American History Hit - What Caused the Civil War? | John Brown's Raid

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry helped cause the Civil War. His is a magnetic persona that's hard to take your eyes away from. But who were the people who inspired him? Who funded him? Who joined him on the raid? It turns out there's a lot more to the story as Don learns with today's guest Dr Kellie Carter Jackson author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance" and co-host of the "This Day" podcast.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. When it was all over, the raid had failed, the troops had come, and John Brown's body lay moldering in his grave. John Anthony Copeland, Jr. wrote a parting letter to his brother.

Copeland was a freeborn African-American, who had been one of Brown's raiders. The gallows now waited for him. Without regret, these are his fearless words. It was a sense of the wrongs which we have suffered that prompted the noble but unfortunate at Captain Brown and his associates, and how, dear brother, could I die in a more noble cause? Days later, Copeland joined John Brown in death. Yet even as he did, the impact of his deed and his words reverberated with fury across the land, further dividing an already divided nation, and driving it irrevocably towards war. Good day, American History Hit listeners.

Don Wildman here with new episodes twice weekly, Mondays, and Thursday. Thursdays. Hope you'll circle back. History leading to the outbreak of civil war in the United States is crammed with pivotal events, often overshadowed by the war itself. As such, many of us are ill-informed about the reality of those events and the stories of those involved. So it goes with Harper's Ferry, the insurgent raid in Western Virginia in October 1859, a year and a half before the war began. He was famously led by John Brown, but if you go by received history. Brown seems like a lone crusader, when in fact, his noble, if miscalculated mission, involved a recruited company and grew out of a broad anti-slavery movement built on the ideas and

sacrifices of so many abolitionists, black and white, who had been fighting, writing, and organizing for decades. Illuminating this period and much more is the scholarly work of our guest today, Kelly Carter Jackson, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the chair of the Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of We Refuse, a forceful history of black resistance, and force and freedom, black abolitionists and the politics of violence, finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among others, listed by the Washington Post as one of the 13 books to read on African American history.

Welcome, Professor Carter Jackson to American History hit. Kelly, nice to meet you. Hi, happy to be here. The raid on Harper's Ferry, in so many ways, this is the match that will light the powder. But if there is an event, which is the tip of an iceberg to mix my metaphors, this is it. Can you explain the major events that brought us to this point? I'll start you off with the Fugitive Slave Act, 1850. Oh, man. So the Fugitive Slave Law, Fugitive Slave Act, it's a game changer.

I feel like people need like a broader sense sometimes of the movement because people don't realize that the abolitionists have been at their activist's work for over 20 years. Let's just start it with like David Walker, if we're thinking how. it becomes political in 1829. You get the first like American anti-slaver society in 1832, 33. So by the time you get to 1850, they've been at this for 20-something years and they've not seen any progress. Like every new piece of legislation that comes out favors slavery. It favors slaveholders.

And this fugitive slave law is no better. It basically says slavery is somewhat national. That the only border that can really protect you is Canada if you are. a slave who has run away, that your slave master can go into the north, into any city, and say, hey, you look like Bob or you Bob. And if they can prove that you were their slave and sometimes even if they really can't, they can kidnap you and take you into slavery. There are financial incentives for slave catchers.

They're being sent throughout the country to retrieve slaveholders' property. And they're big rewards for people who get captured. And it really makes, I think, the abolitionist movement. movement, one that had started out as being like moral swation and nonviolence and civil disobedience. Now it's like, whoa, you've got fight or flight. You've got two options. You can leave and go to Canada. You can leave and go to the UK or something like that. Or you're going to have to stand your ground. And a lot of black abolitionists I look at are like, okay, so how do we do that? They start to form these groups, you know, these protection societies. The Underground Railroad gets much more violent. It is a dangerous endeavor. And all,

throughout the 1850s, you're moving toward, I hate to say civil war, because it sounds like it's inevitable and historians hate to say that anything's inevitable. But it does feel very much like you are marching towards something that cannot be stopped. It crosses the line, and that's more than a metaphor. This is the northern is saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, it's one thing for the South to have slavery and they're thinking they're watching it slowly die away. Many of them don't care. But when the Fugus Slave Act crosses that line literally and brings it to their home ground, this is too much. Another line, bleeding Kansas. Is it going to be a free state or a slave state?

