Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and John Brown (1800-1859) first met in 1847. Over the next 12 years, the two abolitionists corresponded frequently and saw each other on many occasions. Douglass, the former slave and brilliant orator, and Brown, a religious zealot, were bound together by their passionate hatred of slavery.

In the fall of 1855, Brown led a group of men to “Bleeding Kansas” as pro- and anti-slavery partisans were engaged in guerrilla warfare to determine if the Kansas territory would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Historian David Blight notes that when proslavery forces burned and looted the Free Soil bastion of Lawrence, Brown “snapped with rage.”

That rage fueled the May 1856 “Brown-planned and ordered murders” of five men at Pottawatomie Creek. The victims were dragged out of their cabins and hacked to death with cutlasses. All were proslavery men who advocated attacks on Free State supporters. Blight states the “Pottawatomie massacre” would remain an “uncomfortable challenge” for many of Brown’s loyal supporters and sympathetic biographers.

In his autobiography “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” written 25 yeas after the Kansas killings, Douglass approved of Brown’s murderous rampage. Historian Justin Jackson notes that Douglass had made the transformation from “passive resistance” to a more open and public stance endorsing violence in the struggle to end slavery.

During the winter of 1858, Brown informed Douglass of a plan to bring slaves from the upper South to the North, and in so doing, threaten the stability of slavery. Brown also mentioned the possibility of attacking the Harpers Ferry Virginia arsenal and distributing the weapons to escaped slaves making their way to the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains. These self-emancipated individuals would establish colonies of freed men. While Douglass was open to liberating slaves, he was vehemently opposed to attacking the arsenal.

In the summer of 1859, Brown rented a farmhouse in Maryland — no more than five miles from Harpers Ferry — the staging ground for his assault on the arsenal. As Brown and Douglass corresponded through the summer, Blight states that Douglass was aware of Brown’s location and his Harpers Ferry intentions.

On Aug. 19 the two abolitionists met in a stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and debated the Harpers Ferry scheme. Douglass told Brown nothing good would come of his plan. “I at once opposed the measure with all the arguments at my command … It would be an attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole country against us.” Blight states that Douglass considered the plan lunacy and at age 41 was “not prepared to die in such futility.”

Wrapping his arms around Douglass, Brown pleaded with his friend to join him stating: “I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm and I shall want you to help hive them.” Bees referred to slaves Brown was certain would rally to the great uprising. Douglass told Brown “he was going into a perfect steel trap, and once in he would never get out alive; that he would be surrounded at once and escape would be impossible.”

On Oct. 16, 1859, Brown told 18 of his followers: “Men, get on your arms. We will proceed to the Ferry.”

As Douglass had predicted, the attack was a complete disaster. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee stormed the fire-engine house on Oct. 18 where the raiders were entrenched, ending the fiasco 36 hours after it began. Brown was badly wounded and 10 of his men, including sons Oliver and Watson, were dead.

Virginia authorities moved quickly, Brown’s trial commencing on Oct. 27. After deliberating for 45 minutes on Nov. 2, the jury convicted him and his co-defendants of three charges: “conspiring with Negroes to produce insurrection,” first-degree murder (five people were killed by the raiders) and treason. Each charge carried the death penalty.

According to historian H.W. Brands, John Brown believed God had a plan for him. If Brown could not free the slaves in this life “perhaps he might free them in his death.” In letters and conversations during the interim between his conviction and execution, Brown made it clear these were the happiest days of his life, stating his “public murder” would be a mighty blow against slavery.

On the morning of his execution by hanging — Dec. 2 — Brown gave a note to his jailer: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Southerners were infuriated as many people in the North began viewing Brown not as a wild-eyed religious fanatic but a Christ-like martyr who gave his life for a great cause. Ralph Waldo Emerson stated Brown “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

Reflecting on Harpers Ferry in his 1881 autobiography, Douglass stated: “I could speak for the slave, John Brown could fight for the slave, I could live for the slave, John Brown could die for the slave.”

In his insightful essay, “John Brown’s Day of Reckoning,” historian Fergus Bordewich quotes David Frye of the National Park Service: “Harpers Ferry was the South’s Pearl Harbor … There was a heightened sense of paranoia, a fear of more abolitionist attacks — that more Browns were coming any day, at any moment. The South’s greatest fear was slave insurrection.”

Civil War historian James McPherson states this sense of dread revealed the South’s paradoxical (hypocritical?) view of slavery. “On the one hand, many whites lived in fear of insurrection. On the other … they insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage.”

The Harpers Ferry debacle did not start the Civil War (14 months after Brown’s execution) although it may have hastened that conflict’s beginning. The country was on a war trajectory that would only be resolved by a free-state/slave-state showdown — four years of misery that claimed the lives of 750,000 combatants in a combined North-South population of 31.5 million including almost 4 million slaves.

John Brown engaged in violence as an avenging angel on a God-ordained mission to destroy slavery. David Blight states that Douglass’s views of unfolding events were also grounded in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. In Blight’s interpretation of Douglass, “the Civil War was an apocalyptic break in history somehow under God’s intervention …” a righteous conflict to end the scourge of human bondage in this country.

George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

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Sources

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“Black and slave populations in the United States 1790-1880” (accessed 2020) Statista, www.statista.com

Blight, D. (2018) Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Simon & Schuster: New York

Bordewich, F. (2005) Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, Amistad/HarperCollins: New York

Bordewich, F. “John Brown’s Day of Reckoning,” (2009) Smithsonian Magazine, October, www.smithsonianmag.com

Brands, H. (2020) The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the

Struggle for American Freedom, New York: Anchor Books

Douglass, F. (1881, Dover edition 2003) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Dover Publications: Mineola, New York

Jackson, J. (2022) Personal communication, January 16

McPherson, J. (1988) Battle Cry of Freedom – The Civil War Era, Oxford University Press: New York

“Population of the United States from the final census conducted before the Civil War in 1860, by race and gender” (accessed 2022) Statista, www.statista.com

“The Hanging” (accessed 2022) PBS, www.pbs.org