John Brown Trial: 1859

Sometimes great events thrust ordinary and obscure people into the limelight. Certainly this was true of John Brown, born in 1800 to Yankee farmers Owen Brown and Ruth Mills Brown. The Browns made a modest living from the family farm near Torrington, Connecticut, enough to permit their son to enter school for training as a minister. John Brown was a poor student, however, and shortly returned to the family farm after failing his classes. This failure was to be the first of many. John Brown went on to try and fail at earning a living as a farmer, surveyor, real estate investor, postmaster, teacher, racehorse breeder, tanner, and wool merchant.

Unsuccessful in business throughout his life, Brown was already past 50 when he took up the cause of abolition. Some wealthy east coast businessmen and philanthropists gave Brown the support and financing necessary to set up a farm in North Elba, New York, where runaway slaves would be taught how to become independent farmers. Brown soon lost interest in the project, however, and set out for the "front lines" of the abolitionist struggle. In the mid-1850s, Brown took his wife and some of his many sons to the little hamlet of Osawatomie, Kansas.

Kansas at the time was a battleground, known as "Bleeding Kansas" for the undeclared war raging then between the Free and Slave state forces. Brown lost no time in joining the fray. From Osawatomie, Brown led his sons and several followers in a raid on the neighboring pro-slavery settlement of Pottawatomie that left five dead. After this massacre, Brown and his followers became fugitives, engaging in hit-and-run raids against pro-slavery forces in Kansas and elsewhere.

Despite his unabashed use of violence, Brown continued to attract wealthy and influential backers. Of his backers, the most important were the "Secret Six": Gerrit Smith, heir to a large fortune who had financed temperance and prison reform movements before turning to abolition; Franklin B. Sanborn, a young Massachusetts patrician with a Harvard education; George Luther Stearns, who financed Brown's activities with the profits from Stearns' thriving business; Samuel Gridley Howe, a prominent abolitionist who preached violence in the cause of ending slavery and looked to Brown to practice it; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a liberal minister; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous poet. In 1859, Brown obtained support from these men for a proposed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The plan was to seize the arsenal, arm the hordes of slaves who would supposedly flock to Brown's cause, and march on Southern state capitals to end slavery forever.

On October 16, 1859, Brown and 21 raiders succeeded in seizing the Harpers Ferry arsenal by surprise. Instead of attracting black followers, however, the raid only succeeded in bringing out the armed and angry local white residents, who surrounded the arsenal until federal troops arrived. Ironically, the soldiers sent to protect federal property were commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, the famous general of the Confederacy during the Civil War. After a brief siege, the arsenal was stormed. Brown, together with his few surviving followers, was captured and taken under guard to nearby Charles Town, Virginia. (Harpers Ferry and Charles Town later became part of West Virginia.)