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Could Brown’s plan ever have succeeded?
Well, what’s success? I mean, he did spark the Civil War, which ended slavery across the entire United States. He inspired the song that became the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the song that the Union marched off to war to. You can even see his effect on the map — West Virginia begins at Harper’s Ferry. It’s as if he cut the state in half with a sword.
If you want success, I don’t know what’s more successful than that. But at what a cost!
Even if Brown meant to sacrifice himself, the people with him did not mean to sacrifice themselves, and I don’t believe Brown meant to sacrifice his sons.
In most ways the raid was a success. They took the objective, they got what they came for, and they had plenty of time (they had all night and an hour after dawn before the alarm was even raised) to take off with it. Plenty of slaves were joining them — we know they were handing out guns and spears.
But it didn’t take fire like he wanted it to, somehow. There was something about the situation that did not satisfy Brown, and he demanded that the raiders stay in the arsenal and try to hold the buildings. Perhaps he thought, for a moment, that he was dealing from a position of strength. After all, he had his objective, the revolution was beginning, and the time had come to parley with the other side.
It was then that he discovered that he was facing a much more determined adversary than he imagined.
The part of Virginia that they were in simply did not have a lot of slaves. Most of the ones there were local citizens who worked a job. The brutal agricultural areas with huge groups of furious slaves were far to the south. Harper’s Ferry is a sleepy little town that makes guns for the army. Once Brown realized there were no armies of black men to come get his guns, that his hostages were useless, and that he was facing an enemy that would kill him before even listening to him….well, I think he began to realize the depths of his adversary.
Before John Brown’s raid, I think everybody was kidding themselves that slavery could end without bloodshed. But when they shot the third man who came out waving a white flag and drunkenly tore the ears off of Lewis Leary’s corpse, anyone near Harper’s Ferry could see that the slavers would rather die than let go.