John Brown ignited a powder keg, exploding America toward civil war. The abolitionist’s attack on Harpers Ferry fired passions over slavery, carving a canyon between North and South that no bridge could span.

“The day of compromise is passed,” announced South Carolina’s Charleston Mercury, a leading voice of secession. “The South must control her own destinies or perish.”

Virginians, particularly, expressed outrage. As the first target of Brown’s war, the Old Dominion shuddered. The terror of invasion and insurrection rallied proslavery forces.

“All Virginia [will] stand forth and say to fanaticism,” bellowed Delegate James L. Kemper to the General Assembly in Richmond, that “whenever you advance a hostile foot upon our soils, we will welcome you with bloody hands and hospitable graves.”

Evidence proved this prediction. “Virginia is arming to the teeth,” lamented former President John Tyler, the last Virginian to serve as the country’s chief executive. “More than 50,000 stands of arms already distributed, and the demand for more daily increasing.”

Convinced many more “John Browns” were awaiting orders, the U.S. Senate commenced an investigation of Northern conspiracy against the South. Named the “Mason Committee” (after its chairman, Sen. John Mason of Virginia), its purpose was to flush out Brown’s closest allies; determine whether “the invasion and seizure was made under color of any organization intended to subvert the government”; and implicate any citizen who had been an accessory “by contributions of money, arms, munitions, or otherwise.” No one doubted Mason’s commitment to slavery. He had authored the infamous 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that abolitionists abhorred.     

As the South convulsed, preparing for self-defense, Northerners swerved in the opposite direction—erecting a pedestal for Brown’s martyrdom.

Leading the charge were Transcendentalists and ministers from Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson labeled Brown “a pure idealist of artless goodness” whose death made “the gallows glorious like the cross.” Emerson’s young protégé Louisa May Alcott worshipped Brown as “St. John the Just.” Henry David Thoreau, a student of Emerson’s, proclaimed Brown “an angel of light.” Thoreau declared further that Brown and his soldiers “in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.”

Thoreau postulated an intriguing theory. “Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves?”

Many Northerners were uncertain of martyrdom; they were certain slavery could no longer be ignored.

Abraham Lincoln and most in his nascent Republican Party feared Brown’s violent abolitionism and its effect on their political futures. Lincoln assessed Brown: “[H]e agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong,” but always the pragmatist, Lincoln concluded this could not “excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.” Ironically, Brown’s shadow and slavery’s future had a devastating effect upon the Democratic Party in the 1860 election, rupturing it into Northern and Southern factions. As a result of Democratic disunity, Lincoln won.

A year before Lincoln’s election, however, debate over John Brown enraged emotions. Brown inserted slavery’s controversy into every parlor, in every household, in every state. The partisan divide between North and South exasperated, never more derisive, or more dramatic. Talk of civil war permeated.

“Have we no right . . . to secure our rights and protect our honor,” proclaimed Jefferson Davis (then U.S. Senator from Mississippi), to “dissever the ties that bind us together, even if it rushes us into a sea of blood!”

The Richmond Enquirer sadly editorialized: “The Harpers Ferry invasion advanced the cause of Disunion more than any other event . . . since the formation of the Government.”

Author Herman Melville understood Brown’s effect. In his contemporary poem “The Portent,” he predicted, “And the stabs shall heal no more. . . . The meteor of the war.”

Brown’s “meteor” still stirs sensitivities more than a century and a half after his strike at Harpers Ferry. Americans agree to disagree on Brown. Saint or Madman? Murderer or Liberator? Devil or Martyr? Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? Brown’s soul has marched into America’s collective soul. Define this man. What does he mean?

Perhaps a later American writer, Stephen Vincent Benet, in his epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” best captured the dichotomy of a country and the legacy of one man:

     You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough,

     But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?

John Brown did not cause the Civil War; he catapulted America into civil war.