armory, the arsenal, and Hall’s Rifle Works, a privately owned rifle manufacturing factory, then fanned out into the countryside. They began going from house to house rounding up hostages, among them Colonel Lewis Washington, the great-grandnephew of President George Washington, and other prominent citizens. Slave owner John Allstadt testified later that he was awakened in his bed by armed men warning him, “Get up quick or we will burn you up.” Slaves were freed and offered pikes, but most of them resisted, having little understanding of what was happening and fearful of the consequences of betraying their owners. Eventually as many as sixty townspeople were taken hostage.
Ironically, the first casualty was Hayward Shepherd, a freed black man working as a porter and assistant station manager for the B&O Railroad. At one thirty that morning Shepherd had met the express from Wheeling, which Brown had detained for five hours before permitting it to continue to Baltimore, then walked to the Potomac River railroad bridge. When confronted there by two of Brown’s men he turned and ran—and was shot in the back. He managed to stumble back to the railroad office and died later that day. The town honored him as a black man who had refused to join Brown’s effort to destroy slavery, but his actions that day—why did he turn and run?—have long been debated without any resolution.
The engine and guardhouse in which John Brown’s raiders barricaded themselves was later celebrated as John Brown’s Fort, seen here in this late-1880s photo. During the war Union troops often broke off pieces of brick and wood as souvenirs, while Confederate troops cursed as they passed.
Brown’s men could have taken hundreds of weapons and lots of ammunition and fled into the foothills, but they hesitated, perhaps hoping that slaves in the area would rise up and race to join them—and before they could escape, the townspeople organized a defense and surrounded the armory. Many of them believed their greatest fear was being realized: slaves were rising up to kill them. They knew this uprising had to be crushed before it gained strength—whatever the toll. They fought back and forced the remnants of Brown’s army to take cover with about ten hostages inside the arsenal’s fire-engine house, a small brick building with reinforced oak doors that later became known as John Brown’s Fort.
John Brown’s raid terrified many Southerners, who feared it signaled the beginning of a slave uprising. The Richmond Enquirer wrote that it had “advanced the cause of disunion more than any other event … since the formation of [our] government.” Depicted here by British artist Henry Marriott Paget, it became worldwide news.
Brown and his men were trapped. Hoping he might trade his hostages for safe passage out of town, he sent out his son Watson Brown and another man carrying a white flag to negotiate terms. But passions were too strong; the men of Harpers Ferry weren’t simply putting down an attack, they were defending their way of life. Both men were shot within a few steps. Oliver Brown helped his brother get back inside—and he, too, was mortally wounded. In fighting that raged throughout the day, several more of Brown’s men, as well as three citizens, including Harpers Ferry mayor Fontaine Beckham, were killed. The standoff had begun.
When the B&O express reached Baltimore with news of the raid, a company of marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee was dispatched to Harpers Ferry. By the time they arrived, Brown had been holed up with his hostages without any provisions for a full day. After securing the area, Lee ordered Lieutenant James Ewell Brown (“Jeb”) Stuart to offer Brown surrender terms. When Brown refused, Lee’s men stormed the armory. Lieutenant Israel Green and his men smashed through the door of the armory and rushed inside. As Green later remembered, John Brown had just fired his weapon. “I brought my saber down with all my strength upon his head.… He fell senseless on his side, then rolled over on his back.… Instinctively I gave him a saber thrust in the left breast. The sword I carried was a light uniform weapon and either not having a point or striking something hard in Brown’s accouterment’s, did not penetrate. The blade bent double.”
When questioned after his capture, Brown warned that the raid was only a beginning: “I claim to be here … to aid those suffering great wrong. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.… You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this negro question I mean; the end of that is not yet.” Later in the questioning he said, “‘Whom the gods would destroy they first made mad,’ and you are mad.”
Exaggerated rumors about the raid spread rapidly; supposedly as many as seven hundred slaves had rebelled and were at large. Terrified that another Nat Turner was stalking whites, towns throughout Virginia and North Carolina called out their militias to protect their white citizens. The Charleston Mercury reported, “Three of the whites are said to have escaped with four hundred negros.” In reality, ten of Brown’s men were either killed in the fire-engine house or died later of their wounds—Dangerfield Newby had been the first to die, his throat cut from ear to ear by a six-inch spike. Perhaps in retaliation, Newby’s widow and their children were “sold south” to Louisiana. Five members of the raiding party managed to escape, but the rest of them, including John Brown, were captured. Brown and his men were transported to Charleston and turned over to civil authorities for trial. One marine died in the attack.
