Osborne P. Anderson: A Voice from Harper’s Ferry

About the Author

Osborne Perry Anderson was an abolitionist, author, and political activist and one of five black raiders who followed John Brown in his attack on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. He was born free in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. His father, Vincent Anderson, moved the family to West Goshen (near West Chester) around 1850. There Anderson met the Shadds, a family of black abolitionists. In the early 1850s he followed them to Chatham, Canada West, one of several Canadian communities in which free blacks and fugitive slaves from the United States could find a haven. Blacks could be full citizens in Canada, and it is estimated that forty to fifty thousand African Americans had moved there by 1850. Anderson lived with the Shadd family and became a printer’s apprentice at the Provincial Freeman, a newspaper founded by Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman editor on the continent. Thus, Anderson was in Chatham when Brown planned and held his convention there.

Unlike many other recruits, Anderson paid his own way to the rally point of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, arriving on September 16, 1859. There, he stayed with a local black barber named Henry Watson, and on September 24 he walked (by night) from Chambersburg to meet Brown near the Kennedy Farm in Maryland, a place that Brown had rented to be used as a staging area for the raid. The raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, began on October 16, 1859, and ended two days later. Anderson, being the only one of Brown’s men to witness the raid and live to tell the story, proceeded to write A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, which was edited by Shadd, his mentor, and published in 1861. Along with an estimated fifty thousand other Canadians, Anderson went south to the United States when the Civil War began. While some historians believe that he served in the army, there is no record of such service; he did, however, work as a recruiter for the Union army’s U.S. Colored Troops.

Following the war, Anderson resided in the United States, where he had trouble supporting himself. He revisited Harpers Ferry a year before his death, pointing out strategic scenes to Richard Hinton, who would author John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper’s Ferry (1894). In 1872, Anderson died penniless in Washington, D.C., and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Because of his abolitionist activities, Anderson is claimed by Canada as a national hero.