John Brown (abolitionist)

John Brown
Execution by hanging
Resting place	North Elba, New York, U.S. 44°15′08″N 73°58′18″W / 44.252240°N 73.971799°W / 44.252240; -73.971799
Monuments	Various: Statues in John Brown Tannery Site, Guys Mills, Pennsylvania
Known for	Involvement in slave insurrection
Spouses	Dianthe Lusk ​ ​ (m. 1820; died 1832)​ Mary Ann Day ​ (m. 1833)​
Children	20, including John Jr., Owen, and Watson
Parent	Owen Brown (father)
Signature

John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

An evangelical Christian of strong religious convictions, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan faith of his upbringing.^[1][2] He believed that he was "an instrument of God",^[3] raised to strike the "death blow" to American slavery, a "sacred obligation".^[4] Brown was the leading exponent of violence in the American abolitionist movement,^[5] believing it was necessary to end American slavery after decades of peaceful efforts had failed.^[6][7] Brown said that in working to free the enslaved, he was following Christian ethics, including the Golden Rule,^[8] and the Declaration of Independence, which states that "all men are created equal".^[9] He stated that in his view, these two principles "meant the same thing".^[10]

Brown first gained national attention when he led anti-slavery volunteers and his sons during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the late 1850s, a state-level civil war over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. He was dissatisfied with abolitionist pacifism, saying of pacifists, "These men are all talk. What we need is action – action!" In May 1856, Brown and his sons killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre, a response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. Brown then commanded anti-slavery forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie.

In October 1859, Brown

John Brown was born May 9, 1800, in

Although Brown described his parents as "poor but respectable" at some point,

The fourth child of Owen and Ruth,[22]^[b] Brown's older siblings were Anna Ruth (born in 1798), Salmon (born 1802), and Oliver Owen (born in 1804).^[27][28] Frederick, identified by Owen as his sixth son, was born in 1807.^[29] Frederick visited Brown when he was in jail, awaiting execution.^[30] He had an adopted brother, Levi Blakeslee (born some time before 1805).^[31] Salmon became a lawyer, politician, and newspaper editor.^[29]

While Brown was very young, his father moved the family briefly to his hometown,

John's mother Ruth died a few hours after the death of her newborn girl in December 1808.[38] In his memoir, Brown wrote that he mourned his mother for years.^[39][40] While he respected his father's new wife,^[39][40] Sallie Root,^[29] he never felt an emotional bond with her.^[39][40] Owen married a third time to Lucy Hinsdale, a formerly married woman.^[29] Owen had a total of 6 daughters and 10 sons.^[29]

With no school beyond the elementary level in Hudson at that time, Brown studied at the school of the abolitionist Elizur Wright, father of the famous Elizur Wright, in nearby Tallmadge.^[41] In a story he told to his family, when he was 12 years old and away from home moving cattle, Brown worked for a man with a colored boy, who was beaten before him with an iron shovel. He asked the man why he was treated thus, and the answer was that he was a slave. According to Brown's son-in-law Henry Thompson, it was that moment when John Brown decided to dedicate his life to improving African Americans' condition.^[42][43] As a child in Hudson, John got to know local Native Americans and learned some of their language.^[22] He accompanied them on hunting excursions and invited them to eat in his home.^[44][45]

Young adulthood

At 16, Brown left his family for New England to acquire a liberal education and become a Gospel minister.^[46] He consulted and conferred with Jeremiah Hallock, then clergyman at Canton, Connecticut, whose wife was a relative of Brown's, and as advised proceeded to Plainfield, Massachusetts, where, under the instruction of Moses Hallock, he prepared for college. He would have continued at Amherst College,^[41][47] but he suffered from inflammation of the eyes which ultimately became chronic and precluded further studies. He returned to Ohio.^[23]

Back in Hudson, Brown taught himself surveying from a book.^[48][c] He worked briefly at his father's tannery before opening a successful tannery outside of town with his adopted brother Levi Blakeslee.^[41] The two kept bachelor's quarters, and Brown was a good cook.^[41] He had his bread baked by a widow, Mrs. Amos Lusk. As the tanning business had grown to include journeymen and apprentices, Brown persuaded her to take charge of his housekeeping. She and her daughter Dianthe moved into his log cabin. Brown married Dianthe in 1820.^[49] There is no known picture of her,^[50] but he described Dianthe as "a remarkably plain, but neat, industrious and economical girl, of excellent character, earnest piety, and practical common sense".^[51] Their first child, John Jr., was born 13 months later. During 12 years of married life Dianthe gave birth to seven children, among them Owen, and died from complications of childbirth in 1832.^[52]

Brown knew the Bible thoroughly and could catch even small errors in Bible recitation. He never used tobacco nor drank tea, coffee, or alcohol. After the Bible, his favorite books were the series of Plutarch's Parallel Lives and he enjoyed reading about Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell.^[53] He felt that "truly successful men" were those with their own libraries.^[54]

Pennsylvania

Brown left Hudson, Ohio, where he had a successful tannery, to be better situated to operate a safe and productive Underground Railroad station.^[55][56] He moved to Richmond Township in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, in 1825^[55][56][d] and lived there until 1835,^[57] longer than he did anywhere else.^[58] He bought 200 acres (81 hectares) of land, cleared an eighth of it, and quickly built a cabin, a two-story tannery with 18 vats, and a barn; in the latter was a secret, well-ventilated room to hide escaping slaves.^[55][56] He transported refugees across the state border into New York and to an important Underground Railroad connection in Jamestown,^[57] about 55 miles (89 km) from Richmond Township.^[59] The escapees were hidden in the wagon he used to move the mail, hides for his tannery, and survey equipment.^[57] For ten years, his farm was an important stop on the Underground Railroad,^[60] during which, it is estimated to have helped 2,500 enslaved people on their journey to Canada, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.^[60] Brown recruited other Underground Railroad stationmasters to strengthen the network.^[57]

Brown made money surveying new roads. He was involved in erecting a school, which first met in his home—he was the first teacher

In 1831, Brown's son Frederick (I) died, at the age of 4. Brown fell ill, and his businesses began to suffer, leaving him in severe debt. In mid-1832, shortly after the death of a newborn son, his wife Dianthe also died, either in childbirth or as an immediate consequence of it.^[69] He was left with the children John Jr., Jason, Owen, Ruth and Frederick (II).^[70][e] On July 14, 1833, Brown married 17-year-old Mary Ann Day (1817–1884), originally from Washington County, New York;^[72] she was the younger sister of Brown's housekeeper at the time.^[73] They eventually had 13 children,^[74][75] seven of whom were sons who worked with their father in the fight to abolish slavery.^[76]

