YEAR: 1859John Brown’s Raid
John Brown’s Raid was the culmination of decades of militant abolitionist organizing that took Brown from upstate New York to the battlegrounds of Bleeding Kansas and finally to the banks of the Potomac River. Under Brown’s leadership, a small, multiracial band of abolitionists attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in order to build an army of formerly enslaved people to bring the institution of slavery to a grinding halt.
The raid was crushed and Brown hanged, but the sacrifice of the 22 raiders — five Black and 17 white — set the stage for the war to come. Within five years freedmen were flocking to the Union Army’s ranks and the slavocracy was crushed by the force of the Union Army, bolstered by thousands of Freedmen, while the Confederate economy was simultaneously decimated by what W.E.B. DuBois called the “general strike of the enslaved,” the mass withdrawal of labor that made the Confederate economy run.
