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John Brown (1800-1859) knew his way around the Bible.
He found his favorite verse in the New Testament to the Hebrews: “There is no forgiveness without bloodshed.” That was true of a fanatic who had devoted his life to the struggle against slavery.
In October 1859 he made himself a martyr.
Two years later the US northern states entered the civil war against the slave-holding south with his name on their lips.
John Brown (1800-1859) in 1856 during his guerrilla war in Kansas
Source: picture-alliance / newscom / Pi
It was an amazing career for a man who by then had failed in all the endeavors he had started.
The Puritan, born in New England in 1800, succeeded in fathering 20 children.
But as a farmer or businessman, he only pulled rivets.
All the more passionately he devoted himself to a task for which he believed himself chosen: the liberation of the slaves in the American southern states.
In the mid-1850s, the conflict between the industrializing north and the plantation owners in the south took on increasingly brutal forms.
One reason for this was the expansion of the USA to the west.
The development of new territories raised the question of whether or not slavery would be permitted in them too, which in turn determined the highly unstable balance between north and south in federal politics.
So the US expanded across the continent
When the United States was founded, it was only a fraction of the area it is today.
In our graphic we show you the expansion from 1783 to the end of the 19th century.
Source: WORLD
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By then, the slave owners had succeeded in dominating the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court using the instrument of the Democratic Party (which then followed very different values than today).
This has long been a mockery of the population, as the meanwhile 18.5 million Yankees were compared to only 13 million inhabitants of the southern states - four million of whom were slaves with black African roots.
Brown found a rewarding field of activity in Kansas.
The dispute as to whether the “special institution” of the South should also be introduced in this territory, which was expected to join the Union as a federal state, had provoked civil war-like conflicts.
Brown and several sons immediately formed a guerrilla group.
After some opponents of slavery were killed in his neighborhood, he kidnapped five slavery-friendly farmers in 1856 and imposed on them what he called "radical reprisals."
He split their skulls with a heavy saber.
Although he was wanted for the so-called Pottawatomie massacre, Brown remained at large, which gave him the opportunity to continue to participate in the bloody guerrilla war.
"Radical Retaliation": This is how Brown's contemporaries imagined the Pottawatomie massacre
Source: Getty Images
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This strengthened his reputation with the abolitionists, as the declared opponents of slavery in the north were called.
There the rumor soon spread that Brown's alleged massacre was just an invention of his opponents to slander an honorable human rights activist.
In the meantime he found the opportunity to proclaim a republic for freed slaves in Canada, in whose provisional constitution slavery was condemned as a "highly barbaric, groundless and unjustifiable struggle" between masters and slaves.
Brown wanted to put an end to this by turning the tables.
He found discreet support from six notables from the north, the “secret six”, who were willing to use their wealth to end slavery “bloody as it began”, as one of them wrote.
In 1858 Brown presented them with his revolutionary plan: with a handful of determined fighters, he wanted to take control of Harpers Ferry's army arsenal.
The captured weapons were then to be distributed to the black slaves in the area, who would thus become the nucleus of an uprising that would break the rule of the whites once and for all.
Harper's Ferry (then Virginia) Army Arsenal
Source: Print Collector / Getty Images
Harpers Ferry's arsenal was located at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers in what would become West Virginia in 1863.
There, in the summer of 1859, Brown bought a farm as a base for his 22 men - 17 white and five black -, collected weapons and waited for more fighters to rally under his banner.
But advertising via abolitionist networks was not enough to turn sympathy for Brown's plans into action.
Which spoke for a certain sense of reality.
Because Harpers Ferry, surrounded by the rivers and steep mountains, was like a mousetrap that might be taken, but could hardly be defended against an overwhelming force.
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On the evening of October 16, Brown went out with his followers.
The barely guarded arsenal was quickly in her hand.
On the way to the train station, they took some hostages.
Only the local slaves, whom he sent messengers to inform of his successful coup, turned down his invitation to join him.
To do this, the Virginia and Maryland militia mobilized, including Brown and his men in the arsenal.
The Marines stormed the house where Brown and his men had holed up
Source: Getty Images
The following night a company of Marines reached Harpers Ferry.
The command was led by Robert E. Lee and James EB Stuart, who were to become leading generals in the South in the Civil War.
The soldiers stormed the arsenal with their bayonets attached.
In the end, ten of Brown's men, including two of his sons, two Harpers Ferry citizens and one infantryman, were dead. Brown was wounded and captured.
This began his ascent to the “saint”, as the prominent theologian and abolitionist Theodore Parker praised him.
That was probably Brown's plan from the start, says Civil War specialist James M. McPherson.
That would explain why he had neither provided provisions nor viable escape routes: "It almost seemed as if Brown knew that he would achieve more with his failure and subsequent martyrdom than with any kind of 'success'."
Brown and his surviving men were immediately tried in the slave-holding state of Virginia, which - of course - resulted in death sentences.
But their leader used the forum and the interest of the audience to portray himself as a martyr "in the service of justice" who was ready to sacrifice his life because he had mixed his "blood with the blood of millions of people in this slave country" , "Whose rights are violated by evil, cruel and unjust laws," as he explained to his judges.
John Brown on his way to his execution
Source: Getty Images
While church bells rang and cannons shot salutes in the north on December 2, the day of his execution, even moderate contemporaries in the south came to the conclusion that the wave of sympathy for a man who had wanted to put his existence at risk through a slave revolt final ties to the Union would have washed away.
The north had "approved robbery, murder and treason, and even applauded them," wrote an editorialist.
And another broke the loyalty of a government "whose subjects or citizens celebrate John Brown as martyrs and Christian heroes".
A year later, South Carolina became the first slave-owning state to leave the Union.
The American Civil War began.
The song "John Brown's Body" became one of the most sung marching songs in the north.
Brown's End: Etching by Paul Chenay after a drawing by his brother-in-law Victor Hugo
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
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This article was first published in October 2019.