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Was John Brown A Terrorist?

from the October 20, 2009 eNews issue
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Jefferson County, West Virginia is busily celebrating the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on the Harpers Ferry armory with plays and reenactments. On October 16, 1859, John Brown led an abolitionist raid on Harpers Ferry in an effort to end slavery. While the raid ultimately failed and Brown was captured and hung, historians agree that Brown's raid escalated the tensions between America's North and South leading to the US Civil War in 1861.

Harpers Ferry itself is a lovely museum of a town that rises up steep streets over the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. Many of the original buildings still stand despite a series of floods over the years, and the entire town and river valley can be viewed from Jefferson Rock, from which Thomas Jefferson famously gazed down on October 25, 1783 and wrote, "this scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic."

Yet, on October 16, 1859 Harpers Ferry was the scene of bloodshed. After months of planning and collecting weapons, including .52 caliber Sharps carbines and nearly 1000 pikes, Brown led 19 men on an attack of the local armory. The armory held some 100,000 muskets and rifles, and Brown intended to seize these to arm local slaves. According to testimonies at his trial, Brown's purpose was to lead an insurrection of slaves in northern Virginia. As they passed one plantation after another, the slaves would join their forces until there was no stopping them. The institution of slavery would simply collapse as the slaves left their masters and headed south on a liberation march.

Things did not go quite as planned, though. Brown's men successfully took the armory and captured hostages from nearby farms, including Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington. But, that's where the plan stagnated. Local farmers, storekeepers, and militia shot down at Brown's men from the high streets of Harpers Ferry and eventually trapped the raiders in the small engine house at the armory's entrance. On October 18, a company of US Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee surrounded the engine house, broke down its door, freed the hostages and captured Brown and his men. In all, Brown lost 10 men, and had killed four people and wounded nine in the effort.

John Brown's actions are praised by some as necessary and important in the effort to end slavery. Others insist that Brown's tactics proved him a madman and a terrorist.

One of the people to testify against Brown at his trial was Mahala Doyle, a woman whose husband and sons Brown had killed in the Pottawatomie Massacre during the bloody conflict over slavery in Kansas. In May 1856, upset over the violence of pro-slavery forces, Brown and his men had gone into the home of James P. Doyle, a former slave catcher, and had taken him and his sons outside, where they were murdered. Mahala Doyle wrote Brown in prison after the Harpers Ferry raid, saying, "You can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You can't say you done it to free slaves. We had none and never expected to own one."

After his conviction on November 2, 1859, Brown defended his actions, saying:

"I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"

Dr. Robert Willgoos of Shepherd University took part in a public discussion and debate at Harpers Ferry on Sunday. While Willgoos acknowledged that Brown's actions certainly sped along the effort toward the abolition of slavery, he could not condone Brown's methods. "One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist," Willgoos said, "and John Brown's methods were certainly terroristic."