James Ewell Brown (“Jeb”) Stuart, who was to gain fame as a brave and innovative Confederate cavalry general during the war, negotiated surrender terms with John Brown at Harpers Ferry and, when negotiations failed, gave the signal to attack.
By objective standards the raid was a failure. Colonel Robert E. Lee, who was lauded for his decisive leadership at Harpers Ferry, wrote that Brown “acknowledges that he has been disappointed in his expectations of aid from the black as well as white population, both in the Southern and Northern States. The blacks whom he forced from their homes in this neighborhood, as far as I could learn, gave him no voluntary assistance.… The result proves that the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or madman, which could only end in failure; and its temporary success was owing to the panic and confusion he succeeded in creating by magnifying his numbers.”
Brown’s raid rallied the abolitionist forces across the growing nation. At a different time, an insurrection against the federal government might have been put down quickly with little fanfare. But not at this time, and not in this place. Even with the rudimentary communications of the era, the raid quickly became a major turning point in the seemingly inevitable march toward civil war. John Brown almost instantly became one of the most admired—and despised—men in the country. As the Raleigh Register wrote in 1859, “The affair at Harper’s Ferry marks a new and most important era in our country’s history. It will bring to an immediate solution the question as to whether the Union can be preserved, and the right of the South to hold property in slaves be maintained. This is the issue to be tried now. The trial can no longer be deferred. The issue has been forced upon the South, and let the result be what it may, her skirts will be clear of all responsibility.” There was no longer any possibility of compromise.
John Brown and his men were indicted on Virginia state charges of treason, inciting slaves to rebel, and murder. His trial began within a week. His supporters and defense attorneys urged him to plead insanity, which might lighten the penalties, but he rejected that path, telling them, “If I am insane, of course I should know more than all the rest of the world. But I do not think so.”
Virginia’s governor, Henry Wise, who had questioned Brown in prison, wrote, “They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness.”
Six hundred people—among them numerous reporters from Northern newspapers—crowded into the courtroom, snapping open peanuts and chestnuts throughout the trial. While Brown complained that he was not being permitted time to wage a tolerable defense, he was clearly resigned to the outcome. Upon being sentenced to hang Brown rose from the cot on which he had spent most of the trial and made a speech that Ralph Waldo Emerson would later describe as equal to the Gettysburg Address in its power. “I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons,” he said. “I believe that to have interfered, as I have done … in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. 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!”
Southerners believed it was proper that Brown pay with his own life for the death and destruction he had brought to Harpers Ferry—as well as threatening their legal rights to own slaves. Abolitionists fought for him; Emerson proclaimed in a lecture he gave in Boston six days after the sentencing: “That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.” Henry David Thoreau wrote in “A Plea for Captain John Brown” that he was “a man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action … a man of ideas and principles.… Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life.” Thoreau then quoted pro-slavery Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, who described the raid as “among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed.”
On December 1, Mary Day Brown was permitted a visit with her husband. A gallows was set up in Charles Town. Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, under the command of Thomas Jackson—later to become known as “Stonewall” Jackson—guarded the site. Among the spectators watching with what he later described as “unlimited, undeniable contempt” for the “traitor and terrorizer” was a volunteer in the Virginia militia named John Wilkes Booth.
It was later reported that Brown’s body “jerked and quivered” for five minutes after the trapdoor had opened, snapping his spinal cord. Thomas Jackson’s aide, Major J. T. L. Preston, shouted out while his body was still convulsing, “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!” In the North it was a day of mourning. Church bells tolled and commemorative services were held. Citizens of Albany, New York, fired a one-hundred-gun salute. Black-owned businesses were closed for the day. And any hope of peaceful resistance to slavery was essentially abandoned. An article by Frederick Douglass appearing in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist magazine the Liberator concluded, “Moral considerations have long since been exhausted upon slaveholders. It is in vain to reason with them. One might as well hunt bears with ethics and political economy for weapons, as to seek to ‘pluck the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor’ by mere force of moral law. Slavery is a system of brute force. It shields itself behind might, rather than right. It must be met with its own weapons.”
And on that morning Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his personal journal, “This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution.… Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
In addition to Brown, six members of his provisional army were hanged. Southerners rejoiced but were wary of the consequences. Many of them believed Brown represented what they began to refer to as “the Black Republican Party” of the North and started worrying that a Republican victory in the coming presidential elections of 1860 would initiate an effort to legislate the end of slavery. In Congress, Senator Jefferson Davis verbally attacked William Seward, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, declaring, “We have been invaded, and that invasion, and the facts connected with it, show Mr. Seward to be a traitor, and deserving of the gallows.” For the first time, Southerners began discussing the possibility and the ramifications of secession.
