Brown, John (1800-1859)

US slavery abolitionist. With 18 men, on the night of 16 October 1859, he seized the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, apparently intending to distribute weapons to runaway slaves who would then defend a mountain stronghold, which Brown hoped would become a republic of former slaves. On 18 October the arsenal was stormed by US Marines under Col Robert E Lee. Brown was tried and hanged at Charlestown on 2 December, becoming a martyr and the hero of the popular song ‘John Brown's Body’.

Brown was born in Connecticut and grew up in Ohio where he was heavily influenced by strong antislavery sentiment. He studied for the Congregationalist ministry and, although he abandoned this at the age of 18, he remained deeply religious. He then led an itinerant life and tried farming in several of the eastern states before he settled as a farmer in Kansas in 1855.

At the time Kansas was deeply divided over the slavery issue following the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which allowed the settlers of the territory to decide whether or not to permit slavery. Like many evangelicals of his era, Brown regarded abolition as a moral crusade, but unlike most of his contemporaries he accepted the use of violence to promote the abolitionist cause. In 1856, spurred by the sack of Lawrence, Kansas by proslavery forces, Brown and five of his sons attacked and murdered five proslavery farmers living on the Pottawatomie River, an incident later known as the ‘Pottawatomie massacre’. They managed to escape punishment, and Brown spent the next three years collecting funds from wealthy abolitionists in order to establish a colony for runaway slaves in the mountains of Virginia.

After the unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown and his men were sentenced to death. Northern abolitionists cited the executions as an example of the government's support for slavery. For those sympathetic to the abolitionism, John Brown was a martyr who died for his belief that slavery should be abolished. As time went on Brown's name became a symbol of the pro-Union, antislavery cause. In 1881 the African-American leader Frederick Douglass delivered a speech honouring him, and Harpers Ferry became the site of Storer College, a school for African Americans. See United States: history 1783-1861, the Dred Scott Case and Harpers Ferry.