This is the whole dilemma of the expanding West and whether slavery will go with it or not. Oh, yeah. And that 56 people are killed in just trying to determine whether Kansas is a slave state or a free state. I mean, it is violent. People are willing to risk their lives to either protect their human property or, to protect life and humanity of enslaved people. And so it really becomes this all throughout the 1850s. You think of Anthony Burns, who's a famous fugitive slave,

who's captured in Boston, who sort of radicalizes people in Boston, who would have otherwise been apathetic. Now they see him being marched into chains at the Boston Docks and being sent back to Virginia. You have Senator Charles Sumner, who's beaten within an inch of his life in the Senate chamber because he gives that anti-slavery speech. The following year in 1857, you've got the Supreme Court case, Judd Scott v. Missouri,

that basically says, actually, black people, you're not citizens, and you have no rights, which we are bound to respect. Like, you are just, you know, a non-citizen. You are someone else's property, and you cannot sort of sue or have rights. Yeah. I mean, bleeding Kansas is a long period. It's 1850 to 1859, they say. Yeah.

And it was an extended thing where actually the whole place splits as its own little civil war right in the state itself and kind of a mirror of what's going to happen later on, or at least as a predecessor of what's happening. By 1859, for good reason, both sides increasingly believe the union will not survive a compromise, you know, and is probably headed for war. You know, I opened up in this thing talking about how history is overshadowed by the war, speaking of Harper's Ferry. but Harper's Ferry is the result, as you have explored in your work so much, of the abolitionist movement, which today we take as sort of a monolithic story. You know, it just is. It is a thing that happened. But abolitionism has so many chapters and so many characters, doesn't that? I mean, what does the movement look like by autumn 1859? Oh, man. I would say by the late 50s, the movement has sort of fractured. You have your abolitionist that would fall under the William Lloyd Garrison camp. that are still pushing moral suasion and civil disobedience and nonviolence. And by 1859, you have this black radical group that become much more militant. People like Henry Highland Garnett, people like Louis Hayden, people like Jermaine Logan and even Frederick Douglass,

who believe no, slavery starts with violence. Slavery is sustained by violence. Slavery will only be overthrown with violence. And so they're becoming much more emphatic about this. idea that if we don't sort of fight slavery with the same sort of efforts and energy that slaveholders are using, we're going to lose this battle. And so it becomes much more intense. And I think you get people that are really having to make hard decisions about whether or not they are going to take up arms and fight to end slavery. It's hard to even conceive of somebody, of an African-American,

of free African-American in the North, risking that life at that time. I mean, Black Panthers in the 60s were taking a chance, let alone 100 years before this. Yeah. I mean, it is no small choice. But I also think that we have to remember that black leaders, black ordinary citizens are up against a rock and a hard place. They have very few options. I mean, if you're someone like Solomon Northup, let's just say, who's just trying to make a living and live out his free life and you get you. kidnapped, you know, and you have no recourse, no legal recourse to sort of demand your freedom.

The only reason we know about Solomon Orthope is because unusually he's able to regain, you know, his emancipation, his freedom. But most people had no recourse. And so you were either going to have to live your life in hiding. You were either going to have to leave the country altogether, or you were going to have to find out how you could protect one another. And you really couldn't protect each other just with words. You really needed kind of activism that required boots on the ground. And so you see a lot of these black societies creating their own like quasi-military groups. They would like have their own patrol looking out for slave catchers.

