John Brown's Harpers Ferry Raid Exposes Slave Power's Armed Defense of Institutional Capture

John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, seizing the facility with 21 followers in an attempt to spark a slave uprising by capturing weapons and distributing them to enslaved people in the region. The raid exposed how thoroughly the Slave Power had captured federal institutions—President James Buchanan immediately deployed U.S. Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee to suppress what he characterized as an insurrection against federal authority, though the real threat was to slavery rather than the federal government itself. Lee’s forces stormed the engine house where Brown had taken refuge, killed ten raiders including two of Brown’s sons, and captured Brown within 36 hours.

The federal response demonstrated the extent to which national institutions served slavery interests. Buchanan treated an attack on slavery as equivalent to an attack on the United States government, mobilizing federal military forces to defend the peculiar institution. Virginia authorities quickly tried Brown for treason against Virginia (despite Brown never being a Virginia citizen), conspiracy to incite slave rebellion, and murder. The trial was rushed through in one week, with Brown convicted and sentenced to hang on December 2, 1859. The speed and coordination between federal and state authorities revealed the seamless integration of governmental institutions in defense of slavery.

Brown’s raid and execution polarized the nation and accelerated the path to Civil War. Southerners viewed the raid as proof of a Northern conspiracy to destroy slavery through violence, while many Northerners came to view Brown as a martyr who exposed the moral bankruptcy of a federal government thoroughly captured by the Slave Power. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” and Henry David Thoreau compared him to Christ. The episode demonstrated that the Slave Power would deploy federal military force to crush challenges to slavery while simultaneously claiming that federal authority could not be used to restrict slavery’s expansion—revealing the cynical instrumentalization of constitutional arguments in service of institutional capture.