He grew up in Ireland and went to England to attend Oxford, where he graduated with honors in A popular society figure known for his wit and flamboyant style, he published his own book of poems in He spent a The book, about the struggles of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, was an immediate popular success. Hennard then turned the gun on himself and died by suicide.
The incident was one of the deadliest On October 16, , Chevrolet begins to sell a car-truck hybrid that it calls the El Camino. On this day in , Alfred Rosenberg, the primary fabricator and disseminator of Nazi ideology, is hanged as a war criminal. Born in Estonia in , Rosenberg studied architecture at the University of Moscow. After receiving his degree, he stayed in Russia through the early Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Black History. Art, Literature, and Film History. World War II. Sign Up. Vietnam War. A detachment of United States Marines arrived and stormed the arsenal on October 18, capturing seven men, including Brown. The state of Virginia charged Brown with treason.
During this time, slave states commonly accused people who encouraged or led slave rebellions of treason against the state. The court found Brown guilty and sentenced him to death. On December 2, , Brown was hanged.
He became a martyr for many Northerners. Some of these people feared that the United States had become a government dominated by Southern slave owners.
Many white Southerners became convinced that all abolitionists shared Brown's views and his willingness to utilize violence.
Brown's Harper's Ferry raid raised issues for the presidential election of It was also one of the events that led to the eventual dissolution of the United States and the civil war that followed. Brown's actions also created numerous problems for Ohioans. By the mids, the Republican Party had formed in Ohio, and its candidates campaigned on a platform of limiting slavery.
Many non Republicans believed that Republicans sought the complete overthrow of slavery. Several of Brown's men were also from Ohio.
He and a dozen of his men held out in the engine house, a small but formidable brick building, with stout oak doors in front. Other small groups remained holed up in the musket factory and rifle works. Acknowledging their increasingly dire predicament, Brown sent out New Yorker William Thompson, bearing a white flag, to propose a cease-fire.
But Thompson was captured and held in the Galt House, a local hotel. Brown then dispatched his son, Watson, 24, and ex-cavalryman Aaron Stevens, also under a white flag, but the militiamen shot them down in the street. Watson, although fatally wounded, managed to crawl back to the engine house.
Stevens, shot four times, was arrested. When the militia stormed the rifle works, the three men inside dashed for the shallow Shenandoah, hoping to wade across. Two of them—John Kagi, vice president of Brown's provisional government, and Lewis Leary, an African-American—were shot dead in the water. The black Oberlin student, John Copeland, reached a rock in the middle of the river, where he threw down his gun and surrendered.
Twenty-year-old William Leeman slipped out of the engine house, hoping to make contact with the three men Brown had left as backup in Maryland. Leeman plunged into the Potomac and swam for his life. Trapped on an islet, he was shot dead as he tried to surrender.
Throughout the afternoon, bystanders took potshots at his body. Through loopholes—small openings through which guns could be fired—that they had drilled in the engine house's thick doors, Brown's men tried to pick off their attackers, without much success.
One of their shots, however, killed the town's mayor, Fontaine Beckham, enraging the local citizenry. They dragged him onto the railroad trestle, shot him in the head as he begged for his life and tossed him over the railing into the Potomac. By nightfall, conditions inside the engine house had grown desperate. Brown's men had not eaten for more than 24 hours. Only four remained unwounded. The bloody corpses of slain raiders, including Brown's year-old son, Oliver, lay at their feet.
They knew there was no hope of escape. Eleven white hostages and two or three of their slaves were pressed against the back wall, utterly terrified. Two pumpers and hose carts were pushed against the doors, to brace against an assault expected at any moment. Yet if Brown felt defeated, he didn't show it. As his son Watson writhed in agony, Brown told him to die "as becomes a man. Soon perhaps a thousand men—many uniformed and disciplined, others drunk and brandishing weapons from shotguns to old muskets—would fill the narrow lanes of Harpers Ferry, surrounding Brown's tiny band.
President James Buchanan had dispatched a company of Marines from Washington, under the command of one of the Army's most promising officers: Lt. Robert E. Himself a slave owner, Lee had only disdain for abolitionists, who "he believed were exacerbating tensions by agitating among slaves and angering masters," says Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E.
Lee Through His Private Letters. He gathered the 90 Marines behind a nearby warehouse and worked out a plan of attack. In the predawn darkness, Lee's aide, a flamboyant young cavalry lieutenant, boldly approached the engine house, carrying a white flag. He was met at the door by Brown, who asked that he and his men be allowed to retreat across the river to Maryland, where they would free their hostages. The soldier promised only that the raiders would be protected from the mob and put on trial.
The lieutenant stepped aside, and with his hand gave a prearranged signal to attack. Brown could have shot him dead—"just as easily as I could kill a musquito," he recalled later. Had he done so, the course of the Civil War might have been different. The lieutenant was J. Stuart, who would go on to serve brilliantly as Lee's cavalry commander.
Lee first sent several men crawling below the loopholes, to smash the door with sledgehammers. When that failed, a larger party charged the weakened door, using a ladder as a battering ram, punching through on their second try. Israel Green squirmed through the hole to find himself beneath one of the pumpers.
According to Frye, as Green emerged into the darkened room, one of the hostages pointed at Brown. The abolitionist turned just as Green lunged forward with his saber, striking Brown in the gut with what should have been a death blow. Brown fell, stunned but astonishingly unharmed: the sword had struck a buckle and bent itself double.
With the sword's hilt, Green then hammered Brown's skull until he passed out. Although severely injured, Brown would survive. Meanwhile, the Marines poured through the breach.
Brown's men were overwhelmed. One Marine impaled Indianan Jeremiah Anderson against a wall. Another bayoneted young Dauphin Thompson, where he lay under a fire engine. It was over in less than three minutes.
Of the 19 men who strode into Harpers Ferry less than 36 hours before, five were now prisoners; ten had been killed or fatally injured. Four townspeople had also died; more than a dozen militiamen were wounded. Only two of Brown's men escaped the siege. Amid the commotion, Osborne Anderson and Albert Hazlett slipped out the back of the armory, climbed a wall and scuttled behind the embankment of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the bank of the Potomac, where they found a boat and paddled to the Maryland shore.
Hazlett and another of the men whom Brown had left behind to guard supplies were later captured in Pennsylvania and extradited to Virginia.
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