Back to Ohio

In 1836, Brown moved his family from Pennsylvania to

Brown became a bank director and was estimated to be worth US$20,000 (equivalent to about $590,710 in 2023).[80] Like many businessmen in Ohio, he invested too heavily in credit and state bonds and suffered great financial losses in the Panic of 1837. In one episode of property loss, Brown was jailed when he attempted to retain ownership of a farm by occupying it against the claims of the new owner.^[81]

In November 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois for printing an abolitionist newspaper. Brown, deeply upset about the incident, became more militant in his behavior, comparable with Reverend Henry Highland Garnet.^[57] Brown publicly vowed after the incident: "Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!"^[82] Brown objected to Black congregants being relegated to the balcony at his church^[57] in Franklin Mills. According to daughter Ruth Brown's husband Henry Thompson, whose brother was killed at Harpers Ferry:

[H]e and his three sons, John, Jason, and Owen, were expelled from the Congregational church at Kent, then called Franklin, Ohio, for taking a colored man into their own pew; and the deacons of the church tried to persuade him to concede his error. My wife and various members of the family afterward joined the Wesley Methodists, but John Brown never connected himself with any church again.^[42]

For three or four years he seemed to flounder hopelessly, moving from one activity to another without plan. He tried many different business efforts attempting to get out of debt. He bred horses briefly, but gave it up when he learned that buyers were using them as race horses.^[83] He did some surveying, farming, and tanning.^[84] Brown declared bankruptcy in federal court on September 28, 1842.^[43] In 1843, three of his children — Charles, Peter, Austin — died of dysentery.^[70]

From the mid-1840s, Brown had built a reputation as an expert in fine sheep and wool. For about one year, he ran Captain Oviatt's farm,^[83] and he then entered into a partnership with Colonel Simon Perkins of Akron, Ohio, whose flocks and farms were managed by Brown and his sons.^[85][f] Brown eventually moved into a home with his family across the street from the Perkins Stone Mansion.^[86]

Springfield, Massachusetts

In 1846, Brown moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, as an agent for Ohio wool growers in their relations with New England manufacturers of woolen goods, but "also as a means of developing his scheme of emancipation".^[88] The white leadership there, including "the publisher of The Republican, one of the nation's most influential newspapers, were deeply involved and emotionally invested in the anti-slavery movement".^[89]

Brown made connections in Springfield that later yielded financial support he received from New England's great merchants, allowed him to hear and meet nationally famous abolitionists like Douglass and

Two years before Brown's arrival in Springfield, in 1844, the city's African-American abolitionists had founded the Sanford Street Free Church, now known as St. John's Congregational Church, which became one of the most prominent abolitionist platforms in the United States. From 1846 until he left Springfield in 1850, Brown was a member of the Free Church, where he witnessed abolitionist lectures by the likes of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.^[91] In 1847, after speaking at the Free Church, Douglass spent a night speaking with Brown, after which Douglass wrote, "From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass. [in] 1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition."^[89]

During Brown's time in Springfield, he became deeply involved in transforming the city into a major center of abolitionism, and one of the safest and most significant stops on the Underground Railroad.

His daughter Amelia died in 1846, followed by Emma in 1849.[85]

New York

In 1848, bankrupt and having lost the family's house, Brown heard of Gerrit Smith's Adirondack land grants to poor black men, in so remote a location that Brown later called it Timbuctoo, and decided to move his family there to establish a farm where he could provide guidance and assistance to the blacks who were attempting to establish farms in the area.^[96] He bought from Smith land in the town of North Elba, New York (near Lake Placid), for $1 an acre ($2/ha).^[97] It has a magnificent view^[14] and has been called "the highest arable spot of land in the State."^[98] After living with his family about two years in a small rented house, and returning for several years to Ohio, he had the current house – now a monument preserved by New York State – built for his family, viewing it as a place of refuge for them while he was away. According to youngest son Salmon, "frugality was observed from a moral standpoint, but one and all we were a well-fed, well-clad lot."^[99]

After he was executed on December 2, 1859, his widow took his body there for burial; the trip took five days, and he was buried on December 8. Watson's body was located and buried there in 1882. In 1899 the remains of 12 of Brown's other collaborators, including his son Oliver, were located and brought to North Elba. They could not be identified well enough for separate burials, so they are buried together in a single casket donated by the town of North Elba; there is a collective plaque there now. Since 1895, the John Brown Farm State Historic Site has been owned by New York State and is now a National Historic Landmark.^[96]

Actions in Kansas

Kansas Territory was in the midst of a state-level civil war from 1854 to 1860, referred to as the Bleeding Kansas period, between pro- and anti-slavery forces.^[100] From 1854 to 1856, there had been eight killings in Kansas Territory attributable to slavery politics. There had been no organized action by abolitionists against pro-slavery forces by 1856.^[101] The issue was to be decided by the voters of Kansas, but who these voters were was not clear; there was widespread voting fraud in favor of the pro-slavery forces, as a Congressional investigation confirmed.^[100]

Move to Kansas

Five of Brown's sons — John Jr., Jason, Owen, Frederick, and Salmon — moved to Kansas Territory in the spring of 1855. Brown, his son Oliver, and his son-in-law Henry Thompson followed later that year^[102] with a wagon loaded with weapons and ammunition.^[103][i] Brown stayed with Florella (Brown) Adair and the Reverend Samuel Adair, his half-sister and her husband, who lived near Osawatomie. During that time, he rallied support to fight proslavery forces,^[102] and became the leader of the antislavery forces in Kansas.^[103][105]

Pottawatomie

Brown and the free-state settlers intended to bring Kansas into the union as a slavery-free state.^[106] After the winter snows thawed in 1856, the pro-slavery activists began a campaign to seize Kansas on their own terms. Brown was particularly affected by the sacking of Lawrence, the center of anti-slavery activity in Kansas, on May 21, 1856. A sheriff-led posse from Lecompton, the center of pro-slavery activity in Kansas, destroyed two abolitionist newspapers and the Free State Hotel. Only one man, a border ruffian, was killed.^[107]

The Pottawatomie massacre occurred during the night of May 24 and the morning of May 25, 1856. Under Brown's supervision, his sons and other abolitionist settlers took from their residences and killed five "professional slave hunters and militant pro-slavery" settlers.^[109] The massacre was the match in the powderkeg that precipitated the bloodiest period in "Bleeding Kansas" history, a three-month period of retaliatory raids and battles in which 29 people died.^[101]

In the Battle of Black Jack of June 2, 1856, John Brown, nine of his followers, and 20 local men successfully defended a Free State settlement at Palmyra, Kansas, against an attack by Henry Clay Pate. Pate and 22 of his men were taken prisoner.^[113]

In August, a company of over 300 Missourians under the command of General

On September 7, Brown entered Lawrence to meet with Free State leaders and help fortify against a feared assault. At least 2,700 pro-slavery Missourians were once again invading Kansas. On September 14, they skirmished near Lawrence. Brown prepared for battle, but serious violence was averted when the new governor of Kansas, John W. Geary, ordered the warring parties to disarm and disband, and offered clemency to former fighters on both sides.^[117]

