At eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, October 16, a fifty-nine-yearold man with a prophet’s beard and a prophet’s vehemence spoke to twentyone disciples in a farmhouse: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.”

The Ferry was the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and the little army that set off into the drizzling darkness was led by John Brown. Earlier that day he had gone over his final plans: they would seize the armory and rifle works, take hostages to negotiate with the militia, hold the town while slave reinforcements came in from Virginia, and withdraw into the mountains to establish a base, which, growing ever stronger, eventually would smash the institution of slavery in America.

At first everything went smoothly. Brown’s men easily took the town’s two bridges and minutes later grabbed the terrified government watchman at the arsenal. “I came here from Kansas,” Brown told him, “and this is a slave State; I want to free all the negroes in this State; I have possession now of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me I must only burn the town and have blood. ”

While Brown consolidated his position, his raiders went out into the countryside and brought back ten slaves and three hostages, among them Col. Lewis Washington, a great-grand-nephew of the President. With the colonel came a splendid sword that Frederick the Great had given to his ancestor; John Brown strapped it on.

Not long after Washington’s capture, the express from Wheeling rattled across the bridge, to be driven back by gunfire. The baggagemaster left the station to see what was happening and fell mortally wounded. John Brown’s raid had claimed as its first victim a free Negro named Hayward Shepherd.

The gunfire woke the town, and in minutes the terrible news of a slave insurrection was everywhere: the horror Nat Turner had unleashed thirty years before was back again.

By Monday morning the armory and the enginehouse where Brown and his men had barricaded themselves were under heavy fire, whose pitch increased as furious farmers came in from the countryside to join the fight. Brown could still have escaped. But he waited—no one knows why—and by noon militia companies had arrived from Charlestown and it was too late. The slave reinforcements had not materialized, and Brown sent one of his men out under a flag of truce to negotiate. But the crowd wanted blood. The siege continued all afternoon and into the night.

The next morning found John Brown standing over the corpse of one of his sons while another lay mortally wounded nearby; and the first light showed him regular troops under the brevet colonel Robert E. Lee. A young cavalryman named Jeb Stuart negotiated briefly with Brown, then Marines stormed the enginehouse, battered in the door, and bayoneted two of the defenders. Lt. Israel Green, the Marine