History John Brown Quiz

John Brown: Summary

Born in CT, moved to frontier

more comfy with Natives and blacks than whites

failed businessman

failed NY state african american sanctuary

elijah lovejoy was his catalyst

pottawatomie creek massacre/bleeding kansas

secret 6 funding

canada and clandestine meetings (tubman sick)

harper’s ferry

hanged

“greatest white man i ever knew”

harriet tubman to john brown

“slavery is a state of war”

John brown

October 16, 1859

John Brown led a small army of 18 men into the small town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia

What was John Brown’s plan at Harper’s Ferry?

to instigate a major slave rebellion in the south

planned to seize the arms and ammunition in the federal arsenal, arm slaves in the area, and move south along the appalachian mountains to attract slaves to his cause

deepened the divide between north and south

What did the federal complex consist of?

1. armory

2. arsenal

3. engine house

Brown seized the federal complex with little resistance

After the federal complex, what did he do?

he sent a patrol out in the country to

1. contact slaves (did not rise to his support)

2. collect several hostages (including great grandnephew of george washington, Col Lewis W Washington)

He then sat and waited

Who captured Brown?

local citizens and militia surrounded him, killing 2 townspeople and 8 of Brown’s company

Troops under the command of Robert E Lee came from washington to arrest Brown, turning him and his group over to the virginia authorities to be tried for treason (effort to start rebellion over less than 36 hours)

he was sentenced to hang december 2

How did the north react to Harper’s Ferry?

widespread admiration

acknowleged it was the act of a madman, but admired his zeal and courage

church bells pealed on the day of his execution and songs/paintings were created in his honor

Brown became a martyr

northern newspapers, however, denounced the raid

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say?

Brown would make the gallows as glorious as the cross

What did Victor Hugo say?

he was aghast that the shining star of liberty (america) would dare to execute a soldier of christ

How did Republicans react to Harper’s Ferry?

South accused them of conspiring with brown, however they conemned Brown and his ill fated plan

Lincoln spoke out against Brown and condemned him to the punishement of his crime. He also said the south was incorrectly connecting the republicans to Brown’s plan and told them to show proof

How did the south react to Harper’s Ferry?

shock and outrage

south newspapers labeled the north as John Brown sympathizers

blamed the republican party and falsely claimed that Lincoln supported Brown

Abraham Lincoln from the Cooper Union Speech (February 27, 1860)

You accuse us (republicans) of stirring insurrections, but wheres the proof?

John brown is not a republican, we have no ties to Harper’s Ferry

If you know there is a tie, you are bad for not proving it. If you know there is not, then you are bad for accusing it

asserting false claims is malicious slander

Victor Hugo

French Writer

Hunchback of Notre Dame

Les Miserables

Victor Hugo’s long response to John Brown

John Brown dying on the 16th of December is bad

American nation as a whole, one of the glories of the human race, executed him

Brown = liberator, champion of christ

Who wrote John Brown’s Day of Reckoning?

Fergus M Bordewish

published by Smithsonian

October 2009

What river were John Brown and his men near during Harper’s Ferry?

Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah

Who were the men that John Brown recruited?

1. some of them who came across a railway bridge from maryland to virginia were farm boys

2. seasoned veterans of the guerrilla war in disputed kansas

3. Brown’s youngest sons (Watson and Oliver)

4. a fugitive slave from charleston, SC

5. an african american student at Oberlin college

6. a pair of quaker brothers from Iowa who abandoned pacifist beliefs

What did John brown call the south?

Africa

What did Brown refer slaves as to?

Bees

How did Harper’s Ferry affect the nation?

traumatized americans of all persuasions

terrorized southerners with the fear of slave rebellions

radicalized countless northerns who hoped violent confrontation over slavery could be postponed

splintered the democratic party

scrambled the leadership of the republicans

produced the conditions that enabled Lincoln to defeat 2 democrats and a third party candidate in the election of 1860

Before Harper’s Ferry, what did leading politicians believe?

the widening division between North and South would eventually yield to compromise

While democrats split over slavery, what about the republicans?

tarnished by their association with abolitionists

Lincoln was considered more conservative

Because Brown helped to disrupt the party system, what happened?

