John_Brown_inside engine house
It all went wrong, with John Brown’s son dying at his feet. Most of the slaves melted back into the countryside when they saw Brown had no chance, and he ended up penned in a little brick building with one room and bullets pouring through from all sides.
The courtroom appearance that would transmute all this shit to gold was still days in the future. We remember the end of the raid, when they were at bay and dying. Few people know about the raid at the height, when the raiders and as many as 300 slaves owned the streets of Harper’s Ferry. The plan could have worked at several points — Brown could have left the armory after taking all the weapons and gotten away easily. He stayed and stayed and stayed until the situation became too terrible to leave. It’s a tribute to his personal magnetism that anyone stayed with him at all.