John Brown did not expect to be a prisoner in Charles Town’s jail. His Harpers Ferry plan had been an utter failure. Brown failed to pilfer weapons from the U.S. Arsenal, failed to materialize an army of enslaved, and failed to free the enslaved. His Harpers Ferry attack, by every measure, defined debacle.

“I have been whipped, as the saying is,” Brown wrote to his dejected wife from his jail cell, “but I am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by the disaster by only hanging a few moments by the neck.”

Brown anticipated his execution. Jefferson County authorities, however, were not sanctioning a lynching. Trial by a jury of one’s peers is guaranteed in the Constitution, regardless of the local population’s rage and terror over their homeland being invaded and attacked. Execution was not predetermined. Brown’s assigned defense attorney—who had led a company of vigilantes against Brown’s soldiers holding the U.S. Rifle Works along the Shenandoah—argued for a plea of insanity. Brown fired him.

Attorneys then arrived from Boston to defend Brown against the following charges: (1) murder – the Harpers Ferry mayor and three other citizens were killed in the melee; (2) treason – Brown had created his own constitution to rule occupied slave territory; and (3) inciting slave rebellion. Each crime, by itself, was a capital offense.

One week after Brown’s capture, the trial commenced. Brown requested postponement due to his wounded condition, still suffering from blows to his head from a Marine’s saber. “My memory don’t serve me,” he informed the court. “My health is insufficient, although improving.” Judge Richard Parker, himself a slave owner and slave trader, denied Brown’s request.

Brown bristled: “The Governor of the State of Virginia tended me his assurances that I should have a fair trial. . . . If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial.”

Despite Brown’s objections, a jury was selected (that included enslavers), court convened, and indictments levied. The trial commenced on October 25, 1859, and lasted five days. Testimony came from 22 witnesses—12 for the prosecution and 10 for the defense—and included several of Brown’s hostages. Brown, weak from his wounds, was carried from the jail across the street to and from court on a stretcher. Throughout the trial, he laid on a cot in the center of the courtroom.

With final arguments echoing in their ears, the jury (all men and all White) parted for deliberation, the fate of John Brown in their hands. Only 45 minutes later, they returned. The verdict: guilty of murder, guilty of treason, and guilty of insurrection.

Sentencing occurred one week later. Judge Parker, on November 2, pronounced execution by hanging as the answer to Brown’s crimes. The judge gave Brown 30 more days to live. The gallows awaited in Charles Town on December 2.

Six weeks passed between Brown’s capture and his execution. Quick justice (or injustice)?

Brown’s trial fixated the nation. The country—already polarized by decades of disruptive disagreement over slavery—ruptured into a war of words between North and South.

“The notorious horse thief, murderer, insurrectionist and traitor expiated his guilt,” declared an angry editor of the Savannah Daily Morning News. “There are thousands of white-cravated necks in New England and the Northern states today that are as deserving of John Brown’s hempen tie.”

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison adamantly disagreed: “Was John Brown justified in his attempt?” Alluding to America’s fight for independence, he answered, “Yes, if Washington was in his!”  

Back in the courtroom, on sentencing day, Judge Parker asked Brown if he had anything to say. For the first time, Brown arose from his cot. Newspaper journalists from every corner of the country crowded the room, pencils in hand, anxious to record Brown’s remarks.

Without notes, Brown delivered a five-minute speech. Here are the highlights: 

“I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves.”

“[H]ad I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends . . . it would have been all right.”

“I believe that to have interfered as I have done . . . in behalf of [God’s] despised poor, in no wrong, but right.”

From defeat to victory. From ashes to fire. Brown, in just six weeks between his capture and execution, had placed not himself but slavery on trial. John Brown had become “the conquering prisoner of Charles Town jail.”

Perhaps Brown did not fail.