John Brown Underground Railroad Conductor

Most Americans have heard the song John Brown’s Body, also known as Battle Hymn of the Republic. Whether as children in preschool, teenagers in a military marching band, or adults watching old Civil War films, the name of John Brown has made it to the country’s collective ears. Brown’s household name comes with a thrilling history; a violence-driven abolitionist led a militant raid in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, losing two sons, several comrades, and eventually his life in the process.

Brown achieved martyrdom upon his hanging as a traitor and was a great influence of the Union cause in the Civil War, but ultimately, John Brown, a white man from Connecticut, attempted to spark a slave revolution because he believed slavery to be an abomination against his god.

John Brown was born to Calvinist parents, Ruth Mills and Owen Brown, on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. As Calvinism rejected slavery and thought of it as a sin, Brown was raised in a staunch anti-slavery household.

With these thoughts ingrained in him from childhood, he grew up believing he was his god’s chosen warrior against slavery, and alongside his parents, he befriended the dwindling Native American population and aided fugitive slaves as an Underground Railroad conductor in his hometown of Hudson, Ohio. Brown married his first wife, Dianthe Lusk, in 1820 and had several children with her before she passed away early on in the 1830s. In 1833, Brown remarried to Mary Ann Day and had several more children. Two of Brown’s sons, Watson and Oliver, along with 16 other men fought with him in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859.

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Brown spent a good bit of his adult life moving around and trying and failing at different trades. He eventually settled in Kansas in 1855, one year after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened up Kansas and Nebraska to positions as either slave states or free states. Brown, having shifted from a quiet conductor to an angry fighter, took up arms and fought in the Pottawatomie Massacre against defenders of slavery in Kansas. Brown began planning to invade and start a slave revolt in the South. He left his home in Kansas early 1858 to gather support for his cause. He found financial backing, stocked up on arms and planned for the start of his revolt, which was set to occur in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, one of the most industrial cities in the South.

Brown’s plan was to spark the fire of revolution in the heart of the area’s slave population, arm the revolutionaries, and lead them to freedom, and his crew set off on this mission the night of October 16, 1859. In the early morning of October 17, Brown’s band of abolitionists captured the federal armory and several figureheads in the city, but the slaves he expected to revolt never appeared at the scene. Local militia forced Brown and his team into hiding until Colonel Robert E. Lee and his US Marines arrived, capturing Brown, killing his team, and squashing the rebellion. November 2, Brown was tried and found guilty of slave insurrection, murder, and treason against the state of Virginia, for which the penalty was death. He was hung in Charlestown, Virginia, December 2, 1859. Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth were witnesses to his death and would become famous in the years to come by nature of the Civil War and its aftermath. Brown died a martyr for the abolitionist and eventually Union movement, and a song, now named Battle Hymn of the Republic, was written about him, along with a speech calling him “Captain Brown” by Henry David Thoreau.

John Brown’s decision to attempt at sparking a slave rebellion as a white man is, by every definition of the word, controversial. His passionate, violent expression of his beliefs left him both loathed and martyred in his grave. John Brown’s life and death was the tip of the arrow, leading directly to the dissension, disagreement, and discomfort that began the Civil War. Realistically, it would have been very simple for John Brown to have continued as he was. His station as a conductor in the Underground Railroad was beneficial to the slave population he so longed to help, and he and his family were in significantly less danger that way. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Brown and other conductors were definitely on thin ice, but the ice was only financially thin. Their lives were not at stake as conductors on the Underground Railroad. Brown chose to fight violently against slavery because he believed it was his sacred duty to free the enslaved black population from bondage, but he could not have possibly known the impact he would have. It could be argued that in John Brown’s mind, the Harper’s Ferry raid was a failure. He did not amass the army of rebellious slaves united under his cause that he expected and wanted.

Brown did, however, scramble the party system enough for Abraham Lincoln, who wasn’t a real contender for the Republicans previously to Harper’s Ferry, to gain office. What Harper’s Ferry was at that time was a direct expression of hostility and violence on the side of the abolitionists. Abolitionists largely fought for the human rights of the slaves, and John Brown committed murder: the exact opposite of what someone for human rights is supposed to do. Brown’s actions splintered the extreme abolitionist movement on the Republican side and rattled the pro-slavery Democrats by making their fear of slave insurrection a near reality, making way for Lincoln, a more conservative Republican to become President of the United States. John Brown’s decision to raid Harper’s Ferry also set up the idea of Southern secession. After his attack on Virginia, militias began springing up in the South like flowers in the springtime. Tensions increased between the North and the South, and slaveholders worried more and more about the future of their free labor as the election approached. If John Brown had simply stayed put in his conductor position, the widespread fear of anti-slavery leadership and slave insurrection would not have existed in the capacity that it did. Lincoln’s election would not have sparked Southern outrage and succession because he would not have been elected. Without John Brown’s decision to raid Harper’s Ferry, our country could look and run quite differently than it does today.

Although John Brown led an attack on Harper’s Ferry due to his religious convictions against slavery, his impact is much greater. Brown’s actions launched the United States into Civil War over the basic questions of what humanity is and who has it, which the United States continues to ask today in discussions about reproductive, transgender, and civil rights. Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry also offers a deeper look into political violence on the liberal side, and it presents a challenge to the idea that those fighting for humanity will sometimes neglect the very cause they fight for. In a society in which every possible side to a story is publicly under attack from the media, John Brown’s actions, though excessive and violent, offer a beam of hope. Brown shows that neither side is completely innocent when it comes to a divided country, and he solidifies the silver lining on every cloud. No matter how bad the situation, all it takes is one white man to scramble a country’s mindset and make way for a kinder, more-balanced society to follow behind. John Brown’s body lies a’moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on. Glory, glory, hallelujah.