- John Brown's Raid
- John Brown had a wild plan to abolish slavery. His plan was to take over the federal arsenals in Harper's Ferry, obtain all the weapons there and pass them out to local slaves to start a slave revolt resulting in the freeing of slaves. Actually he and his men took over the arsenal, but were cornered by the Marines who were led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. John Brown was quickly captured, tried, convicted and hung. Brown had originally asked Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to join him, but they both declined for various reasons.
- John Brown (declined the help of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas) led 16 white men, 3 free blacks, 1 freed slave and 1 fugitive slave to capture the arsenal; the were sucessful in capturing it, but were captured themselves by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee (who ironically later was the general of the confederate army). John Wilkes Booth (the man who would assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in the future) witnessed John Browns execution. At John Browns trial, 17 of his friends and relatives presumed his insanity to save his neck.
- John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry inevitably led to his execution which was looked upon in many different ways between the North and South. For the South, the proper justice for the guilty man who had tryed to rise up against slavery had been served, they felt that this was a typical radical North action. The Northerners however thought Brown had good intentions, but he took the wrong actions to fufill those intentions; they saw Brown as a martyr. Brown himself realized he could do more for the cause of abolition and ending slavery as a martyr than alive. These different views on John Brown and his actions increased sectionalism and eventually led to The Civil War.
- John Browns raid was a cause of The Civil War both directly and indirectly. Directly, it showed how the dispute over slavery was turning into gruesome violence between Northerners and Southerners; indirectly Brown's image martyr was shown by journalists, artists, and song writers. They showed Brown as a man who died fighting against the injustice of slavery. This gave strength to the abolitionist cause, which upset the Southerners who thought John Brown deserved execution even more. This was the first time a white man had so violently tryed to end slavery and died trying.
- The fact that John Brown a white man died trying to fight against slavery with extreme violence scare the Southerners; they started to take actions of pre-wars, such as training their state militias and militarizing incase of a invasion from the North, like John Brown. These were the actions that led to The Civil War. Those who viewed him as a hero and those who viewed him as an enemy battled over the same issue Brown died for, slavery. His execution also angered many abolitionists and free-soilers who were ignorant of his bloody past and focused on what he fought for; they clashed with the Southerners who thought Brown deserved what he got for what he did against slavery.