John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry (1859)

CTL-E-5408 · Event · other · 1859

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

On the night of October 16, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown led twenty-one men — including five Black men: Dangerfield Newby, Lewis Leary, John Copeland Jr., Shields Green, and Osborne Perry Anderson — in a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown intended to seize weapons and establish a stronghold from which enslaved people could be armed and freed, beginning a liberation campaign through the Appalachian South. The raiders held the armory briefly before being cornered in its fire-engine house by local militia and a detachment of United States Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee; ten raiders were killed, and Brown was captured, tried for treason against Virginia, and hanged at Charles Town on December 2, 1859. The raid electrified the country — condemned across the South as proof of Northern intent, mourned in the North with church bells and eulogies — and it stands, eighteen months before Fort Sumter, as the violent overture to the Civil War. The graph already holds Brown the man (CTL-E-1586); this record holds the act.

The record

• Also known as: John Brown's Raid, Harpers Ferry Raid

Notes

Statistics: Raid: October 16–18, 1859; Brown executed December 2, 1859 (NPS). The intake paste's stop #6 date (October 16, 1859) is VERIFIED exact as printed. Raiders killed: 10; Dangerfield Newby was among the first to die. · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: Brown is usually filed as a white abolitionist's story. The record restores the five Black men who walked into Harpers Ferry beside him — named here because a citation graph's first duty is names. Newby carried a letter from his enslaved wife in his pocket. That is the raid, told at the right altitude. · Photo slot: CLEARED CANDIDATE — Wikimedia Commons File:John Brown portrait, 1859.jpg, Public domain, license verified from Commons API metadata on 2026-10-15; not downloaded — visual pass follows merge per standing pattern.

Referenced by

• John Brown — initiated → this record

Sources

• National Park Service, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, 'John Brown's Raid' — supports: the October 16–18, 1859 raid, its aims, the Marine detachment under Lee, and Brown's execution on December 2, 1859 (primary source)
• West Virginia Encyclopedia, 'John Brown's Raid' — supports: the composition of the raiding party, including the five Black raiders named in this description
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Harpers Ferry Raid' — supports: the raid's national impact as a precursor to the Civil War

Record CTL-E-5408 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 3 sources (1 primary) · 1 mapped relationship · CTL research: BCI-001, RELP-001.
Directory: all entity records · the knowledge graph

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