John "Osawatomie" Brown (1800–1859), a fifty-nine-year-old radical abolitionist, led the raid. But before the raiders could make a quiet escape, the mission's objectives were redrawn to include the capture of several prominent hostages and the theft of some symbolically charged weapons that had once belonged to George Washington. Despite a last-minute shortage of volunteers and poor planning for food, ammunition, and transport, the raid quickly met its initial goal of capturing the weapons. There the alliance would free slaves, arming some with pikes or rifles, and open a defendable route of ridgeline escape and logistical resupply from Alabama to Canada. Their apparent plan was to capture the weapons and to quickly move them into improvised natural fortifications located at regular intervals along the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains. Most members of this "multiracial alliance" were free-soil veterans of the Kansas civil war and were trained in guerrilla tactics. Three others waited outside town to provide a rear guard. THE RAID ON HARPERS FERRYĭuring the night of 16 October 1859, nineteen men walked into Harpers Ferry, captured the armory, and then commandeered the thousands of rifles stored at the arsenal. armory, a federal arsenal, and Hall's Rifle Works. The town, with a population of almost three thousand, had a military economy: it was home to a U.S. In 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was a prosperous town, strategically situated at this river junction, on two rail lines, and almost midway along a canal that carried freight from the Chesapeake to Pennsylvania. The rivers converge, proceed through a mountain pass, and flow past Washington, D.C., into the Chesapeake Bay. The Potomac drains the eastern slopes of the Allegheny Mountains and flows southeast until, at Harpers Ferry, it confronts the Shenandoah, flowing north out of the Virginia Blue Ridge.
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