In the same ways that people look out for ice today, you know, and they're like, hey, we've got to protect each other. They're doing the same thing in the 1850s. Well, I mean, and this is my early point of this whole episode, really, and why we're talking, is that it's one thing to tell the story of Harper's Ferry, which we will do, chronologically. It's an important event. John Brown, an important character. But it's another thing to understand where he comes from ideologically and that there is a switch within him from one side to the other within that belief system. And that's really interesting. And most people don't understand that about abolitionism. And John Brown's kind of a symbol of that switch, isn't he? Yes. I love, I love John Brown. I wrote my senior thesis in college on John Brown. And the idea that he's actually

not a leader that he's a follower, that he has been an avid fan of black heroes that he followed, you know, Trissant de Vertrero and Henry Christoph, he looked at Haiti as inspiration. He looked up to people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Jermaine Logan and Louis Hayden. And he was like, hey, I believe in equality. I believe in liberation. I want to work with you, not like for you. A lot of white abolitionists were also sort of low-key racist. Like they thought they knew what was best for black people. They thought that they were doing a good work, which they were. But at the heart of it was a lot of paternalism and a lot of like, oh, but you're a child.

But you don't know how to. And John Brown was very egalitarian. That's what kind of made him a man ahead of his time is that he wasn't just willing to like work for freedom. He was willing to defer. He was willing to look at black leadership and say, what do you want and how can I help support and be in solidarity for that effort? A lot of black people looked at him like he was crazy. I mean, you see every picture of this guy.

He's a severe looking person in those pictures. That's not fair. It's hard to get a good picture taking yourself in the 1800s. But very intense guy. There's actually a lot of love in his feelings towards what he's doing and the people he's met. And the lessons he's learned, which is really what we're talking about, He's going to make a choice of armed revolt. He's going to speak out, bold rhetoric, and he's going to seek support within this community.

He's going to find people to help him do this thing. This is a conspiracy, you know, for real, of the best variety. In order to prove that slavery could not be dismantled by compromise, only by confrontation, that's where he lands at this point. But he's made a journey, is what I'm trying to say, you know, through those previous decades to this point. And it's all very religious for him. It's all based on... Oh, absolutely. Yeah, his very, very religious feelings.

Deep religious feelings. I mean, he believes that God has told him that he has a mandate, that he has to do this, that he is there to set the captives free in biblical language. And I also have to remind my students that, like, the 19th century was a deeply religious error. That sometimes the only thing people read was the Bible and, like, their local newspaper, if they had literacy. And so there were also these big religious revolutions. that were also happening throughout the 19th century of like the second great awakening.

But people believe that Christ is coming back and that slavery is a sin. And you better not have Christ come back and he find you a slaveholder. You know, like there's this real like, you know how you see those signs. Like repent. Jesus is coming. Like that is how people felt that the end times were coming because slavery was so bad. Yeah. Brown grew up in a deeply religious Calvinist family, which actually harbored

freedom seekers. This is in Ohio, right? He grew to believe that slavery was a moral sin, had to be destroyed by force, as we mentioned. It takes an incident which most Americans don't know about very much. It's Elijah Lovejoy's murder in 1837. This is out in Illinois. It's a very famous incident that involves a publisher, Elijah Lovejoy, who was an abolitionist. And Illinois is right there on the border. And so people are coming over from Kentucky, I guess, right? And he is murdered in 1837, which is right as abolitionism is really gaining a lot of momentum in this country. This got big headlines across America. Huge.

I mean, the story of Elijah Lovejoy is a turning point for, I think, a lot of abolitionists. One, because Elijah Lovejoy, as you said, he's a publisher, he's a printer, he's making these abolitionists newspapers and pamphlets. And each time he does this, you know, white southerners, white slaveholders are infuriated and they destroy his printing press. not once, not twice, but three times. So by the fourth time, he's like, listen, I am not going to allow them to destroy my printing press again, you know, technology that was not cheap.

And so he says, I'm going to guard the printing press to make sure that, you know, no one destroys it. And one night the mob comes to his front door. And he and his brother, he basically says, I'm not going to shoot anyone. But, you know, I'm going to bring out my rifle as like a warning shot as a way to to say like, hey, listen, you don't want this. And he sort of like fires warning shots. And the mob overtakes him.

