Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry

John Brown raids the federal armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in an unsuccessful bid to spark a general slave rebellion on October 16, 1859.

Brown had established a headquarters in a rented farmhouse in Maryland, across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry in the summer of 1859.

On the night of October 16, he and an armed band of five blacks and sixteen whites, including three of his sons, quickly seize the armory and round up some sixty leading men of the area as hostages.

Brown takes this desperate action in the hope that escaped slaves will join his rebellion, forming an “army of emancipation” with which to liberate their fellow slaves.

Instead of retreating to the mountains with a supply of arms, the abolitionists fortify themselves in the armory's engine room.

Brown and his men had resisted attacks by the local militia throughout the next day and night, but on the following morning he surrenders to a small force of U.S. Marines who, in little more than an hour, have broken in and overpowered him. (The leader of the force is Robert E. Lee, who had received these orders while on leave at Arlington to straighten out the entangled affairs of his late father-in-law.)

Brown himself is wounded, and ten of his followers (including two sons) have been killed.

Brown, tried for murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state, is convicted despite the high moral tone of his defense.

Hanged on December 2, 1859 in Charles Town, Virginia (today in West Virginia), he becomes a martyr symbol for many in the abolitionist camp.