Frederick Douglass was the most famous Black person to visit Harpers Ferry during the 19^th century. He came on Memorial Day (May 30, 1881) as a trustee of Storer College to present a graduation commencement speech. The subject: John Brown: An Address.

“If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery,” Douglass proclaimed, “he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”

Douglass and Brown were close friends and associates during the 1850s. Both had dedicated their lives to the termination of enslavement in America. Douglass had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838, and Brown had helped enslaved escape. The two of them conceived a strategic plan to extract enslaved people from Southern states. They would utilize the Appalachian Mountains as their concealment, conducting guerilla raids against enslavers, and escorting freed persons into the North via secluded, fortified mountain corridors. Their plan enhanced the Underground Railroad concept as it permitted large groups of enslaved to seek freedom under protection of soldiers loyal to Brown.

But Douglass and Brown disagreed over Brown’s first target: Harpers Ferry. Douglass considered it a perfect “steel trap” and refused to accompany Brown for the opening salvo of his war against slavery.

“I told him finally that it was impossible for me to join him,” Douglass reminisced, 22 years after Brown’s attack upon Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859. “I could see Harpers Ferry only as a trap of steel, and ourselves in the wrong side of it. He regretted my decision, and we parted.”

Douglass never saw Brown again. They had their final meeting in a remote stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, about two months before the Harpers Ferry attack. Here, Brown outlined his scheme: (1) seize the U.S. Armory and Arsenal at the Ferry, (2) remove thousands of rifles and muskets stored there by the government; and (3) use these weapons for his envisioned army of liberation.

“To me, such a measure would be fatal . . . to all engaged in doing so,” Douglass believed. “It would be an attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole country against us.”

Douglass proved correct. Brown’s Harpers Ferry attack failed. Brown would be surrounded and captured within the U.S. Armory fire-engine house only 36 hours after his war had commenced. Douglass, fearful he would be arrested as a conspirator, fled temporarily to Canada.

“His zeal in the cause of race was far greater than mine,” Douglass serenaded the Storer College crowd. “[He] was as the burning sun to my taper light. . . . I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Douglass’s spirited defense of Brown was cathartic. “The bloody harvest of Harpers Ferry was ripened by the heat and moisture of merciless bondage,” he roared. “That startling cry of alarm on the banks of the Potomac was but the answering back of the avenging angel.”

So passionate was Douglass about his speech at Storer College—by charter, the first integrated school in West Virginia—that he permitted the college to sell a printed version as a fundraiser to endow a “John Brown Professorship.”  

As Douglass’s oration echoed off the mountains of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable sight rocked the senses of history. Aside Mr. Douglass on the speaker’s platform was Andrew Hunter—Jefferson County’s former prosecuting attorney who had successfully tried Brown for murder, treason, and inciting a slave rebellion, ultimately resulting in Brown’s execution. The irony of these two men, representing opposite perspectives on Brown, side-by-side on the stage, illustrated the enigma and enduring controversy of John Brown in American history.

Douglass acknowledged that the rule of law had conquered Brown. “To the outward eye of man, John Brown was a criminal,” reflected Douglass. “His deeds might be disowned, but the spirit which made those deeds possible was worthy of highest honor.”

Tipping his hat to Brown as an abolitionist martyr, Douglass crescendoed at the end of his fiery speech: “[H]e was a thousand times more effective as a preacher than as a warrior. . . . Mighty with the sword of steel, he was mightier with the sword of truth; and with his truth, he literally swept the horizon.”

Copy of Frederick Douglass's "A Lecture On John Brown, Delivered at Harper's Ferry and sundry other places" from the Library of Congress website