The Charleston Mercury echoed the fears of Southerners when it warned that the Harpers Ferry raid “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.… It is a warning profoundly symptomatic of the future of the Union with our sectional enemies.”
It had become obvious, as plantation owner Edmund Ruffin wrote, that the presidential election of 1860 would determine “whether these southern states are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved.”
New York senator William Seward was the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, but members of his own party believed his radical stance against slavery made him unelectable. No man was more despised throughout the South than “the Black Republican” Seward. Even many Northerners believed his election would lead to the end of the Union, perhaps even a civil war. They began searching for a more conciliatory candidate who could hold the country together.
After losing a bitterly contested fight for the 1860 Republican nomination for the presidency, New York senator William Seward accepted Lincoln’s offer to become secretary of state. Supposedly his Auburn home had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and among the escaping slaves he assisted was Harriet Tubman, but many historians doubt that story.
Although not yet officially a candidate for the presidency, in February 1860 Abraham Lincoln had been invited to New York to address the Young Men’s Republican Union at the Cooper Union. He used the opportunity to artfully weave a moderate path that could placate both the North and the South—emphasizing that John Brown’s actions did not represent the Republican Party. While he accepted that slavery was legal throughout the South, he strongly believed the practice should not be extended to new states or territories. Citing the words of the founding fathers, he told the packed hall,
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.… In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.…
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.…
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.
Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech thrilled Republicans, instantly making him a strong challenger for the presidential nomination. As one member of the audience later reported, “When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed. He was tall, tall,—oh, how tall! and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man.” But once he began speaking, “his face lighted up as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet like the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man.” Abraham Lincoln had taken his first step into history.
This photograph was taken in late February 1861, just after Lincoln arrived in Washington for his inauguration. Lincoln was noted for his unusually large hands, as seen here.
As Lincoln liked to tell people, he was a simple and humble man, born in a one-room log cabin on the Kentucky frontier in 1809. He was mostly self-educated, with less than a year of formal schooling. After growing up in Indiana, he moved with his family to New Salem, Illinois, when he was twenty-one. A strong, athletic, but quiet young man, Abe Lincoln served as a captain in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War. He was twenty-three years old when he entered elective politics, running for the Illinois General Assembly. During that campaign he demonstrated the easy, amiable, and approachable style that years later would make him so popular—although without any financial support, he failed to win a seat in the assembly. But even in those formative years he clearly had the ultimate political gift—he didn’t seem to be a politician. “Honest Abe,” as he became known for his unquestioned integrity, was the proverbial “man of the people.”
After working as a shopkeeper—and falling deeply into debt, then as the postmaster of New Salem and a surveyor, he decided to study law. In 1834, he ran as a Whig for the state legislature from Sangamon County—and won the first of his four terms in state government. Two years later he was admitted to the bar and moved to Springfield.
It was in Springfield in 1839 that he met Mary Todd, the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky slave owner, and after a somewhat rocky courtship they married in 1842. By then he had established his reputation as an able lawyer. In 1849, he argued and lost a case concerning the statute of limitations and liability in front of the United States Supreme Court. He developed a legal philosophy that would later become the foundation of his presidency. He wrote: “Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often the real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.”
During his career as a lawyer, he defended several men accused of murder. In an 1858 case he won an acquittal for his client by showing that the moon was at a low angle the night of the killing, discrediting an eyewitness who claimed to have seen the murder in the moonlight.
In 1846, pledging to serve only a single term, he was elected to the House of Representatives—the only federal election he would win before running for the presidency. During his failed 1855 campaign for the Senate he emphasized that he was not an abolitionist but rather was against the extension of slavery into new states or territories. That moderate stance on slavery was among the reasons he was essential in the formation of the new Republican Party and received the nomination as the Republican candidate in the 1860 election.
His Democratic opponent, once again, was Stephen A. Douglas, whom he had faced off against in the now legendary debates only two years earlier. But the pro-slavery Southern Democrats, known as Fire-Eaters, rejected Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine and held their own convention, nominating Vice President John C. Breckinridge. Conservative Whigs, desperate to prevent secession over slavery, joined a number of Southern Democrats to form the Constitutional Union Party and nominated Tennessee’s John Bell for president.
