Why Did John Brown's Raid

On October 16, 1859, John Brown, a radical abolitionist of the North, led a small army of 18 men into the small town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He seized the arms and ammunition in the federal arsenal and planned to arm slaves to instigate slave rebellions in the South. He was captured by the militia and Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee’s troops, and was quickly sentenced to death. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry received polarized comments. While he was hailed as a martyr by Chicago’s Republican press, Democratic newspaper in South Carolina and Illinois condemned him as a criminal. At the same time, the Northern press did not ask for the execration of Brown’s penalty in hopes of preserving the Union, but the South viewed this event as another strong reason for seceding. John Brown’s raid has a profound effect on deepening sectional and partisan divide between North and South.
Press and Tribune was a leading daily newspaper in Chicago, Illinois. Politically, it was characterized as a Republican press against
the Democratic Party. On December 2nd, 1859, the day when John Brown was executed, Press and Tribune published an editorial titled “The Fatal Friday”. In this articled, Brown was recognized as a man whose “heroism is as sublime as that of a martyr” and whose abolitionism spirit “have excited throughout all the North strong feeling of sympathy in his behalf”. His gestures and words carried significance and circulated in Northern press. But the South would not agree. Mercury, a Democratic newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, regarded Brown as a “hoary villain” who tried to rise the slaves to “cut the throats of their white masters”. Mercury particularly condemned the Northern press for considering him as an admirable person and attacked on Northern “unruly sympathizers”.
Under the background of pre-Civil War sectional tension, such discrepancy in attitudes toward John Brown’s raid had deeper political implication.
Although initially the Northern press expressed deep sympathy for Brown, saying that “we would be glad to avert the axe which hangs over the old man's head”, the impending secession crisis and the coming presidential election of 1860 required Northern press to be very careful with their political opinions. At that moment, the North’s chief political endeavor was to prevent rather than hastening Southern states from seceding. In one of its editorials, Chicago’s Press and Tribune characterized this raid as a “fanaticism action” and stated sincerely that “as long as we are a part of the Union, supporting the constitution and the laws”, Old Brown was answerable for the “legal consequence of his act”(2). The Northern newspaper had done their best to calm the slaveholders down and persuade them to stay in the
Union.
However, the Southern press did not buy the North’s effort to preserve the Union and found their attitude abominable. “There are men whose minds are so blindly and determinedly fixed on preserving the Union,” Mercury commented, that they would not be able to “wake from the delusive dreams of future peace”. The harm had already been done. Even though Brown was lawfully executed, the South was greatly unsettled by the tributes paid to Brown by the press and the public in the North. The sympathy and admiration expressed by Northern newspapers in response to this raid was an evidence of regional consensus, or conspiracy, that made the raid possible in the first place. They feared that “the bloody excesses of the abolition invaders of Virginia did not at all satisfy [the North]” and there would be more slave rebellions. The slavery institution was at stake. This anxiety was manifested in press such as Mercury, which claimed that “North men [are] ready to engage in adventures upon the peace and security of the southern people”. For the South, the Northern newspaper’s “indifference or contempt for the South” and “broad and pathetic farce that has been played off before the public” indicated that Brown’s raid was not, as Republicans claimed, the work of one single extremist abolitionist, but rather rather an outbreak of the widespread sectional hostility. Brown’s raid should serve as a symptomatic warning of the danger of staying in the Union. John Brown’s raid gave the Southern slaveholders another strong reason to secede from the Union, and the Northern presses’ responses further exacerbate this sectional tension.
During any public crisis, press often played the role of both the representative and the shaper of the public opinion. Northern republican newspaper conveyed Brown’s heroism to the public, incentivized mass sympathy for Brown and arose new tides of abolitionist sentiments. Such massive and regional hostility worried Southern democrats. For them, secession seemed to be the only way out. From this moment, the pre-Civil War tension, both regional and partisan, became more aggressive.