And they wind up not only killing him, but also destroying his printing press. I think they set it on fire or throw it into the river. I mean, it is violent. And he becomes, I would say, one of the first white martyrs of the movement. Brown sees him and is so inspired, so heartbroken, but also so inspired to like, wow, if he can give his life for this cause, maybe this is what I need to do too. Sure. It affects Abraham Lincoln as well. Yeah, it does.

About that turns him around as well. This triggers Brown joining in on the bleeding Kansas efforts. He's part of a big thing called the Potawatomi Massacre in which five pro-slavery men are murdered. He's really deep into it. And so let's take this forward to October 1859 and get into what is actually a pretty complicated story. The preparation for this, I've already suggested, is going to take years. He's going to have to get money. How does he decide it's going to be Harper's Ferry?

Halper's Ferry is really strategic because you can't just to sort of go into Georgia, right? Like you can't be in deep south. I mean, he does have radical, I guess, but he's trying to think practically as well. So he's looking at places that are in the south, that are slave holding. But are places where enslaved people could easily run away. They could get to the Blue Ridge Mountains and they could seek refuge in higher ground. And then from there, they could get deeper into the north. to get to safe territory.

So he has to be sort of strategic about that place. He also knows that there's an armory there in Harper's Ferry. Him and his men take over this armory, get all of the guns, get all of the rifles, literally pass them out like, you get a gun, you get a gun, like, and have enslaved people get to freedom. He actually says, and maybe this is a little optimistic on his part, but he's like, I don't necessarily think we need to shut blood. We're just trying to get away. But if it comes to that and no question it's going to come to that, he believed that people should defend himself.

So Harper's Ferry is strategic. Okay. It's a U.S. federal arsenal. You know, this is before the Civil War. I keep happening to remind us. And so this is going to be a union problem still and addressed as such. The key funder, I want to talk about this woman, Mary Ellen Pleasant. Yes.

Amazing story. It's incredible, incredible. She is a real character. She sort of has a scattered past. There's a lot we don't know about her because she gives different tales about her childhood and sort of how she grew up. So no one really knows like if she was born enslaved or if her family members were enslaved or she was free later. She moves around a lot. But long story short, she settles in California.

She becomes this entrepreneur and very, very successful. She runs boarding houses. She runs hotels. She helped start the first bank of California. She, for all intensive purposes, is I would consider the first black millionaire. That's what you read about. It's amazing. The 19th century.

Yeah, she is. When a million dollars could buy you something. Yes. Yeah, Billy could. It's really good. And she becomes one of John Brown's biggest backers, financial backers. Now, he has a lot of backers. There's like the Secret Six, this group of white men that are fundraising for him.

Frederick Douglass gives him money. There's a lot of people. He's going around kind of like. like a lecture circuit, fundraising all around the country. But Mary Ellen Pleasant is one of the biggest financier. She donates $30,000 to his cause. So does he literally travel to the San Francisco area and find her? No, she actually travels all the way to the East Coast to meet with Brown and is actually not far from the area when things pop off.

The problem is, and I don't want to get too into the weeks, but like there was a date that they were all supposed to do this raid. Everyone had this date in mind. And John Brown jumped the gun by like two weeks. And it's not clear why he did that. But a lot of people were upset, especially Mary Ellen Pleasant because she's like, dude, I gave you $30,000. Like we had a plan. Stick to the plan.

And he doesn't. And she worries about her own livelihood and being caught in the aftermath. But for me, what's most sort of extraordinary about this story. And there are a lot of things that are extraordinary. But to know that the. biggest financier of John Brown was a black woman who was committed to helping him see this goal lived out to know that Harriet Tubman was also in agreement with him. She doesn't show up partly because he jumped the gun two weeks. Also, some people suspect that she was sick. You know,

she had lots of health issues from her traumatic brain injury when she was struck while she was enslaved. But the fact that she was willing to join him, I think says that he had some support that people just did not appreciate. Harriet Tubman helps him recruit a force of some 21 men, 16 white guys, five black, including Osborne Perry Anderson, the only black man who escapes this raid and keeps his life. His sons, Owen, Watson, and Oliver are with him on this. The supplies are stockpiled. He stockpiles him in a Maryland farmhouse, which is a few miles from Harper's Ferry, right?

