Transcription
FERGUS BORDEWICH: Did he set out to terrorize the South? Yes, he did.
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC]
When I read about him as a young person, I was tremendously fascinated by the fiery complexity of Brown and the way he faced the racial contradictions of this country head-on 150 years ago. He had worked on the Underground Railroad for much of his life. His vision of liberating slaves in the South was essentially a vision of the Underground Railroad writ large.
Many years later, I wrote a book, a national history of the Underground Railroad called Bound for Canaan. I dealt at length with Brown in that book.
Well, John Brown had been thinking about raiding Harpers Ferry for a long time. It was an armory with a huge stock of weapons. Brown hoped that, having captured the weapons, he could distribute them to enslaved people who would join his cause, go off with him into the Alleghenies and Appalachian Mountains, and establish colonies of freed men and an Underground Railroad pathway from the Deep South to the North.
In the dead of night, he and a small band of men, 19 of them at that moment, crossed from Maryland across the Potomac into Harpers Ferry. They seized the federal armory there. Men were sent out into the surrounding countryside in an effort to raise a rebellion among enslaved people. They didn't succeed in that. Very, very few slaves participated.
Brown was quickly trapped in the fire engine house near the federal armory in Harpers Ferry. Over the course of a day, there was a bitter fight, mostly sniping back and forth, while hundreds and hundreds of militiamen cut off Brown and his men's only avenues of escape.
Brown and his men were holed up in a single room, very congested, crowded with fire engines, pumping wagons, a number of hostages, and his own men wounded and dying. He and his men became willing to martyr themselves. The Marines broke through the door to the engine house. There was a melee inside. Brown's men were killed. Those who were captured were hanged later on, including Brown.
Immediately after his death, he was heroized, really sanctified by Northern abolitionists. He terrified white Southerners. If one abolitionist could come South with this in mind and put guns in the hands of enslaved people, others could. The South, of course, was already moving towards accepting secession. It moved a lot faster after John Brown's raid.
He wanted to terrorize the South. That was one of his main objectives. It succeeded.
In the following decades after the war, John Brown's star sank to its lowest. He was often written off as a madman, even a psychopath, a lunatic. Yes, he was a zealot, but he was also a man far ahead of his time in his vision of racial fairness and equitability. John Brown was 150 years ahead of most of us. He was by no means the kind of blind fanatic, much less lunatic, that he was said to be.