Report of the Select committee of the Senate appointed to inquire into
the late invasion and seizure of the public property at Harper's Ferry
(1860)
On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and 21 armed followers
entered the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now part of West Virginia),
as most of its residents slept. They took 60 prominent locals hostage and
seized the town's United States arsenal and its rifle works. The men,
among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave,
hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an "army of
emancipation." They wanted to overturn the institution of slavery by
force.
By the next evening, the conspirators were holed-up in an engine house.
The next day Colonel Robert E. Lee's troops stormed the building and
Brown was caught. For his actions, he was quickly tried and convicted of
murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and sentenced
to death by hanging.
The fears inspired by the raid on Harpers Ferry exceeded and outlasted
its actual threat. For thousands of southerners, it was evidence of a
vast conspiracy of northern abolitionists whose object was to incite
violence and destroy the southern way of life. John Brown's raid
exacerbated a deepening sectional crisis between north and south and
brought the nation one step closer to civil war. John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859.