Just over the border there. and manages to keep this mission secret, even from some of the recruits that he has up until the last moment. All I'm really trying to establish here for a listener that might not understand the subtleties of this is that a lot of people and a lot of stuff went through the mill on this. Took a long time to plan, took a lot of money to make it happen. And yet somehow this guy pulls off a very secret thing, which is amazing. It's amazing. And I think, you know, enslaved people. I'm just going to say all black people.

It's in the 19th century. Knew how to keep a secret. That is the only way they survived. You know, like if you were, I don't know, stealing extra rations or if you were, you know, learning how to read in secrecy, if you were trying to plant your own escape, you were not going to be loose lit. Like that was the last thing you were going to be. And so people were very much, if their allegiance was to anything, it was to secrecy

because secrecy was safety. And nobody wanted, nobody wanted to die, nobody wanted to be harmed. And so it made it easy to keep a secret when you knew that your life, and not just your life, but the lives of so many others were at risk. And so it was a widely known secret, like widely circulated, but people kept their mouths shut. Interesting. Okay. So let's talk about this raid. Happens on the night of October 16th, 1859.

He's got the people. He's got the supplies. All of these chess pieces are in play. After Night Falls, Brown's men cross the Potomac River into Harper's Ferry. They cut the telegraph wires to delay news. I mean, this is movie stuff here. They take control of the Federal Army and Arsenal with little resistance at first. I mean, how much of a force was there to resist them?

Not much yet. I mean, like, it's kind of astonishing that no one really catches them. And, you know, 21 people. I mean, we're talking two dozen men. That's not an army. Let's just put it that way. That's not an army at all. And that's why a lot of people were like, this is a suicide mission.

This mission is doomed. But they are able, because they're so small in some ways, to go undetected. And it's not until someone in the town sees what they're doing. And they're like, hey, that looks suspicious. What's going on? As you mentioned before, they'd like this to be a quiet event, right? They'd basically, they're just. trying to get these weapons. They're not trying to have a shootout. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And to get enslaved people

to trust them to be ready to leave at a moment's notice. Yeah, right. They seize the rifle works and the U.S. Armory's engine house. Remember, this is a Ford and there's a couple different structures within it. It's very small. They are suddenly, this is going to be their stronghold because events get past them at that point, right? Yeah. And it doesn't take long. for things to go south, for someone to see what's going on, get suspicious, alert the authorities, and the next thing you know, a shootout is taking place. Right. And they have hostages, which is important. They have hostages. They are inside the armory and they're sort of using that as their safe house, if you will. But they're kind of trapped in that place too because it's,

how are you going to get out when you are surrounded? The militia shows up, the local militia shows up and at that point everything is doomed. You know, you have shootouts in the street. You have a danger field newbie who is killed brutally and butchered. I mean, you have bullets flying left and right. It's a miracle that Osborne Anderson was able to escape. He sees a lot of his comrades go down. But John Brown is still inside the armory and he is wounded, but he's not giving up. He is not going to surrender, but within a matter of 24 hours, it's clear that he has no other choice. And what's also interesting is that, you know, the militia doesn't just storming and shoot and kill him. I feel like that's what would happen today.