Brown had become infamous and federal warrants were issued for his arrest due to his actions in Kansas. He became careful of how he travelled and whom he stayed with across the country.^[118]

Raid at Harpers Ferry

Brown's plans

Brown's plans for a major attack on American slavery began long before the raid. According to his wife Mary, interviewed while her husband was awaiting his execution, Brown had been planning the attack for 20 years.^[119] Frederick Douglass noted that he made the plans before he fought in Kansas.^[120] For instance, he spent the years between 1842 and 1849 settling his business affairs, moving his family to the Negro community at Timbuctoo, New York, and organizing in his own mind an anti-slavery raid that would strike a significant blow against the entire slave system, running slaves off Southern plantations.^[121]

According to his first biographer James Redpath, "for thirty years, he secretly cherished the idea of being the leader of a servile insurrection: the American Moses, predestined by Omnipotence to lead the servile nations in our Southern States to freedom."^[122] An acquaintance said: "As Moses was raised up and chosen of God to deliver the Children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage, ...he was...fully convinced in his own mind that he was to be the instrument in the hands of God to effect the emancipation of the slaves."^[123]

Brown said that,

A few men in the right, and knowing that they are right, can overturn a mighty king. Fifty men, twenty men, in the Alleghenies would break slavery to pieces in two years.^[124]

On December 2, 1859, in Charles Town, after failure of the raid and the date of his execution,

I John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land; will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed [through the revolt supposed to start with Harpers Ferry] it [ending slavery] might be done."^[125] (emphasis by Brown)

Brown kept his plans a secret, including the care he took not to share the plans with his men, according to Jeremiah Anderson, one of the participants in the raid.^[126] His son Owen, the only one who survived of Brown's three participating sons, said in 1873 that he did not think his father wrote down the entire plan.^[127] He did discuss his plans at length, for over a day, with Frederick Douglass, trying unsuccessfully to persuade Douglass, a black leader, to accompany him to Harpers Ferry (which Douglass thought a suicidal mission that could not succeed).^[128]

Preparations

Financial and political backing

To attain financial backing and political support for the raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown spent most of 1857 meeting with abolitionists in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut.

In Boston, he met Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.^[132] Even with the Secret Six and other contributors, Brown had not collected all money needed to fund the raid. He wrote an appeal, Old Browns Farewell, to abolitionists in the east with some success.^[132]

In December 1857, an anti-slavery Mock Legislature, organized by Brown, met in Springdale, Iowa.^[135] On several of Brown's trips across Iowa he preached at Hitchcock House, an Underground Railroad stop in Lewis, Iowa.^[136]

"Virginia scheme"

With a free-state victory in the October elections, Kansas was quiet. Brown made his men return to Iowa, where he told them tidbits of his Virginia scheme.

Brown started to wear a beard, "to change his usual appearance".[141]

Weapons

The Massachusetts Committee pledged to provide 200

Weapons were purchased and sent to Kennedy Farmhouse in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where they were stored.^[144] Brown's plan was to make use of weapons, ammunition, and other military equipment stored at the armory, arsenal, and the rifle factory in Harpers Ferry.^[145] There were an estimated 100,000 muskets and rifles at the armory and arsenal complex at the time.^[146]

The more sophisticated weapons, like Sharps rifles and pistols, were to be used by Black and White officers. The remaining fighters would use spear-like pikes, shotguns, and muskets.^[147]

Constitutional convention in Ontario

Brown and 12 of his followers, including his son

While in New York City, Brown was introduced to Hugh Forbes, an English mercenary, who had experience as a military tactician fighting with Giuseppe Garibaldi. Concerned about Brown's strategy, Forbes undermined and delayed the plans for the raid.^[153]

Although nearly all of the delegates signed the constitution, few volunteered to join Brown's forces, although it will never be clear how many Canadian expatriates actually intended to join Brown because of a subsequent "security leak" that threw off plans for the raid, creating a hiatus in which Brown lost contact with many of the Canadian leaders. This crisis occurred when Hugh Forbes, Brown's mercenary, tried to expose the plans to Massachusetts Senator

Continue to organize funds and forces

On December 20, Brown led his own raid, in which he liberated 11 slaves, took captive two white men, and looted horses and wagons. The Governor of Missouri announced a reward of $3,000 (equivalent to $101,733 in 2023) for his capture. On January 20, 1859, he embarked on a lengthy journey to take the liberated slaves to Detroit and then on a ferry to Canada. While passing through Chicago, Brown met with abolitionists Allan Pinkerton, John Jones, and Henry O. Wagoner who arranged and raised the fare for the passage to Detroit^[154] and purchased supplies for Brown. Jones's wife and fellow abolitionist, Mary Jane Richardson Jones, provided new clothes for Brown and his men, including the garb Brown was hanged in six months later.^[155][156] On March 12, 1859, Brown met with Frederick Douglass and Detroit abolitionists George DeBaptiste, William Lambert, and others at William Webb's house in Detroit to discuss emancipation.^[157] DeBaptiste proposed that conspirators blow up some of the South's largest churches. The suggestion was opposed by Brown, who felt humanity precluded such unnecessary bloodshed.^[158]

Over the course of the next few months, he traveled again through Ohio, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts to drum up more support for the cause. On May 9, he delivered a lecture in Concord, Massachusetts, that Amos Bronson Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau attended. Brown reconnoitered with the Secret Six.^[159]

As he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by Harriet Tubman, "General Tubman", as he called her.^[160] Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners.^[161] She also raised funds for Brown.^[162]

Some abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, opposed his tactics, but Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves and made preparations for military action. After he began the first battle, he believed, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the South.^[161]

Brown's forces

The men that fought with Brown in Kansas gathered at Springdale, Iowa, a Quaker settlelment, about January 1858, to prepare to execute Brown's Virginia scheme.^[163]

In June, Brown paid his last visit to his family in North Elba before departing for Harpers Ferry. He stayed one night en route in Hagerstown, Maryland, at the Washington House, on West Washington Street. On June 30, 1859, the hotel had at least 25 guests, including I. Smith and Sons, Oliver Smith and Owen Smith, and Jeremiah Anderson, all from New York. From papers found in the Kennedy Farmhouse after the raid, it is known that Brown wrote to Kagi that he would sign into a hotel as I. Smith and Sons.^[159]

The men who prepared for the raid at Kennedy Farmhouse and participated in the raid with Brown included two groups of men:

A group that fought with him in Kansas and gathered at Springdale, Iowa, to prepare and drill for the raid,^[164]

• Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, 26, born in Indiana, served with Brown in Kansas, killed in the raid. ^[165]
• Oliver Brown, 20, John Brown's son, served in Kansas, and he was mortally wounded during the raid^[166]
• Owen Brown, about 35, John Brown's son, fought in Kansas. He escaped the raid.^[167]
• John E. Cook, 29, reformer and former soldier, attended Oberlin College, he initially escaped capture, but was found and hanged^[167]
• Albert Hazlett, 23, fought in Kansas, escaped following the raid, but was captured and hanged^[168]
• John Henry Kagi, about 24, a teacher, became Brown's second in command, before the raid he printed copies of Brown's constitution in a printing shop he established in Hamilton, Ontario, mortally wounded during the raid^[169]
• William H. Leeman, 20, fought with the free-staters in Kansas for three years, beginning at the age of 17. He died during the raid.^[170]
• Aaron Dwight Stevens, about 28, was a former soldier and fighter in Kansas, who gave the men military training and drills. He was wounded during the raid, after which he was executed.^[171]
• Charles Plummer Tidd, 25, fought in Kansas. He escaped the raid and later served during the Civil War.^[171]

Men he met when rounding up recruits for the raid:^[164]

• Watson Brown, son of John Brown, mortally wounded during the raid^[172]
• John Anthony Copeland Jr. was a free black man who joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. He was captured during the raid and was executed^[173]
• Barclay Coppoc, 19, escaped capture following the raid. He fought in the Civil War.^[174]
• Edwin Coppoc, 24, captured and hanged.^[175]
• Shields Green, about 23, escaped slavery, captured and hanged.^[168]
• Lewis Sheridan Leary, a harness maker freed by his white father, mortally wounded during the raid^[176]
• Francis Jackson Meriam, 22, grandson of Francis Jackson who was a leader of Antislavery Societies. Meriam was an aristocrat. He escaped during the raid. Captain Meriam led an African American infantry group during the Civil War.^[168]
• Dangerfield Newby, 44, born a slave, escaped slavery, returned to Virginia to fight in the raid, where he was killed.^[177]
• Stewart Taylor, 23, a wagonmaker from Canada, mortally wounded during the raid.^[178]
• Dauphin Thompson, 21, married to Ruth Brown, John Brown's daughter, mortally wounded during the raid^[178]
• William Thompson, 26, mortally wounded during the raid^[178]

They were at Kennedy Farmhouse, four to five miles away from Harpers Ferry. Brown's daughter and daughter-in-law, Anne and Martha, Oliver's wife, prepared food and kept the house for the men from August and throughout the month of September.^[144]

The raid

Brown led his forces for Harper Ferry on the night of October 16, 1859.^[179] The objective was to take the armory, the arsenal, the town, and then the rifle factory. Then, they wanted to free all the slaves in Harpers Ferry.^[180] After that, they would move south with those newly freed people wanted to join the fight to free other enslaved people.^[181] Brown told his men to take prisoners who disobeyed them and to fight only in self-defense.^[182]

Initially, they met no resistance entering the town.

When an eastbound Baltimore and Ohio Railroad train approached the town, Brown held it and then inexplicably allowed it to continue on its way. At the next station where the telegraph still worked, the conductor sent a telegram to B&O headquarters in Baltimore. The railroad sent telegrams to President Buchanan and Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise.^[184]

By the morning of October 18 the engine house, later known as John Brown's Fort, was surrounded by a company of U.S. Marines under the command of First Lieutenant Israel Greene, USMC, with Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army in overall command.^[185]

Army First Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart approached the engine-house to apprehend Brown and told the raiders their lives would be spared if they surrendered. Brown refused, saying, "No, I prefer to die here." Stuart then gave a signal and the Marines used sledgehammers and a makeshift battering ram to break down the engine room door. Lieutenant Israel Greene cornered Brown and struck him several times, wounding his head. In three minutes Brown and the survivors were captives.^[186]

Altogether, Brown's men killed four townspeople and one Marine. Ten people were wounded, one of whom was a Marine.

Brown and the others captured were held in the office of the armory. On October 18, 1859, Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, Virginia Senator James M. Mason, and Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio arrived in Harpers Ferry. Brown conceded that he did not receive the support he expected from White and Black people. The questioning lasted several hours.^[191]

The trial

Brown was charged with treason, and was tried in a Virginia state court at Governor Wise's request. Accordingly, the charge was treason against Virginia.^[192] President Buchanan did not object.^[193]

The answer provided in 1859 was more political ~ than legal. The president of the United States and the governor of Virginia decided that Brown would be tried in Virginia for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that is where he was tried. This decision thrust Virginia rather than the United States into the role of the offended sovereign and contributed incalculably to the widening abyss between North and South. John Brown was condemned not as an enemy of the American people but as an enemy of Virginia and, by logical extension, of Southern slaveholders.

— Brian McGinty, author of John Brown's trial ^[194]

Brown was tried with his men who had lived through the raid and had not escaped — Copeland, Coppoc, Green, and Stevens — on charges of murder, "conspiracy to foment a slave insurrection", and treason, as of October 26.^[195]

On November 2, after a week-long trial in Charles Town, the county seat of Jefferson County,^[196][197] and 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Brown guilty on all three counts.^[197] He was sentenced to be hanged in public on December 2.^[197] He was the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States.^[11][12]

The trial attracted reporters who were able to send their articles via the new telegraph. They were reprinted in numerous papers. It was the first trial in the U.S. to be nationally reported.^[198]

November 2 to December 2, 1859

Before his conviction, reporters were not allowed access to Brown, as the judge and Andrew Hunter feared that his statements, if quickly published, would exacerbate tensions, especially among the enslaved. This was much to Brown's frustration, as he stated that he wanted to make a full statement of his motives and intentions through the press.^[199] Once he had been convicted, the restriction was lifted, and, glad for the publicity, he talked with reporters and anyone else who wanted to see him, except pro-slavery clergy.^[71] Brown received more letters than he ever had in his life. He wrote replies constantly, hundreds of eloquent letters, often published in newspapers.^[200]

Rescue and Victor Hugo's pardon plans

There were well-documented and specific plans to rescue Brown, as Virginia Governor

However, Brown said several times that he did not want to be rescued. He refused the assistance of Silas Soule, a friend from Kansas who infiltrated the Jefferson County Jail one day by getting himself arrested for drunken brawling and offered to break him out during the night and flee northward to New York State and possibly Canada. Brown told Silas that, aged 59, he was too old to live a life on the run from the federal authorities as a fugitive and wanted to accept his execution as a martyr for the abolitionist cause. As Brown wrote his wife and children from jail, he believed that his "blood will do vastly more towards advancing the cause I have earnestly endeavoured to promote, than all I have done in my life before."^[203] "I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose."^[204]

The letter was initially published in the London News^[dubious – discuss] and was widely reprinted. After Brown's execution, Hugo wrote a number of additional letters about Brown and the abolitionist cause.^[205]

