Brown's mantle has been claimed by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Timothy McVeigh, Socialist leader Eugene Debs and abortion protesters espousing violence. It also created, in John Brown, a figure who after a century and a half remains one of the most emotive touchstones of our racial history, lionized by some Americans and loathed by others: few are indifferent. In military terms, it was barely a skirmish, but the incident electrified the nation. The raid that Sunday night would be the most daring instance on record of white men entering a Southern state to incite a slave rebellion. They had come to Harpers Ferry to make war on slavery. Among them were Brown's youngest sons, Watson and Oliver a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina an African-American student at Oberlin College a pair of Quaker brothers from Iowa who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Brown a former slave from Virginia and men from Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Some of those who strode across a covered railway bridge from Maryland into Virginia were callow farm boys others were seasoned veterans of the guerrilla war in disputed Kansas.
Their leader was a rail-thin 59-year-old man with a shock of graying hair and penetrating steel-gray eyes. Harpers Ferry, Virginia, lay sleeping on the night of October 16, 1859, as 19 heavily armed men stole down mist-shrouded bluffs along the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah.
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