John Brown anniversary opens Civil War sesquicentennial

HARPERS FERRY, W. Va. - Three hours after darkness fell, John Brown and his band of armed men approached the bridge leading over the Potomac River to the dozing town. They aimed to seize the U.S. armory, grab its thousands of rifles, and start a slave revolt that would spread across the South.

It was 150 years ago today, Oct. 16, 1859. The long-haired, wild-eyed Brown was about to launch a raid that would hasten the Civil War and make him the most notorious man in America, a figure who still ignites controversy a century and a half later. Some see him as an Osama bin Laden; others, as a Christian soldier who gave his life to end human bondage.

"You could ask 100 people about John Brown and still get 100 opinions," said Jeff Bowers, a ranger at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, which plans three days of activities this weekend to commemorate Brown's raid.

The events help lift the curtain on the coming 150th anniversary, starting in April 2011, of the Civil War.

The old center of Harpers Ferry looks much as in 1859. The hunched shoulders of the Blue Ridge Mountains have kept development at bay. Two strong rivers, the Shenandoah and the Potomac, squeeze the town into a triangle. This was Virginia then; it became part of West Virginia in 1863.

A railroad bridge still spans the Potomac at the spot where Brown and his men - a dozen whites and a half-dozen free blacks - crept into town about 10:30 on a chilly, damp night.

The armory watchman, hearing muffled feet, went out with a lantern and was captured. When he refused to open the gate, one of Brown's men used a crowbar to twist off the chain.

Brown was in, and not a shot had been fired - not yet.

At 59, he cast a striking pose. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whom Brown had tried to recruit to lead a republic of freed slaves, had met with him that summer near Chambersburg, Pa., where the raid had been plotted. Douglass recalled Brown as "straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine." His eyes, he later wrote, were "full of light and fire."

Brown knew violence. He had joined a guerrilla war in Kansas over expansion of slavery. In what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown and several men, including four of his sons, dragged five pro-slavers from cabins and killed them, some with broadswords.

A guidebook printed by the National Park Service says Brown "deliberately murdered" the men. But Paul Finkelman, a Brown scholar at Albany Law School, says the story is complex. Pro-slavery forces had threatened to kill Brown and his family.

"My own view of Brown is that he's not a terrorist in the modern sense of the word," Finkelman said. "He is not a stone-cold killer."

Having gained the armory, Brown dispersed his men to capture outposts in town and take hostages. They briefly seized a passing train.

Howard Shepherd, a freed slave who worked at the train depot, became the raid's first casualty when he ran into one of Brown's men in the dark and was fatally shot.

At daylight, the townspeople finally picked up on something amiss. Citizens began to take potshots at the raiders. A local grocer was killed by the return fire.

Militiamen from Virginia and Maryland were called. As day wore on, several of Brown's men were shot, or fled, or were captured.

By now, the government in Washington had been alerted. A force of 86 U.S. Marines arrived at Sandy Hook, Md. About 10:30 p.m., Army Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee - the same Lee who later would lead a Confederate army - took command.

A present-day Marine, Gunnery Sgt. Thomas E. Williams of Frederick, Md., picked up the story in a dramatic presentation to visitors at Harpers Ferry on Monday.

Williams, a member of the Marine Corps Historical Company, was dressed in the blue Marine uniform of the 1850s as he stood in front of the firehouse where Brown and his remaining men had holed up with their hostages.

As darkness fell on the second night of the raid, Williams said, the Marines prepared for an assault.

At 7 a.m., after giving Brown a last chance to quit, the Marines attacked the doors with sledgehammers. The doors held, so they battered them with a ladder.

As the Marines poured in, one was shot and killed. Two more raiders were also killed. The hostages were unharmed.

Brown survived. A Marine tried to run him through with a ceremonial sword. But the blade hit a buckle and did not penetrate his coat.

In the end, 17 people were killed. Brown and four compatriots were taken off to jail to be tried for treason. There was no slave revolt.