Abolitionists in the United States saw Hugo's writings as evidence of international support for the anti-slavery cause. The most widely publicized commentary on Brown to reach America from Europe was an 1861 pamphlet, John Brown par Victor Hugo, that included a brief biography and reprinted two letters by Hugo, including that of December 9, 1859. The pamphlet's frontispiece was an engraving of a hanged man by Hugo that became widely associated with the execution.^[206]

Last words, death and aftermath

On December 1, Mary Ann Brown, who had stayed away from the prison due to Brown's concern for her safety, visited her husband for several hours with permission from Governor Wise.^[207]

On the day of his execution, December 2,^[208] Brown read his Bible and wrote a final letter to his wife, which included the will he had written the previous day,^{[209][207][210]} as large meetings were held in many cities in the Northeast. In many of the cases, "Negroes were the chief actors in creating excitement".^[208]

Brown was well read and knew that the last words of prominent people are valued. That morning, Brown wrote and gave to his jailor Avis the words he wanted to be remembered by:

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.^[211]

At 11:00 a.m. Brown rode, sitting on his coffin in a furniture wagon, from the county jail through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers to a small field a few blocks away, where the gallows were.^[209] The military, prepared for an attack, lined the square where Brown was to be hung, with "the greatest array of disciplined forces ever seen in Virginia", according to Major Preston.^[207] Among the soldiers in the crowd were future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth (the latter borrowing a militia uniform to gain admission to the execution).^[209]

Brown, who did not want to have a minister with him, displayed "the most complete fearlessness of & insensibility to danger & death" as he walked to the gallows.^[207] Brown was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and was pronounced dead 35 minutes later by the coroner.^[212]

The poet Walt Whitman, in Year of Meteors, described viewing the execution.^[213]

Funeral and burial

Brown's desire, as told to the jailor in Charles Town, was that his body be burned, "the ashes urned", and his dead sons disinterred and treated likewise.^[214][215] He wanted his epitaph to be:

I have fought a good fight.

I have finished my course.

I have kept the faith. [2 Timothy 4:7]^[216]

However, according to the sheriff of Jefferson County, Virginia law did not allow the burning of bodies, and Mrs. Brown did not want it. Brown's body was placed in a wooden coffin with the noose still around his neck, and the coffin was then put on a train to take it away from Virginia to his family homestead in North Elba, New York for burial.^[217]

His body needed to be prepared for burial; this was supposed to take place in Philadelphia. There were many Southern pro-slavery medical students and faculty in Philadelphia, and as a direct result, they left the city en masse on December 21, 1859, for Southern medical schools, never to return. When Mary and her husband's body arrived on December 3, Philadelphia Mayor Alexander Henry met the train, with many policemen, and said public order could not be maintained if the casket remained in Philadelphia. In fact he "made a fake casket, covered with flowers and flags[,] which was carefully lifted from the coach"; the crowd followed the sham casket. The genuine casket was immediately sent onwards.^[218][219] It was transported through places special to Brown during his life. His corpse was transported via Troy, New York, Rutland, Vermont, and across Lake Champlain by boat. His corpse arrived at the Brown farm at North Elba, New York.^[220] Brown's body was washed, dressed, and placed, with difficulty, in a 5-foot-10-inch (1.78 m) walnut coffin, in New York.^[221] He was buried on December 8, 1859.^[222] Abolitionist Rev. Joshua Young gave a prayer, and James Miller McKim and Wendell Phillips spoke.^[220][222]

In the North, large memorial meetings took place, church bells rang, minute guns were fired, and famous writers such as Emerson and Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown.^[223]

On July 4, 1860, family and admirers of Brown gathered at his farm for a memorial. This was the last time that the surviving members of Brown's family gathered together. The farm was sold, except for the burial plot. By 1882, John Jr., Owen, Jason, and Ruth, widow of Henry Thompson, lived in Ohio; his wife and their two unmarried daughters in California.^[224] By 1886, Owen, Jason, and Ruth were living near Pasadena, California, where they were honored in a parade.^[225]

Senate investigation

On December 14, 1859, the

The investigation was performed in a tense environment in both houses of Congress. One senator wrote to his wife that "The members on both sides are mostly armed with deadly weapons and it is said that the friends of each are armed in the galleries." After a heated exchange of insults, a Mississippian attacked Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania with a Bowie knife in the House of Representatives. Stevens' friends prevented a fight.^[229]

The Senate committee was very cautious in its questions of two of Brown's backers, Samuel Howe and George Stearns, out of fear of stoking violence. Howe and Stearns later said that the questions were asked in a manner that permitted them to give honest answers without implicating themselves.^[229] Civil War historian James M. McPherson stated that "A historian reading their testimony, however, will be convinced that they told several falsehoods."^[230]

Aftermath of the raid

John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was among the last in a series of events that led to the

Southern Democrats charged that Brown's raid was an inevitable consequence of the political platform of what they invariably called "the Black Republican Party". In light of the upcoming elections in November 1860, the Republicans tried to distance themselves as much as possible from Brown, condemning the raid and dismissing its leader as an insane fanatic. As one historian explains, Brown was successful in polarizing politics: "Brown's raid succeeded brilliantly. It drove a wedge through the already tentative and fragile Opposition–Republican coalition and helped to intensify the sectional polarization that soon tore the Democratic party and the Union apart."[234]

Many abolitionists in the North viewed Brown as a martyr, sacrificed for the sins of the nation. Immediately after the raid, William Lloyd Garrison published a column in The Liberator, judging Brown's raid "well-intended but sadly misguided" and "wild and futile".^[235] However, he defended Brown's character from detractors in the Northern and Southern press, and argued that those who supported the principles of the American Revolution could not consistently oppose Brown's raid. On the day Brown was hanged, Garrison reiterated the point in Boston: "whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections".^[236]

Frederick Douglass believed that Brown's "zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine – it was as the burning sun to my taper light – mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him."^[237]

Viewpoints

Contemporaries

Between 1859 and Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Brown was the most famous American: emblem to the North, as Wendell Phillips put it,^[238] and traitor to the South. According to Frederick Douglass, "He was with the troops during that war, he was seen in every camp fire, and our boys pressed onward to victory and freedom, timing their feet to the stately stepping of Old John Brown as his soul went marching on."^[239] Douglass called him "a brave and glorious old man. ...History has no better illustration of pure, disinterested benevolence."^[240]

Other black leaders of the time—Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman—also knew and respected Brown. "Tubman thought Brown was the greatest white man who ever lived",^[241] and she said later he did more for American blacks than Lincoln did.^[242]

Black businesses across the North closed on the day of his execution.^[243] Church bells tolled across the North.^[12] In response to the death sentence, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked that "[John Brown] will make the gallows glorious like the Cross."^[244] In 1863, Julia Ward Howe wrote the popular hymn the Battle Hymn of the Republic to the tune of John Brown's body, which included a line "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free", comparing Brown's sacrifice to that of Jesus Christ.^[12]

According to W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1909 biography, John Brown. Brown's raid stood as "a great white light – an unwavering, unflickering brightness, blinding by its all-seeing brilliance, making the whole world simply a light and a darkness – a right and a wrong."^[245]

According to his friend and financier, the rich abolitionist Gerrit Smith, "If I were asked to point out the man in all this world I think most truly a Christian, I would point to John Brown."^[246][247]

Historians and other writers

Writers continue to vigorously debate Brown's personality, sanity, motivations, morality, and relation to abolitionism.