While Lincoln followed established tradition and did not personally campaign, Douglas traveled throughout the nation, pointing out that “people saw candidates in the flesh less often than they saw a perfect rainbow,” while preaching against abolition in the North and against secession in the South. But it was hopeless; Edmund Ruffin, a leader of the Fire-Eaters, made it clear what was at stake. “If the southern states and people can be brought together,” he thundered, “… I trust that by next November, and the election of an abolitionist, some one or more of the southern states will promptly secede.” He reinforced that point by purchasing several of the pikes carried by John Brown’s men during the Harpers Ferry raid and sending one to the governor of each slaveholding state—and to these razor-sharp spears he had affixed a label reading SAMPLE OF THE FAVORS DESIGNED FOR US BY OUR NORTHERN BRETHREN.
Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States solely by the free-soil states in the North and the West, winning all of the Northern states, while Breckinridge won all of the Southern states. Although there was an extraordinary turnout of 81.2 percent of eligible voters, the second-highest in history, Lincoln received only 39.8 percent of the vote, second only to John Quincy Adams as the lowest winning percentage of the popular vote. But it proved sufficient to provide a landslide majority in the electoral college.
Within days of the election, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi called their legislatures into special session to vote on withdrawing from the Union. When some Republicans urged Lincoln to consider some form of compromise, he refused, telling them he did not want to make it “appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness.” Slavery would not be permitted in new states or territories, he wrote to Republicans. “On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
South Carolina seceded on December 20, calling on the other Southern states to form a “great slaveholding confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses.” Within the next several weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. The nation was being ripped apart. In his inaugural address on March 4, Lincoln made one last, futile attempt to appeal for unity, telling Southerners, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” But he also warned them of what was to come: “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.… In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in ‘mine,’ is the momentous issue of civil war.… You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.… We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”
The Lincoln-Douglas debates received national attention. There was no direct vote for senators in 1858, so no one actually cast a vote for Lincoln or Douglas. Votes were cast for the Illinois legislature, and the majority of those votes were Republican; but the apportionment plan of the legislature gave the power to select the senator to Democratic legislators.
But it was far too late. On February 18, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederate Convention selected West Point graduate and Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States of America. Davis left no doubt about his intentions when he told delegates that “the time for compromise has now passed,” and under his leadership the South would “make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.”
His vice president, former Georgia congressman Alexander Stephens, spoke for the South when he said, “Slavery … is his [the Negro’s] natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
By the time Davis and Stephens assumed office, Confederate military operations had already begun. Militia in the seceding states had seized almost all the federal mints, depots, forts, and arsenals within their territory without a single shot being fired. The loyalty of American troops and federal government officials was being tested, and each individual had to make the momentous personal decision about their allegiance. Among the very few federal fortifications that remained under Union control was Fort Sumter, which was located on a two-and-a-half-acre man-made island in the center of Charleston Harbor.
With tensions boiling following Lincoln’s election, President James Buchanan ordered Major Robert Anderson to take command of the federal troops stationed in Charleston’s Fort Moultrie. Anderson’s appointment may well have been a gesture to the South; born in Kentucky, he was a pro-slavery former slave owner. He was a thirty-five-year army veteran, and had supposedly enlisted and discharged a young Abraham Lincoln during the Black Hawk War. But when he had to make his fateful decision about whether or not to join the secessionists, he remained faithful to the Union. Without orders, under the cover of night on December 26, he ordered his two companies of the 1st US Artillery Regiment to abandon vulnerable Fort Moultrie and occupy the far more defensible Fort Sumter.
The Confederacy was outraged, and government officials demanded that Anderson’s troops return to Fort Moultrie. Jefferson Davis reportedly offered to pay the expenses for transporting the entire garrison. Anderson refused, insisting that his only objective was to protect his men, stating firmly, “I cannot and will not go back,” then defiantly raised a large thirty-three-star US flag clearly visible in Charleston. Anderson’s loyalty and courage made him the North’s first hero of the coming war. President Buchanan responded by secretly ordering a merchant vessel, the Star of the West, carrying two hundred troops, to reinforce Fort Sumter.
Sumter’s brick walls were fifty feet high and in many places five feet thick. But the reality was that it could not be held for any length of time. Surrounded by Confederate artillery, it lacked sufficient ammunition or supplies to survive a siege. News got out about Buchanan’s attempt to reinforce the fort by sea. As the Star of the West came into sight early on the morning of January 9, 1861, Southern batteries opened fire—arguably the first shots of the Civil War. Anderson debated returning fire. One of his aides, Captain Abner Doubleday, who later would gain renown as the man who invented baseball, urged him to respond. Anderson hesitated, fearful of starting a war, and the ship turned around and sailed out of range.