There would be no, you know, sort of like you live to tell your motivation or your reasoning. But John Brown is captured and imprisoned and sentenced. And while he's sentenced, he says a whole lot of things. We get to know a little bit more about his motivations. in that aftermath. If anyone is confused about how fast this happens, that's what happens. It's really fast. I mean, we're talking overnight. By the way, I want to just mention one of those hostages is Lewis Washington, who is the grand nephew of George Washington. Wow. So I mean, good fodder for the newspapers, for sure. No, right? But this happens because, as you say, it was by dawn

October 17th the next day that townspeople realized what was happening. They saw all this going on. It was the townspeople who assemble or call out for the militia, and it's the Virginia militia that surrounds the fort. One of the reasons that Brown lost control of this is that they lost control of the bridges, which was going to be their escape route, I suppose. That trapped them, you know, and they had to make the choice to fortify this, and this is going to be a shootout. That's when it all begins. So the action of what we're talking about happens in the morning, I guess, of October 17th, and it gets really ugly. Like you said, there's somebody who's, you know, think of that Black Hawk Down kind of moment where the, you know, somebody gets shot and then they just drag them around and all that

ugly stuff. When do the federal troops get involved? Not long after. So all of this becomes, within the better part of a week, national news, like national news. Everyone is hearing what is happening at Harper's Ferry, how John Brown tried to lead a slave rebellion as what other slaveholders called it, that he was insinuating an insurrection among them. And when that happened, And federal troops get involved. And then there's a trial. And this trial is the most paid attention to trial of, you know, the nation. News reaches Washington, D.C.

And the president at that time is James Buchanan. And he sends out the U.S. Marines under none other than Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future general in charge of the Army of the North Virginia. And that's when things get the feds involved on the 18th. It takes more than a day for this to unfold. And they have to do what we've seen in the movie so much. They have to storm the engine house. They're going to get to these guys. You can sort of think of the Alamo in a way.

It's an assault that only lasts a few minutes. They use a battering ram. They break open the doors. The soldiers rush in. And they start killing or capturing Brown's men. I'll go through the statistics. Of the Raiders who are there, 10 are killed, including two of Brown's sons, Watson and Oliver. Seven are captured.

Five escape, including Owen. Brown, one of his sons, and we mentioned before Osborne Anderson. Civilian militias who are six killed and nine wounded. John Brown himself was beaten unconscious and taken prisoner. The whole thing happened over a period of 36 hours. Boy, are people worked up about this. Yes, yes, yes. Because it's one thing to hear about, you know, we didn't even mention Nat Turner's revolt in 1836. I mean, this fear of a slave rebellion was central to the problems of how to manage situation. And it was everything that slaveholders feared more than anything since Nat Turner's rebellion, which was one of the largest and were bloodiest slave rebellions to take place in U.S.

history. This was right up there. And for people who lived through that or who knew about Nat Turner's rebellion, this felt like sort of a deja vu. They were terrified that this could snowball, that this would become a domino effect and other plantations or other enslaved people would want to rise up in response. That doesn't happen for a number of reasons, but that doesn't happen. But it becomes this national story. Even people like Abraham Lincoln before he's president is talking about this moment and what it means. And I think the South, which will eventually become the Confederacy, they use this as a,

See, we told you, this is all the North once. They want to destroy us. They want to free our slaves. They want, you know, like they really help the. themselves up as the victim in this moment. Sure. Well, this becomes a trial. John Brown's trials is as famous as the raid itself. Important because, although many in America at the time condemned his methods of violence, the trial is where he becomes martyred. That's where he is able to be a big force in the galvanization of a movement, which has already been going on, as we say. But

he's suddenly because of the spectacular nature of this mission, but also because he's a white guy. He suddenly gets the attention that abolitionists have been looking for for a long time. He was wounded, bayoneted. He gets stabbed with a sword. He's hit over the head. He has to be carried into this court on a stretcher. Is he literally there, you know, mentally? You know, we don't necessarily know.