External videos
Presentation by Reynolds on John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, May 12, 2005, C-SPAN

Some writers describe Brown as a monomaniacal zealot, others as a hero. In 1931, the

In his posthumous The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (1976), David Potter argued that the emotional effect of Brown's raid exceeded the philosophical effect of the Lincoln–Douglas debates, and reaffirmed a deep division between North and South.^[266] Biographer Louis A. DeCaro Jr., who has debunked many historical allegations about Brown's early life and public career, concludes that although he "was hardly the only abolitionist to equate slavery with sin, his struggle against slavery was far more personal and religious than it was for many abolitionists, just as his respect and affection for black people was far more personal and religious than it was for most enemies of slavery".^[267] Historian and Brown documentary scholar Louis Ruchames wrote: "Brown's action was one of great idealism and placed him in the company of the great liberators of mankind."^[268]

Several 21st-century works about Brown are notable for the absence of hostility that characterized similar works a century earlier (when Lincoln's anti-slavery views were de-emphasized).

The connection between John Brown's life and many of the slave uprisings in the Caribbean was clear from the outset. Brown was born during the period of the Haitian Revolution, which saw Haitian slaves revolting against the French. The role the revolution played in helping to formulate Brown's abolitionist views directly is not clear; however, the revolution had an obvious effect on the general view towards slavery in the northern United States, and in the Southern states it was a warning of horror (as they viewed it) possibly to come. As W. E. B. Du Bois notes, the involvement of slaves in the American Revolutions, and the "upheaval in Hayti, and the new enthusiasm for human rights, led to a wave of emancipation which started in Vermont during the Revolution and swept through New England and Pennsylvania, ending finally in New York and New Jersey".^[271]

The 1839 slave insurrection aboard the Spanish ship La Amistad, off the coast of Cuba, provides a poignant example of John Brown's support and appeal towards Caribbean slave revolts. On La Amistad, Joseph Cinqué and approximately 50 other slaves captured the ship, slated to transport them from Havana to Puerto Príncipe, Cuba, in July 1839, and attempted to return to Africa. However, through trickery, the ship ended up in the United States, where Cinque and his men stood trial. Ultimately, the courts acquitted the men because at the time the international slave trade was illegal in the United States.^[272] According to Brown's daughter, "Turner and Cinque stood first in esteem" among Brown's black heroes. Furthermore, she noted Brown's "admiration of Cinques' character and management in carrying his points with so little bloodshed!"^[273] In 1850, Brown would refer affectionately to the revolt, in saying "Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. Witness the case of Cinques, of everlasting memory, on board the Amistad."^[274]

The specific knowledge John Brown gained from the tactics employed in the Haitian Revolution, and other Caribbean revolts, was of paramount importance when Brown turned his sights to the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As Brown's cohort

The idea of creating maroon communities was the impetus for the creation of John Brown's "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States", which helped to detail how such communities would be governed. However, the idea of maroon colonies of slaves is not an idea exclusive to the Caribbean region. In fact, maroon communities riddled the southern United States between the mid-1600s and 1864, especially in the Great Dismal Swamp region of Virginia and North Carolina. Similar to the Haitian Revolution, the Seminole Wars, fought in modern-day Florida, saw the involvement of maroon communities, which although outnumbered by native allies were more effective fighters.^[277]

Although the maroon colonies of North America undoubtedly had an effect on John Brown's plan, their impact paled in comparison to that of the maroon communities in places like Haiti, Jamaica, and Surinam. Accounts by Brown's friends and cohorts prove this idea. Richard Realf, a cohort of Brown in Kansas, noted that Brown not only studied the slave revolts in the Caribbean, but focused more specifically on the maroons of Jamaica and those involved in Haiti's liberation.^[278] Brown's friend Richard Hinton similarly noted that Brown knew "by heart" the occurrences in Jamaica and Haiti.^[279] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a cohort of Brown's and a member of the Secret Six, stated that Brown's plan involved getting "together bands and families of fugitive slaves" and "establish them permanently in those [mountain] fastnesses, like the Maroons of Jamaica and Surinam".^[280]

Legacy

Of all the major figures associated with the American Civil War Brown is one of the most studied and pondered.^[281][282] "As a nation, we are unable to get over John Brown."^[283]: 89 Kate Field raised money to give to the State of New York for what was to be, in her words, "John Brown's Grave and Farm" (now John Brown Farm State Historic Site).^[284] At the centenary of the raid in 1959, a "sanitized" play about him was produced at Harper's Ferry.^[285]

In 2007 Brown was inducted into the

• May 1: In 1999, John Brown Day was celebrated on May 1.^[286]
• May 7: In 2016, John Brown Lives! Friends of Freedom celebrated May 7 as John Brown Day.^[287] In 2018, it was May 5. Spirit of John Brown Freedom Awards were given to environmentalist Jen Kretser, poet Martín Espada, and to Soffiyah Elijah, attorney and executive director of the Alliance of Families for Justice, which advocates for prison reform.^[288] In 2022, the day chosen was May 14.^[289]
• May 9: The
  John Brown Farm, Tannery & Museum, in Guys Mills, Pennsylvania, holds community celebrations on John Brown's birthday, May 9.^[290]
• August 17: In 1906, the Niagara Movement, predecessor of the NAACP, celebrated John Brown Day on August 17.
• October 16: In 2017, the Vermont Legislature designated October 16, the date of the raid, as John Brown Day.^[291][292]

Meetings in honor of John Brown

In 1946, the John Brown Memorial Association held its 24th annual pilgrimage to the grave in North Elba, where there were memorial services.^[293]

At the 150th anniversary of the raid In 2009, a two-day symposium, "John Brown Comes Home", was held, on the influence of Brown's raid, using facilities in adjacent Lake Placid. Speakers included

• John Brown Museum, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia^[296]
• John Brown Farm State Historic Site, North Elba, New York
• John Brown Farm, Tannery, and Museum, Guys Mills, Pennsylvania^[297]
• John Brown House (Chambersburg, Pennsylvania)
• John Brown Museum, Osawatomie, Kansas
• John Brown Raid Headquarters (Kennedy Farm), Samples Manor, Maryland