Before becoming president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis had served the United States as a soldier in the Mexican-American War, a senator from Mississippi, and secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce.
Lincoln, newly inaugurated as president, considered a proposal to order the fort evacuated if Virginia agreed to remain in the Union, but that plan was never realized. The standoff continued into April, infuriating Southerners and thrilling Northerners. Six thousand Confederate troops, commanded by General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who ironically had been an artillery student of Anderson’s at West Point in the 1840s, were dug in around the harbor. By that time Anderson and his eighty-four artillerymen—including the regimental band—were running out of rations. As he admitted to Confederate officers, “If you do not batter us to pieces, we shall be starved out in a few days.”
The nation waited. A fort that few people outside Charleston even knew existed, a fort that had little military value, had become the potential flash point to begin the Civil War.
Secretary of State William Seward, perhaps anxious to avoid starting the war over an indefensible position, secretly sent word to Confederate leaders that Lincoln soon would evacuate the fort. Lincoln, however, determined that if war was to come it would be started by the South, instead decided to send vitally needed supplies—but no reinforcements—to Anderson. On April 6, he announced that Union ships carrying those provisions had sailed, adding that “no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition” would be made unless the Confederates prevented the ships from landing.
The Civil War began in Charleston Harbor on the morning of April 12, 1861, with the shelling of Fort Sumter. On April 14, Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard reported, “before sunset the flag of the Confederate States floated over the ramparts of Fort Sumter.”
Jefferson Davis would not permit the fort to be resupplied. On April 11, General Beauregard sent former senator James Chesnut and Captain Stephen Lee to deliver his ultimatum: time was up. Anderson had one day to surrender or the attack would begin. As Chesnut and Lee left the fort after delivering the message, Anderson shook their hands and said solemnly, “If we never meet in this world again, God grant that we may meet in the next.”
That night Chesnut’s wife, Mary, wrote in her diary, which years later would become a best seller titled A Dairy from Dixie, “I did not pretend to go to sleep. How can I? If Anderson does not accept terms—at four—the orders are—he shall be fired upon. I count four—Saint Michael chimes. I begin to hope. At half-past four, the heaving booming of a cannon.
“I sprang out of bed. And on my knees—prostrate—I prayed as I never prayed before.”
There is considerable speculation about who actually fired the first shot from Fort Johnson, a ten-inch mortar shell that trailed flame visible from the rooftops of Charleston. Supposedly Captain George S. James of the South Carolina Artillery offered the honor of pulling the lanyard to fire the signal cannon to Fire-Eating Virginia congressman Roger Pryor, but he declined, explaining, “I cannot fire the first gun of the war.” According to legend, Edmund Ruffin stepped forward and fired the cannon. But historians believe that Captain James gave the order to fire and the lanyard actually was pulled by Lieutenant Henry S. Farley.
Almost instantly forty-three Confederate cannons began a relentless barrage. Captain Stephen Lee remembered that the first shot “burst immediately over the fort, apparently about one hundred feet above. The firing of the mortar woke the echoes from every nook and corner of the harbor, and in this the dead hour of the night, before dawn, that shot was a sound of alarm that brought every soldier in the harbor to his feet.” Many Charleston residents watched the bombardment from their balconies, offering toasts to the brave soldiers defending their honor and culture.
In a headline calling it “A Splendid Pyrotechnic Display,” the Charleston Mercury reported that “at the break of day, amidst the bursting of bombs, and the roaring of ordnance, and before thousands of spectators, whose homes, and liberties, and lives were at stake, was enacted this first great scene in the opening drama of what, it is presumed, will be a most momentous military act.”
In the North the New York Herald wrote, “Civil war has at last begun. A terrible fight is at this moment going on between Fort Sumter and the fortifications by which it is surrounded.… Troops are pouring into the town by hundreds, but are held in reserve for the present, the force already on the island being ample. People are also arriving every moment on horseback, and by every other conveyance. Within an area of fifty miles, where the thunder of the artillery can be heard, the scene is magnificently terrible.”
When he surrendered Fort Sumter, Union major Robert Anderson took its thirty-three-star US flag with him. Almost precisely four years later he returned and proudly raised that same flag over the fort.