I think that he did have some clarity because he is, I wouldn't say giving speeches, but he's making declarations about the Negro question. and the idea of what is to become of the country and what is to become of slavery and really how America is going to have to grapple with its sins. And from that perspective, I do think that he was very lucid about like how he felt

that the country was going down a terrible, violent path and that he had been sort of mandated to write this wrong, to correct this. And that even though he knew he wasn't going to be successful. I think he had the sense of foresight to know that, but maybe my death, maybe the death of a white man, maybe when they see my actions,

it will matter more than if there was any other person. I do think that if this were a black man, if this were like a Nat Turner Part 2, he would be dead immediately. They would have killed him on spot. We wouldn't have heard of it, you know, like it would have been snuffled really quickly. There wouldn't have been this long trial.

then when in this circus. And I think he's making the most of that moment as much as he can. I just want to quote one of his speeches, you know, one part of a speech that he makes. Now, if it is deemed necessary, says John Brown, that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country.

I'm getting chills already. I get chills. Whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments. I submit, let it be done. Wow, somebody really needed to say that stuff. Incredible. I mean, that's John Brown right there. This is why John Brown has been one of my heroes.

The kind of courage that it takes to look at a system that everyone thinks will be around for eternity and to damn it. And to really put their life, their body and not just their body, their sons on the line. You know, he didn't do this alone. He acted with his sons, people that he loved. people that he, you know, was willing to sort of like go down with. And it feels like the words that he gives in those final moments are so prophetic. You know what I mean? They're so sort of harp on that 19th century biblical moment that he is giving us the ultimate cautionary tale.

And if we don't heed this, you know, Brown is emphatic. Yeah, about what will happen. He's sentenced to hang December 2nd, 1859 in Charlestown, Virginia. But there are other trials that happen as a. result also, especially the two black men, Shields Green and John Copeland. Tell me about those guys. Oh, man. John Copeland, who is one of the black men who joins Brown and is caught up in what will be a trial and lead to his execution. On December 10th of 1859, he writes a letter to his brother in which he asked, could I, brother, die in a more noble cause. I am so soon to stand and

suffer for doing what George Washington, the so-called father of this great but slavery-cursed country, was made a hero for doing, while he lived and when dead, his name was immortalized and his great and noble deeds in behalf of freedom taught by parents to their children. And he's basically saying, what I'm doing is no different than what George Washington did. I am fighting for freedom. I am fighting for liberty. And to die in this noble cause is. is what he would consider an honor. Yeah. Well, they're both sentenced to death, and that is a letter that I really underscore for

folks to look up. It's an incredible letter of incredible courage. It captures exactly what we're trying to say, is that there are other aspects of the story that deserve a lot more attention than they get in modern times. The butterfly effect of Harper's Ferry is fascinating. Over what period of time, you know, did it come and go? and we've got so caught up in what happens then, you know, secession and all the rest of it.

Or are we talking about it today because it continues to be referred to throughout the war? Yes. John Brown becomes a rallying call. He becomes an anthem. John Brown's Body, the song that goes to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, that glory, glory, hallelujah. They would sing that same song,

but it would be to John Brown's Body. John Brown's body is a moldering, something like that, right? Yes, John Brown's body is molding the grave. They talked about how they were going to lynch Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree or something. Exactly. The lyrics are kind of violent. But this song was sung all throughout the war. It never died.

That moment in which John Brown loses his life is almost like the starting point for how we should see the Civil War. I mean, as you mentioned at the top of the episode, this is the spark that lights the fire to the Civil War. John Brown's light, his fire, keeps on blazing for the next five years. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Christ, saying Brown would, quote, make the gallows glorious like the cross. He's a very useful symbol at that point and begins being used over and over again. George William Curtis was an abolitionist. His summation of Brown was not buried but planted. John Brown Body song sprung up.

It's a fascinating thing. However, in the South, it's another story entirely, of course. They see this trial in the coverage as convincing that, you know, they're going to have to make their own fight. That this is a hopeless situation they're in against this northern assault. And suddenly, secession is really talked about. And I think taken seriously for the first time where Southerners are like, okay, if they're going to take up arms, we need to take up arms. And the thing about the hoax southerners, especially slaveholders, is that they, every time there was some sort of even rumor of a rebellion, they would take it to the nth degree. The response always outweighed, you know, what incident took place.

