Eventually white slaveholders would flee and the institution of slavery would collapse.
#The raid on harpers ferry free#
Slaves would flee to the mountains and in turn free more slaves. His radicalization led him to a plan to recruit an army of 50 to 100 guerrilla fighters to attack slaveholders in Virginia and Maryland.
As a response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act Brown founded the League of Gileadites, a militant group to prevent the capture of fugitive slaves. He considered that insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in America. He believed that peaceful resistance by the abolitionist movement and the incremental abolition policy of its supporters had shown to be ineffective in the fight against slavery. These were his transformative years where he learned and got involved in abolitionist activities. In 1846 he moved to Springfield, Massachusetts where he met Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. The economic crisis of 1839 left him in great financial loss and in order to get out of debt he tried different business ventures.
From his first marriage he had seven children and from his second, thirteen more. In Pennsylvania he opened his own tannery and raised cattle, a business learned from his father. At age 16 he moved to Plainfield, Massachusetts and then to Pennsylvania. His family moved to Ohio where he spent his childhood, his father owned a successful tannery. John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut on May 9, 1800. His goals were to free slaves and overthrow the white government to establish a free black state. He was said to be acting on God’s orders.
In 1855 Brown had also perpetrated the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre in Kansas as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, resulting in five deaths. On the night of October 1859, John Brown and 21 of his followers raided the Harper’s Ferry Federal Arsenal in Virginia.
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