In the summer of 1859, John Brown hid at the Kennedy Farmhouse in Maryland under the alias Isaac Smith, a few miles from the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. With 21 men, 16 white and five Black, he stockpiled nearly 200 Sharps carbines and almost a thousand pikes meant for enslaved people he expected to join him, telling neighbors the pikes were mining tools. Frederick Douglass heard the plan at a Pennsylvania quarry and called it a steel trap, but Shields Green chose to follow Brown. Warnings leaked through drillmaster Hugh Forbes and an anonymous letter to Secretary of War John B. Floyd, who dismissed it in part because it placed the armory in Maryland.

On October 16, Brown seized the armory, then sent men to take a great-grandnephew of George Washington hostage along with a sword and pistols linked to Washington and Lafayette. No uprising came. Hayward Shepherd, a free Black baggage handler, was the first man killed, and Brown let a stopped B&O train go on to Baltimore, where the alarm was raised. Militia pinned his men in the engine house, where his sons Watson and Oliver were mortally wounded, until Marines under Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart broke in on October 18.

• Brown’s men drilled at night and welcomed thunderstorms that covered their noise.
• The Marine officer who struck Brown carried a light dress sword that bent double instead of killing him.
• Wounded on the paymaster’s office floor, Brown told the governor of Virginia and visiting congressmen to prepare for eternity, as reporters took notes.
• John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd at Brown’s hanging on December 2.
• Brown’s final note said the nation’s sins could never be washed away without a great shedding of blood.