And every single sort of slave rebellion, you know, it's like they don't just kill the offenders. They kill everyone that is suspected of being, you know, a part of this rebellion. and they would chop off the heads of people and put them on stakes as a warning. I mean, it was gruesome the kind of response that they would have. And so it kind of tracks that they would take something like John Brown's raid and say, this is the moment that we need to take it to level 10, to take it to the integral. Even when Northerners were saying, no, this is an isolated incident. This is one person.

John Brown doesn't represent us. You know, like there are a lot of people in the North trying to distance themselves from John Brown and to make him to be this crazy person. I do not believe John Brown was crazy. I don't. But that is how they tried to diminish what he was doing. Yeah, it's amazing when you step back, as we've done on the show so many times.

And you'll look at James Buchanan and those sorts of northerners who are just placating and just trying so hard to say, don't worry, don't worry, you know, when things had already inflamed to such a point that it was too late and stronger action needed to be taken. The theme of this episode, as we've talked about already, while John Brown is indeed a martyr and a useful symbol, an important guy, there were so many more behind him, so much more. So was the result of John Brown's

raid helpful or complicating in some way for those abolitionist voices to be heard? I mean, at that point, are all bets off. It's a yes and. Yes, John Brown amplifies the abolitionist movement in ways that I don't think they could have ever done, especially because a lot of white abolitionists were not willing to engage in, you know, sort of forceful or violent actions. And John Brown takes that to a whole other level. But I also think that when you look at John Bonn alongside his black peers, his black counterparts, he is sort of fulfilling all of the things that they had threatened to do. All of the things that they had said was necessary.

All of the things that we had been trying to be like, we told you. So, like, Brown really fulfills that role. And it's just sort of incredible to me that, like, when I think about all of the different people that were involved in this, from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman to Mary Ellen Pleasant, to even to the black men who die with him, Shields Green, John Copeland, these people are heroic beyond measure. It's really hard to sort of place yourself in that moment. And like, where would I be? What would I do? You know, could I have joined? I don't know that I could have, you know, that's no joke.

But that is what was required when you think about abolished slavery. Slavey was not abolished nonviolently. It was a long, bloody battle. And still to this day, the most casualties the United States have ever experienced has come from the Civil War. Over 750,000 people die in that war. Well, I mean, for better or worse, I am a perfect example of who we're hoping to reach with this story. because of course I was taken to Harper's Ferry, but my history-loving dad.

And of course, we talked about John Brown. But we didn't talk about Copeland and we didn't talk about all those other people. And that's what is so useful as we revisit these stories in this podcast for me personally. I hope for listeners that, of course, there's a whole, you know, deep running river under these very famous histories. Find out about Mary Ellen Pleasant. There's tons of books on her. I just said that to my wife this morning. Yeah. She needs a movie.

I mean, the fact that John Brown's right is just like one blip on her life. Yeah. Lifesman is wild. But it's also crazy that when she dies on her tombstone, she requests that it say she was a friend of John Brown. Oh, how sweet. And I was like, wow. It's pretty special. Yeah.

Amazing. Well, I'm going to also tell people to read your books. And here are the books I will directly discuss. We refuse a forceful history of black resistance and force and freedom, black abolitionists and the politics of vines. written by this good woman. You are also a podcaster, though, right, Kelly? And where can people hear this? Yes, on the This Day podcast, check us out.

We drop three episodes a week. Oh, my God. How do you do that? Oh, gosh, with a lot of effort. But with a lot of fun, too. I mean, we have a really good time. And I have to say, like, our most recent episodes have been bingers. Like, we have been, like, auditioned it out there.

So if you want to know a little bit of esoteric history and find out what happened on this day, we're all over the sort of historical. Oracle map, but we have a really good time with Jody Abergan and Nikki Himmer. And the name of the podcast, This Day Podcast? This Day Podcast. We were this day in esoteric political history, and we thought that might be a bit much. It's a little deseric. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was really great to meet you. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts?

American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit. Thank you.