• Currier & Ives print (see Paintings). The latter was only exhibited for two months in 1863; Barnum withdrew it to save the building from destruction during the anti-Negro riot that broke out shortly.^[208]

• Nothing came of the proposal that Kansas send a statue of Brown as one of its two representatives honored in the U.S. Capitol.
• The first statue of Brown, and the only one not at one of his residences, is that located on the (new) John Brown Memorial Plaza, on the former campus of the closed black
  fugitive slaves and contrabands escaping from the slave state of Missouri. The pillar and the life-sized statue of Brown were erected by descendants of slaves in 1911, at a cost of $2,000 (equivalent to $65,400 in 2023).^[302] Lettering reads: "Erected to the Memory of John Brown by a Grateful People". There is a bronze plaque. In March 2018, the statue was defaced with swastikas and "Hail Satan".^[303]
  • At the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, near Lake Placid, New York, there is a 1935 statue of Brown escorting a black child to freedom. The artist was Joseph Pollia. The cost of the statue and pedestal "was contributed in small sums by Negroes of the United States".^[304]
  • A statue (1933) is at the
    Women's Relief Corps, Department of Kansas.^[305]
  • The only other sculptures of Brown are two busts: the first by black sculptor
    Edward Brackett.^[307]

• Only one major street in the world honors Brown, the Avenue John Brown in
  Port-au-Prince, Haiti, near an avenue honoring abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner
  .
  • A rural John Brown Road is near
    Northwest Pennsylvania near the Ohio border, near the route Owen Brown took seeking refuge after the raid in his brother John Jr.'s house in Ashtabula County, Ohio, there is a Harpers Ferry Road, and intersecting with it, a smaller John Brown Road. In Osawatomie, Kansas
    is John Brown Highway.

• Storer College began as the first graded school for blacks in West Virginia. Its location in Harpers Ferry was because of the importance of Brown and his raid. The Arsenal engine house, renamed John Brown's Fort, was moved to the Storer campus in 1909.^[308] It was used as the college museum.
  • A plaque honoring Brown was attached to the Fort in 1918, while it was on the Storer campus.

In 1931, after years of controversy,

W. E. B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP

, wrote text for a new plaque in 1932. The Storer College administration would not allow it to be put it up, nor did the National Park Service after becoming owner of the Fort. In 2006, it was placed at the site on the former Storer campus where the Fort had been located.

• John Brown's Fort, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.
• John Brown House (Akron, Ohio), where he lived from 1844 to 1854, is (2020) not open to the public but is being renovated by the Summit County Historical Society of Akron, Ohio. There is a John Brown Memorial near the House.^[309] They are in the Perkins Park area of the Akron Zoo. The memorial was not erected within the zoo; the zoo incorporated the land where it is. It is not well marked and is not normally open to the public, nor is the house, though this is expected to change.^{[310][311][312]} The monument was erected in 1910, 8,000 people attended,^[309] and Jason Brown, at the time John Brown's oldest living child, spoke.^[313]
• The wagon that carried Brown from jail to his execution is preserved by the Jefferson County, West Virginia, Museum in Charles Town.^[314]
• A wagon used by Brown when transporting freed slaves from Missouri across Iowa is preserved at the
  Iowa Historical Society^[315]
• An approximate replica of the firehouse was built in 2012 at the Discovery Park of America museum park in Union City, Tennessee. There is a marker explaining the link with John Brown's raid.^{[316][317][318]}
• Iowa has set up the John Brown Freedom Trail, marking his journey across Iowa leaving Kansas, en route to
  Chatham, Ontario.^[319]
  • Lewis, Iowa: "Fighting Slavery – Aiding Runaways. John Brown Freedom Trail – December 20, 1858 – March 12, 1859."
• "Because of the impossibility of colored boys entering work shops where useful trades are taught", a John Brown Industrial College was planned at Bonner Springs, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, and 80 acres (32 ha) purchased.^{[320][321][322]}

Media

Two notable screen portrayals of Brown were given by actor

A well-known image of Brown in the later 19th century is a Currier and Ives print, based on a lost painting by Louis Ransom.^[331][332] It portrays Brown as a Christ-like figure. The "Virgin and Child" typically depicted with Christ are here a black mother and mulatto child. Legend says that Brown kissed the mythical baby but virtually all scholars agree that this did not in fact happen.^[333] Above Brown's head, like a halo, is the flag of Virginia and its motto, Sic semper tyrannis ("Thus always to tyrants"). According to Brown's supporters, the government of Virginia was tyrannical and according to fugitive slaves, it "is as well the black man's, as the white man's motto".^[334]

In 1941,

Paintings such as Thomas Hovenden's The Last Moments of John Brown immortalize an apocryphal story in which a black woman offers the condemned Brown her baby to kiss on his way to the gallows. The tale was probably invented by journalist James Redpath.^[337]