But the passions Brown unleashed sped the onset of the Civil War 18 months later. His raid has been called the match that lit the powder keg.

Southerners, who lived in dread of slave uprisings and complained of Northern interference in their "peculiar institution," were so outraged that some called for secession right then.

In the North, many people were almost as outraged by the raid's violence and threat to public order.

Abraham Lincoln, preparing to run for president in 1860, distanced himself from Brown's radicalism. He told a crowd that even though Brown "agreed with us that slavery is wrong, that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason."

But as time passed and Civil War fever spread, some in the North came to see Brown as a liberator who, though violent, had been nobly and courageously motivated.

"Unlike modern terrorists, Brown never killed any hostages he took, nor did he intentionally kill anyone who was not seen as combatant," Finkelman noted. "He had enough gunpowder to blow up Harpers Ferry, which is what a terrorist might have done."

By the time the Battle of Antietam was fought near Harpers Ferry in 1862, Union soldiers were singing, "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave . . . "

Henry David Thoreau called him "a crucified hero."

A century and a half later, opinions still diverge along sectional and racial lines, said William M.S. Rasmussen, cocurator of a Brown exhibit that opened last weekend at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

"White Southerners, for the most part, haven't changed in 150 years," Rasmussen said. "They look upon him as a lunatic."

Yet many Americans, including many blacks, "cannot help but admire" Brown's commitment to ending slavery, he said.

"How do you separate John Brown the murderer and the traitor from John Brown the hero and the martyr? I don't know what the answer is."

Among visitors at Harpers Ferry the other day, that split was much in evidence.

"I think people like him make things worse," said Myron Cohen, a retired mailman from Gaithersburg, Md. "The impression I get of him is very negative. He reminds me a bit of the Weathermen, the stuff that went on in the 1960s."

Kimberly Coleman of Kensington, Md., who works for the federal government, said: "Maybe he didn't go about what he did legally. But in order to do something right, you may have to do something illegally. . . . Sometimes it takes a little bloodshed - or a lot."

At his trial in Charles Town, seven miles from Harpers Ferry, Brown offered no apology.

The red courthouse, with white columns, still stands.

At his sentencing, Brown rose to speak.

"Now," he said, "if it is deemed necessary 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 whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments - I submit; so let it be done."

On Dec. 2, 1859, Brown was led into a wagon with his arms tied at his sides. He sat on his coffin as he rode five blocks to where a scaffold had been built. There, he was hanged.

The next afternoon, thousands of Brown supporters, many of them blacks, turned out in Philadelphia to greet the train carrying his casket as it pulled into a station at Broad and Pine Streets.

City officials feared a riot. They diverted the crowd by loading an empty casket into a hearse. The body was spirited to the Walnut Street wharf and put on a boat, ultimately bound for burial in the family plot in North Elba, N.Y.

For decades, Brown's descendants didn't know how to think of him.

One was Alice Keesey-Mecoy, of Allen, Texas. A great-great-great-granddaughter of Brown's, she was 16 when she learned of her kinship.

"My family did not talk about it," she said. "I'd say it was shame and embarrassment - and the way he was talked about in books. The family just opted not to acknowledge it."

Now 50, Keesey-Mecoy has become an expert on Brown. She is to present a paper at a symposium this weekend in Harpers Ferry.

While white abolitionists wanted to end slavery, many had no real dealings with African Americans. But Brown, she said, was committed to the equality of all people.

"He's seen as either this terrorist or this saint," she said. "In actuality, he was a man - a man who had convictions so strong that he was willing to fight for them."

In Charles Town, a white sign with black letters marks the site at the corner of Samuel and Hunter Streets where Brown's gallows stood.

Gene Perkins, who owns a house there, pointed to a bird feeder dangling from the gnarled finger of a black walnut tree.

"That's the spot," he said.

One night, he recalled, he got a call from a neighbor. "Do you know there are three women sitting in your yard?" the neighbor asked.

Perkins went out with a flashlight and found the women. They were looking for John Brown's ghost.