Lincoln was carried to victory

11 states seceded

The civil war

Perception of John Brown

20th century saw him as an irrational fanatic

pro south 1940 Santa Fe Trail’s Raymond Massey portrayed him as a wild eyed madman

Civil rights movement + acknowledgement of the nation’s racial problems occasioned a more nuanced view

How did Frederick Douglas describe Brown?

built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships

though a white gentleman, is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our case, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery

John Brown childhood

Born 1800 in CT to strict parents

Parents believed righteous punishment = punishment of the divine

Moved to wilderness of Ohio in Hudson

became friends with natives and known as abolitions helping fugitive slaves

What careers did Brown try out?

1. farmer

2. tanner

3. surveyor

4. wool merchant

John Brown family life

married twice (first wife died of illness)

fathered 20 children (almost half died in infancy, 3 died in the war against slavery)

John Brown beliefs

rooted in calvinism

convinced he had been predestined to bring an end to slavery

slavery = sin against God

Gerrit Smith (In 1848)

a wealthy abolitionist

encouraged Brown and his family to live on land Smith had bestowed on black settlers in north NY

Brown’s plan to liberate slaves as never done before (while tucked away in the Adirondack Mountains)

A “subterranean Pass-way” (the underground railroad writ large)

would stretch south through the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains, linked by a chain of forts manned by armed abolitionists and free blacks

warriors would raid plantations and run fugitives north to canada

template for Harper’s Ferry under different circumstances

What did John Brown Jr say to his father in regards to pro slavery advocates?

the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with revolvers, bowie knives, rifles, and cannons, while they are not only thoroughly organized, but under pay from slave holders

May 1856

pro slavery raiders sacked Lawrence, Kansas, through burning and looting

What was Brown angry at?

the north’s apparant helplessness

“caution, caution sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”

What dd Brown do with a party of free staters?

dragged 5 pro slavery men out of their isolated cabins on eastern kansas’ powatomie creek and hacked them to death with cutlasses

• seen as a terrorist act

disturbed even abolitionists

“god is my judge” = justification

Brown eluded capture, nobody ever really got consequences

The murders ignited reprisals. What happened?

1. Pro slavery border ruffians raided free stater homsteads

2. Hamlets were burned

3. farms abandoned

4. Brown’s son Frederick (participated in the pottawatomie creek massacre) was shot dead by a pro slavery man

August 1856, told his son Jason “i have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause”

John Brown and Harriet Tubman

January 1858, brown left kansas to seek support for his southern invasion. April, he sought Harriet tubman out

called her general tubman

Tubman embraced Brown as one of the few whites she had ever met who shared her belief that antislavery work was life and death struggle

“the greatest white man who ever lived”

Harriet Tubman

made 8 secret trips to Maryland’s eastern shore to lead dozens of slaves north to freedom

December 1858

Brown returned to Kansas after getting financial backing from wealthy abolitionists (secret 6)

Led 12 fugitive slaves on an epic journey east

Got to detorit and ferried across the detroit river to Canada

covered 1500 miles in 82 days

What did Brown purchase with secret 6 funding?

hundreds of sharps carbines and thousands of pikes that he planed to arm the first wave of slaves he expected to flock to his banner once he occupied Harper’s ferry

many thousand more could then be armed with rifles stored at the federal arsenal there

“When i strike, the bees will swarm”

Brown’s raid vs Douglas and Tubman

Brown urged Douglas to sign on as a president of a provisional govt

He expected Tubman to help him recruit young men for his revolutionary army to infiltrate the countryside before the raid and encourage local blacks to join him when the time came

neither participated

Douglass thought it would fail (going into a perfect steel trap means he would not get out alive)

Tubman may have concluded that if Brown’s plan failed, the underground railroad would be destroyed, its routes, methods, and participants exposed

Why Harper’s Ferry?

