A violent crusader in the cause of freedom: John Brown and his guerrilla force raided Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hope of starting a slave uprising across the South.

• Author: Schaumburg, Ron
• Position: Times past

On the morning of Oct. 17, 1859, the people of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, awoke to discover that their town had been invaded.

During the night, a small band, led by a fiery antislavery crusader named John Brown, had occupied a gun factory and seized a federal arsenal stacked with thousands of muskets and rifles. The raiders--14 white and five black men--held dozens of prisoners at gunpoint and killed several people who got in their way.

Fierce and fearless, John Brown had conceived a bold plan: He hoped to incite black slaves throughout the South to rebel and take up arms against their masters. The guns from Harpers Ferry would give the insurrection the firepower it needed to spread, plantation by plantation, until all the slaves were freed.

Brown was convinced that an army of slaves would rush to join him after hearing of the Harpers Ferry raid. The throngs never came, but publicity surrounding Brown's subsequent trial and execution helped ignite the long-smoldering debate over slavery and moved the nation a step closer to the Civil War.

MAKING OF A RADICAL

By the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown, at 59, was already known as a fanatical crusader against slavery. A few years earlier, in Kansas--where people were debating whether to become a slave state or free state--Brown's guerrilla gang, provoked by a bloody attack on abolitionist settlers, hacked to death five unarmed pro-slavery settlers.

Born in Connecticut, Brown hated slavery from his youth. As an adult, he worked as a farmer, tanner, and land speculator, but he was a poor businessman and had a hard time feeding his large family (two marriages had produced 20 children).

As a Calvinist, Brown practiced a strict form of Christianity. He believed the Bible contained God's law, which took priority over the laws of man. He deeply loved his country, but he had no qualms about breaking its laws if he felt they contradicted biblical morals. At his trial, he explained his beliefs by saying:

... [T]he New Testament ... teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them....

Brown especially despised the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a crime to help escaped slaves. As a link in the Underground Railroad, he once led a group of 10 slaves to freedom in Canada, a journey that took three months and covered more than a thousand snow-covered miles.

To carry out his slave...