In what ways did John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry Armory fail? In what ways did it succeed?
After leading the massacre of five pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, John Brown (right) had been a fugitive from justice. (Some Southerners complained bitterly that Northern authorities made no effort to arrest Brown.) In 1859, Brown re-emerged to stage a much more daring attack against slavery. Leading a band of twenty men, Brown seized the Harper's Ferry Armory in Virginia in October. His plan was to distribute the rifles and ammunition in the armory to slaves, touching off a slave rebellion and putting a violent end to slavery.
Brown's raid did not succeed in launching a war against slavery, but did succeed in enlisting more Northerners in the crusade against slavery. Harper's Ferry Armory was quickly surrounded by the U.S. Army, under the command of Robert E. Lee. Several of Brown's followers, including two of his sons, were killed when Lee's troops seized the armory. Brown was arrested and executed in early December. Although his raid on the armory failed, his willingness to risk his life, as well as the lives of his own sons, thrilled Northern opponents of slavery, who hailed him as a martyr to the abolitionist cause. As black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass declared, "How will slavery be ended? The John Brown way." After decades of failed attempts to compromise over the issue of slavery, uncompromising abolitionists and defenders of slavery were gaining the upper hand. Pro-slavery and antislavery Americans now distrusted each other so deeply that the possibility for compromise had evaporated.