Historical markers

• According to the
  historical markers
  :
  • At his birthplace in Torrington, Connecticut, on John Brown Road.
  • Baldwin City, Kansas: "Battle of black Jack"
  • Franklin County, Kansas: At the site of the Pottawatomie massacre.
  • Lawrence, Kansas: "John Brown and the Siege of Lawrence, September 14–15, 1856"
  • Near Netawaka, Kansas: Battle of the Spurs
  • Osawatomie, Kansas:
    • At the site of the Battle of Osawatomie, in John Brown Memorial Park.
    • "Soldiers' Monument". Commemorating the 5 persons killed, including one of Brown's sons. "This inscription is also in commemoration of the heroism of Capt. John Brown who commanded at the Battle of Osawatomie August 30, 1856; who died and conquered American slavery on the scaffold at Charlestown Va. Dec. 2, 1859."
    • 1935 plaque by The Woman's Relief Corps, Department of Kansas
    • Old Stone Church Marker. "Built by Rev. Samuel Adair brother-in-law of John Brown" (1861).
  • Topeka, Kansas: "Capital of Kansas" ("In the late 1850s negroes bound north on the 'underground railway' were hidden here by John Brown.")
  • Near Trading Post, Kansas:
    • "
      Marais des Cygnes Massacre
      " – site of a "fort" built by Brown after the massacre
    • "Murder on the Marais des Cygnes"
  • Hagerstown, Maryland: at the site of the Washington House Hotel, where Brown stayed on his way to Harpers Ferry.
  • Hyattsville, Maryland: Osborne Perry Anderson, who fought with Brown.
  • Kennedy Farm
    .
  • Marlborough, Massachusetts: at the John Brown Bell, once in Harpers Ferry, since 1892 on display in Marlborough. The second-most-famous American bell, after the Liberty Bell.
  • Detroit, Michigan
    : at the house of William Webb, site of the "Frederick Douglass – John Brown meeting".
  • Hudson, Ohio:
    • At his boyhood home.^[339]
    • First Congregational Church in Hudson: "At a November 1837 prayer meeting, church member and anti-slavery leader John Brown made his first public vow to destroy slavery." Another marker mentions Brown at the former site of the church.
  • Chambersburg, Pennsylvania: "Abolitionist John Brown Boards in Chambersburg"
  • In rural Crawford County, Pennsylvania, there is a John Brown Road, and on it two historical markers at the site of Brown's house and tannery.
  • Indiana, Pennsylvania: marker for Albert Hazlett, a member of Brown's party who was also hanged at Charles Town (in 1860)
  • Valley Forge National Historic Park
    ): "Knox's Quarters – John Brown Farm".
  • Kent, Ohio: marker for Underground Railroad stops mentions John Brown's residence in Kent (then called Franklin Mills) during the 1830s.
  • Mont Alto, Pennsylvania: "John Brown Raid", where John Cooke, one of Brown's followers, was captured. (Two markers.)
  • Near Amissville, Virginia: Dangerfield Newby marker.
  • Winchester, Virginia: "A 'Malicious Design' – Burning the Winchester Medical College". The body of John Brown's son Watson was brought there for dissection by medical students.
  • Charles Town, West Virginia:
    • "
      Jefferson County Courthouse
      – Where John Brown Was Tried"
    • "Two Treason Trials". (The other had nothing to do with Brown.)
    • "Hanging Site of John Brown. Creation of a Martyr. Prelude to War."
    • "Site of the execution of John Brown"
    • "Edge Hill Cemetery – John Brown Raid Victims"
    • Beallair, home of Colonel Lewis Washington, held hostage by Brown.
    • Focus of Action – Jefferson County in the Civil War
  • Harpers Ferry, West Virginia:
    • "Pilgrimage." Marks the site of an 1896 visit by the
      National League of Colored Women
      .
    • "Holy Ground". Marks 1906 visit by members of the Niagara Movement, predecessor of the NAACP, on what they called John Brown Day, August 17.
    • "John Brown", plaque erected in 1918 by the alumni of Storer College.
    • "John Brown", plaque erected in 1932 by the NAACP.
    • "John Brown Fort."
    • "A Nation's Armory"
    • "Arsenal Square"
    • "'for the deposit of arms'"
    • "John Brown Monument", on the site of the original location of "John Brown's Fort"
    • "John Brown's Last Stand", at the same location.
    • "Allstadt House – John Brown's Hostages – Prelude to War"
    • "The John Brown Raiders", all those who participated in the raid.
    • "In Honor of Private Luke Quinn" – killed during the capture of John Brown
    • "The Murphy Farm", location of John Brown's Fort between 1895 and 1910.
    • "
      Hayward Shepard
      – Another Perspective"
    • "Heyward Shepherd"
  • Chatham, Ontario
    : "John Brown's Convention 1858".

Archival material

Court material and related documents

The indictments, summons, sentences, bills of exception, and similar documents for Brown and his raiders are held by the Jefferson County Circuit Clerk, and have been digitized by West Virginia Archives and History.^[340] Two separate collections of relevant letters were published. The first is the messages, mostly telegrams, sent and received by Governor Wise.^[341] The Senate of Maryland published the many internal telegrams of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.^[184]

Much material is missing. The order book, which had the minutes of John Brown's trial,^[342] was evidently possessed by Brown's judge Richard Parker in 1888.^[343] As of 2022^[update], its location is unknown. Among the missing material used at his trial as evidence of sedition were bundles of printed copies of his Provisional Constitution, prepared for the "state" Brown intended to set up in the Appalachian Mountains. Even less known is Brown's "Declaration of Liberty", imitating the Declaration of Independence.^[344]

According to Prosecutor Andrew Hunter,

John Brown had with him when captured at Harpers Ferry a carpet-bag in which were his constitution for a provisional government and other papers. He had placed it in one corner of the engine house, and there it was found when the marines charged and captured the survivors. Mr. Hunter took possession of the carpet-bag and carried it to Charlestown. He kept it and its contents. He added to the papers the letters which were forwarded to the prisoners and not delivered to them. Ordinary letters were allowed to pass to the prisoners after Mr. Hunter had examined them. But those letters which seemed to contain information bearing upon the organization in the North, Mr. Hunter confiscated and kept. He had between seventy and eighty of these letters, and he placed them in John Brown's carpet-bag. Other important documents bearing upon the secret history of the case went into the same receptacle, and much of the matter nobody but Mr. Hunter saw.^[345]

There was correspondence from

The carpet-bag also contained maps of Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia that showed the locations of State arsenals with proposed routes for attacks and retreats.[8]^[345][350]

Hunter personally took the carpet-bag to Richmond, because he thought it would be safer there. He was at the time a member of the Virginia State Senate. In 1865, when Lee advised that he could no longer defend Richmond, Hunter did not want the "Yankees" to find the carpet-bag. He thought that the Capitol was as safe a place as any in Richmond, and he asked Commonwealth Secretary George Wythe Munford if he could hide it in the Capitol. "Munford told me that he has taken the carpet-bag up to the cock-loft of the Capitol and had let down the bag between the wall and the plastering, and I believe those papers are there yet."^[345]

Wise sent attorney Henry Hudnall to Charles Town to put in order Hunter's documents. In a letter to Wise of November 17, he refers to "a large quantity of matter", including "nearly a half bushel of letters" just of Tidd alone.^[351]

In 1907–08 there appeared in print a varied collection of letters and other documents a Union soldier from Massachusetts took from Hunter's office in the Charles Town courthouse in 1862, when it was being used as a Union barracks.^{[343][352][353][354]}

Correspondence and other archival material

The West Virginia Archives and History owns the largest single collection on Brown, the Boyd B. Stutler Collection. A negative microfilm of the material is held by the

The Hudson Library and Historical Society of Hudson, Ohio, Brown's home town, prepared annotated listings of Brown's many ancestors, siblings, and children.^[357] Since John Brown moved around a lot, had a large family, and had a lot to say, he carried on a voluminous correspondence, including letters to editors,^[358] and was repeatedly interviewed by reporters, as he made himself available. Archival material on him and his circle is therefore abundant, and widely scattered. There has never been a complete edition of his extant correspondence; the one scholarly attempt, from 1885, produced a book of 645 pages. Editor F. B. Sanborn stated that he had enough letters for another book.^[359] A 2015 book was published just of the letters Brown wrote in the last month of his life, from jail.^[360] Additional letters were found and published in the 20th century.^{[361][362][363]} Archival material concerning John Brown's time in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, including his tannery, is held by the Pelletier Library, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania.^[364] Clark Atlanta University holds a small collection.^[365]

Brown biographer

• Bibliography of the American Civil War
• List of incidents of civil unrest in the United States
• Origins of the American Civil War
• Radical Republicans

Notes