Are you willing to die for a cause? John Brown’s soldiers were and did.

Their mission? Liberating enslaved Blacks. Their method? Guerilla warfare in the pro-slavery South. Their mantra? “[We] are waring [sic] with Slavery,” wrote Brown’s youngest volunteer, 18-year-old William Leeman, in a letter to his mother. “[T]he greatest Curse that ever infested America.”

Twenty-one men, ages 18 to 44, gathered with “Captain” Brown at his Kennedy Farm headquarters in remote Washington County, Maryland, from mid-June through mid-October 1859. The “army of liberation” included three of Brown’s sons (Owen, Oliver, and Watson); seasoned guerrilla war veterans of “Bleeding Kansas” (more than half the “army’s” total); and five African Americans (two formerly enslaved).

“A more earnest, fearless, determined company of men it would be difficult to get together,” proclaimed recruit Osborn Perry Anderson, a Pennsylvania-born African American who worked as a printer in Canada.

Cramped into two small log cabins nestled under Elk Ridge, about five miles north of Harpers Ferry—the first target in Brown’s war—secrecy reigned paramount. To ensure an appearance of normalcy and to serve as “watch dogs,” Brown enlisted his 16-year-old daughter Anne and his recently married daughter-in-law Martha, Oliver’s wife. “We were in constant fear that people would become suspicious enough to attempt an investigation and try to arrest the men,” recalled Anne, who was often posted on the porch. “I was there to keep the outside world from discovering that John Brown and his men were in their neighborhood.” They succeeded.   

As the moment neared for Brown’s launch of war, he returned the young women to the family farm in upstate New York. Two weeks later, on a rainy Sunday evening on October 16, 1859, Captain Brown issued his first order: “Men, get on your arms. We shall proceed to the Ferry.”

Everything proceeded perfectly, at first. Intelligence derived from one soldier, John Cook, who had been spying for Brown in and around Harpers Ferry for the previous 18 months, provided specific targets. Each soldier had an assignment. Some guarded the Potomac and Shenandoah bridges. Others captured the federal armory and arsenal. A contingent seized the Shenandoah rifle works. One sortie, led by Cook, ventured into the countryside, seizing prominent enslavers, including Lewis Washington—a descendant of George Washington—as hostages.

The plan unraveled when a bridge watchman escaped and warned the approaching passenger train. This resulted in shots fired at a frightened baggage porter, Heyward Shepherd, alerting town residents, and spreading alarm. Local militia soon surrounded the Ferry, trapping Brown and isolating his men.

Angered by the invaders and insurrection, town tempers boiled. Atrocities occurred after local citizens, including town Mayor Fontaine Beckham, were killed during the fighting.

Dangerfield Newby was the first of Brown’s soldier to die. Formerly enslaved himself, he intended to free his still-enslaved wife and six children in Virginia. A six-inch railroad spike, fired from a musket, severed his neck from ear-to-ear, and his body was left for roaming hogs. Newby’s ears were sliced off as souvenirs.

Willie Leeman tried to escape across the Potomac. A hailstorm of bullets stopped him on an islet, and he surrendered. An enraged citizen swam out and shot Leeman in the head. “The lad’s body, lying for hours in plain sight on the rock, was riddled and mutilated repeatedly . . . [as] the dead Abolitionist [made] an attractive target.” A similar fate befell William Thompson, killed by a mob and thrown off the railroad bridge into the Potomac, his corpse pelted with bullets throughout the day.

Brown’s army disintegrated. His son Oliver was killed, and son Watson mortally wounded. All totaled, 10 of Brown’s men died in battle (including two African Americans); six would be executed by hanging following trial in Charles Town (two African Americans among them); five managed to escape. Osborn Anderson, the only African American to escape, shared his experience in 1861 in a booklet: A Voice from Harpers Ferry.

Ill-treatment of Brown’s dead continued long after the shooting stopped. Watson Brown’s corpse was crammed into a barrel and shipped to the medical college at Winchester, Virginia, for anatomical exam and study. His preserved body displayed “all the muscles, arteries and nerves” and was a “specimen of interest and note.” According to the professor responsible for Watson’s corpse, “Virginia was entitled to the body as an object of warning.”

Hospitable graves did not honor most of Brown’s dead soldiers. Burial in a local cemetery was out of the question “in view of the excited state of the public.” Seven corpses were thus jammed into two “store boxes,” carried across the Shenandoah, and buried one-half mile upriver in an unmarked grave—victims of a failed war. Their jumbled bones and skulls finally were recovered 40 years later; in 1899, they were reinterred beside the grave of Captain Brown on his farm in North Elba, New York.

“[T]he principles of the cause in which we are engaged will not die with me and my brave comrades,” wrote Edwin Coppoc, just prior to his hanging in Charles Town. The 24-year old Quaker prophesized, “[B]y the taking of my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on that glorious day when the slave shall rejoice in his freedom.”

Jeremiah Anderson—bayoneted and killed in the final attack against Brown’s “Fort” —had proclaimed his mission the day after Independence Day 1859: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? Is it every man’s?”

Anderson then challenged, “But there are a few who dare to answer this call, and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the center.”