61 miles northwest of DC at the junction of the potomac and Shenandoah rivers, it was the site of a major federal armory including a musket factory and rifle works, an arsenal, and several large mills and an important raildroad junction

After his men stepped off the railway bridge into town that October night in 1859…

Brown dispatched people to seize the musket factory, rifle works, arsenal, and adjacent brick fire engine house

3 men remained in maryland to guard weapons brown hoped to give to slaves

telegraph lines cut, railroad station seized

first casualty

• A free black man Hayward Shepherd challenged Brown’s men and was shot in the dark

Numbers of Harper’s Ferry

Early reports claimed it had been taken by 50, 150, 200 white insurrectionists and 600 runaway blacks

Brown expected to have 1500 men in command by midday monday

he believed he would eventually have armed 5000 slaves

DID NOT WORK OUT

Who were the first to arrive to handle John Brown?

the jefferson guards from charlestown

killed a former slave Dangerfield Newby

• was in the north to earn money to buy freedom for his wife and 6 children

cut brown off form his route of escape

Who handled brown next?

armed units from Frederick Maryland, Martinsburg and Shepherdstown Virginia, etc

Brown and his men are surrounded

brown sent out NY william thompson with a white flag to propose a ceasefire, but he was captured and held in the Galt House

Brown then sent his son Watson (24) and ex cavalryman Aaron Stevens also under a white flag, but the militiamen shot them down in the street

• Watson managed to crawl back, but Stevens was arrested

Attempts to escape by others

3 men ran to the Shenandoah hoping to wade across

• John Kagi (vp of brown’s provisional govt) and Lewis Leary (black) were shot dead

• John Copeland (black oberlin student) reached a rock in the river and surrendered

William Leemen hoped to make contact with the men Brown left in Maryland

• he tried to swim in the potomac but got trapped on an islet and was shot dead while surrendering

One of Brown’s men accidentally killed the town mayor. Who?

Fontaine Beckham

vengeful mob came into the Galt House where William Thompson was prisoner and shot him in the head

How many hostages did they have?

11 white hostages and 2/3 of their slaves

What did James Buchanan do?

dispatched a company of Marines from washington under the command of Robert E Lee

Robert E Lee

commander of marines from washington

slave owner, had disdain for abolitionists

abolitionists = excaberbated tensions by agitating among slaves and angering masters

Slavery was an institution sanctioned by god, and would only disappear if god ordained it

Lee asking for Brown’s retreat

he sent a leiutenant (JEB stuart, who would serve as Lee’s cavalry commander) carrying a white flag

brown asked that he and his men be allowed to retreat across the river to maryland where they will free the hostages

the leiutenant gave the signal for attack

Lt. Israel Green

went through the hole and was beneath one of the pumpers

he emerged into the darkened room, one of the hostages pointed at brown

green struck brown inw hat should have been a death blow but he was unharmed because the sword had struck a buckle and bent itself double

Marines finish the job

Indianian Jeremiah Anderson was impaled

Dauphin Thimpson was bayoneted under a fire engine

of the 19 men who strode into Harper’s Ferry, 5 were prisoners and 10 were dead/fatally injured

4 townspeople died, more than a dozen militiamen were wounded

Osborne Anderson and Albert Hazlett: the 2 escapees

they slipped out the back, climbed a wall, and scuttled behind the embankemnet of the baltimore and ohio railroad to the bank of the potomac, found a boat, and paddled to the maryland shore

in total, 5 members of the party would get to safety in the north or canada

Charges

1. treason

2. first degree murder

3. conspiring with blacks to produce insurrection

All charges had death penalty

Trial

Held in charlestown, virginia

began october 26

verdict was guilty, brown sentenced on November 2

WHen did brown die?

december 2, 1859

led out of charles town jail

“ dont keep me waiting longer than necessary. be quick” = last words

Who witnessed Brown’s death?

Thomas J Jackson, a presbytarian professor from the virginia military institute (stonewall)

John Wilkes Booth

How did the north react to Brown’s death?

said they will be more anti slavery (newbury port, massachussets)

Brown was hanged like christ was crucified

his soul goes marching on

How did the south react to Brown’s death?

More paranoia, fear of abolition attacks

fears of slave insurrections