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.

Shortly after dusk on October 16, 1859 a party of eighteen heavily armed men, the self-styled Provisional Army of the United States, departed the Kennedy farm house in Washington County, Maryland. They made their way south, crossed the Potomac into Virginia at Harper’s Ferry. In short order they seized the B&O Railroad trestles crossing the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, the US Armory and Arsenal, the US Rifle Works, cut all telegraph access, and took hostage two prominent citizens.

Their objective was to ignite a slave rebellion in Virginia which would spread and destroy the institution of chattel slavery in the South.

John Brown’s Raid was as much a signal event in the nation’s inexorable slide towards civil war as Edmund Ruffin’s firing the first shot on Fort Sumter. It should be viewed as the death knell of the non-violent anti-slavery struggle in the United States.

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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.

Shortly after dusk on October 16, 1859 a party of eighteen heavily armed men, the self-styled Provisional Army of the United States, departed the Kennedy farm house in Washington County, Maryland. They made their way south, crossed the Potomac into Virginia at Harper’s Ferry. In short order they seized the B&O Railroad trestles crossing the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, the US Armory and Arsenal, the US Rifle Works, cut all telegraph access, and took hostage two prominent citizens.

Their objective was to ignite a slave rebellion in Virginia which would spread and destroy the institution of chattel slavery in the South.

John Brown’s Raid was as much a signal event in the nation’s inexorable slide towards civil war as Edmund Ruffin’s firing the first shot on Fort Sumter. It should be viewed as the death knell of the non-violent anti-slavery struggle in the United States.

Read More →