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

Audience

Anderson’s target audience consisted of both whites and blacks. He particularly wanted to show white southerners, as well as northerners, that the southerners whom Brown’s party encountered at Harpers Ferry were cowards. But Anderson’s most immediate audience was black. On January 1, 1861, for example, a meeting of black citizens was held at the Twelfth Street Baptist Church in Boston to promote Anderson’s book. Excerpts from the book were read aloud, and a collection was taken up for Anderson, who was still a wanted man and in dire financial straits. The book, which sold for fifteen cents, was available for purchase at the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston. The book later became and remains an excellent source for biographers of Brown and historians writing about the raid on Harpers Ferry.