Lacking sufficient cannons or ammunition, Anderson held his fire until seven a.m., when he ordered Captain Doubleday to begin firing the fort’s heavy siege guns. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” Doubleday remembered. “… The United States was called upon not only to defend its sovereignty, but its right to exist as a nation.” Fort Sumter’s heavier cannons were in exposed positions on the ramparts and Anderson chose not to risk the lives of his men by manning those emplacements in what clearly was a futile effort. But one brave sergeant, John Carmody, raced onto the ramparts and single-handedly fired the loaded weapons. His courage was celebrated by Sergeant James Chester, who described it as “Carmody against the Confederate States.”
Throughout the next day Anderson’s men tried to fight back. Lacking supplies, they cut up their clothing and sheets and sewed them into gunpowder bags. At nightfall came a storm that raged into the next morning, making the defenders even more miserable.
The bombardment lasted thirty-six hours, setting the wooden barracks and gunpowder magazine on fire. As Doubleday later wrote, “It seemed impossible to escape suffocation. The roaring and crackling of the flames, the dense masses of whirling smoke, the bursting of the enemy’s shells, and our own which were exploding in the burning rooms, the crashing of the shot, and the sound of masonry falling in every direction made the fort a pandemonium.” Only the fact that the wind suddenly changed direction enabled the garrison to survive. As the fire reached the gunpowder stores, Anderson ordered his men to throw the barrels of powder into the Atlantic Ocean.
On the afternoon of April 13, Anderson surrendered. He informed Secretary of War Simon Cameron by telegram, “The quarters were entirely burned … the magazine surrounded by flames … four barrels and three cartridges of powder only being available, and no provisions remaining but pork, I accepted terms of evacuation.”
General Beauregard accepted the surrender honorably, allowing Anderson’s men to fire a fifty-gun salute to the American flag as it was lowered. Incredibly, there had been no Union fatalities during the barrage, but during this surrender ceremony a cannon exploded, and Private Daniel Hough became the only soldier to die in this battle. A week later a second federal soldier, Edward Galloway, one of five men wounded in the bombardment, would succumb to his wounds.
Northerners were shocked by the defeat. Poet Walt Whitman remembered that news “ran through the Land, is if by electric wires.”
Anderson and his men were given safe passage to the North, where they were greeted as heroes. A week after the surrender an estimated one hundred thousand New Yorkers squeezed into Union Square Park to cheer Anderson and the flag he had rescued at Fort Sumter. It was the largest assembly of people in American history. Days later Anderson was promoted to brigadier general and sent on a morale-raising tour to help recruit volunteers; he eventually was given command of the Department of Kentucky.
Among the few who welcomed the war was Frederick Douglass, who wrote, “God be praised! … war has come at last! … The government is aroused, the dead North is alive, and its divided people united.… Drums are beating, men are enlisting, companies forming, regiments marching, banners are flying.”
It had been only eighteen months since John Brown and his men had lit the fuse that finally exploded over Fort Sumter. The more than half century of compromise was done and, as Lincoln would later say at Gettysburg, the bloody struggle to determine if this nation, “or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” had begun.
Being chosen to carry your unit’s flag was the most cherished and deadly honor for a Civil War soldier. The flags they carried were the beloved symbols of pride, patriotism, and loyalty, to be protected no matter the cost. Capturing the enemy’s battle flag was considered a tremendous achievement, while losing your own flag was a humiliating disgrace. Unarmed flag bearers led their units into combat and became a primary target. When they fell, others raced to grab the flag before it could touch the ground. Even though bearing the flag was often a death sentence there was never a shortage of volunteers. At Antietam, for example, First Texas lost eight flag bearers—as did the northern 69th New York Volunteer Infantry. At Gettysburg one North Carolina unit lost fourteen men who carried their flag. Several flag bearers eventually were awarded Medals of Honor.
The value placed on flags is seen in the many mentions in Civil War songs. In “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” Union troops promised “Yes we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,” while Rebels sang in the popular “Bonnie Blue Flag,” “And when our rights were threatened, The cry rose near and far—‘Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag.”
There were numerous flags representing the national armies, state militias, and individual units. While the red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes remained the Union banner throughout the war, the Confederacy had three different flags. The original “stars and bars,” which bore a great resemblance to the United States flag, was replaced after two years of war by a flag bearing a small blue cross in its upper left corner containing white stars against a red background, with a great white field. The flag mistakenly considered the Confederate flag, a blue cross containing white stars stretching from corner to corner against a red background, actually was the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag.
