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

Context

Despite the fact that he was born free in the northern United States, Osborne Anderson, an African American, lived in a world in which he was considered a nonperson. The movement to abolish slavery was very much alive, but it had primarily succeeded in creating a hostile relationship between northern and southern states. The Compromise of 1850, which included the new Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, decreeing that those who helped fugitive slaves would be prosecuted and ordering northerners to aid in the capture and return of fugitive slaves to their masters, only served to deepen that hostile relationship. Subsequently, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, fanned the flames of northern hatred for slavery and encouraged northerners to flout the Fugitive Slave Act by aiding fugitive slaves. While Stowe was attempting to persuade southerners to eschew slavery based on an appeal to emotion and religious beliefs, she succeeded only in making many southerners feel personally angry. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 prolonged the debate over slavery by allowing the residents of the two new territories to decide for themselves via the ballot box whether they would enter the union as slave states or free states.

John Brown was a white man who had always been opposed to slavery, but in November 1837, following the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of an antislavery newspaper in Alton, Ohio, Brown publicly declared his personal war on slavery and committed himself to its destruction. He had come to believe that the only way to end slavery was through the use of violence. Thus, in 1855, Brown joined with five of his sons in an attempt to help bring the Kansas Territory into the Union as a free state. With antislavery and proslavery factions battling for control of the land and of the vote, “Bleeding Kansas” became a microcosm of the future Civil War; in the end, Kansas emerged as a free state (incorporated on January 29, 1861). By then, Brown had made himself a legend and a wanted man primarily because of his actions following the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, by proslavery factions on May 21, 1856. To avenge the murders of five Lawrence residents, Brown ordered and carried out the murder of five proslavery men who lived along the banks of the Pottawatomie Creek. This incident came to be known as the Pottawatomie Massacre.

Rendered a fugitive, Brown became a hero to white and black abolitionists alike. Fleeing to the East, he was welcomed and sheltered, and he gained financial backers, including the “Secret Six”—a group of wealthy, white abolitionists who approved of his plans to use violence to end slavery. Also known as the “Committee of Six,” the group included Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister and author; Samuel Gridley Howe, physician, social reformer, and philanthropist; Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister and social reformer; Franklin Sanborn, journalist, educator, and biographer of John Brown (1885); Gerrit Smith, philanthropist and politician; and George Luther Stearns, a wealthy industrialist. Brown’s original plan involved rescuing slaves from the slave states a few at a time, but it eventually escalated into plans for a slave insurrection. In order to follow through on either plan, he felt that he needed the help of free blacks; thus, he attempted to gain the support of prominent black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Delany.

Brown’s attempts to recruit black assistance led to his planning a conference at Chatham, in Canada West (now Ontario, Canada), where he recruited Osborne Anderson. Brown paid his first visit to Chatham in April 1858 in preparation for the Chatham Convention of May 8–10, 1858. While in town, Brown stayed with members of the Shadd family, which was also sheltering Anderson; they offered Brown the use of their printing press to record and spread his ideas. His goal was to recruit black Canadian abolitionists to take part in his planned slave insurrection in the South. Thirty-four blacks from the local area attended the convention; Brown brought twelve of his followers—eleven white and one black. Delany organized the convention and served as chairman; Anderson served as secretary. Brown used the convention to lay out his “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” with the purpose of establishing his credibility as a careful planner and highlighting his differences from other leaders of slave insurrections, such as Nat Turner.

Although Brown gained the support of black Canadian abolitionists at the convention, he was unwilling to reveal many specific details about his plans. But by the summer of 1859, his plans were in place, and John Brown, Jr., returned to Chatham in August 1859 to issue a call to arms among those who had attended the convention. Unfortunately for Brown, over a year had gone by, and support for his plans had dwindled. Mary Ann Shadd, however, felt that someone needed to represent the Chatham contingent, and Anderson volunteered. Thus, he became one of only two Canadians to take part in the raid (the other being Stewart Taylor).

Brown led the raid of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. He then had only twenty-one followers, including five blacks and sixteen whites. He led eighteen of them into Harpers Ferry, and they quickly captured two bridges, the arsenal, the rifle factory, and the engine house. But by noon on October 17, militia groups arrived from nearby locales and attacked Brown’s men who were holding the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge. Thus, Brown and his men were cut off from their major escape route. After an attack on the engine house and on Brown’s men at the rifle factory, it seemed clear that all was lost. The local militia was later joined by Colonel Robert E. Lee and ninety U.S. marines. On the morning of October 18, Brown was asked to surrender; following his refusal, Lee’s marines attacked the engine house, capturing Brown and those of his men who were still alive. Anderson and Albert Hazlett were the only two men to escape from Harpers Ferry itself (as the other five accomplices who escaped were not in Harpers Ferry). Anderson and Hazlett made their way back toward Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, but separated before they reached their goal. Anderson made it to Chambersburg and from there proceeded to York, to Philadelphia, and thence to Canada. Hazlett, on the other hand, was captured near Newville, Pennsylvania, and returned to Virginia, where he was tried, convicted, and hanged. As for Brown, he was captured on October 18; convicted of murder, treason, and inciting a slave insurrection on November 2 at the Charles Town courthouse; and hanged on December 2, to be buried on his farm in North Elba, New York.

Anderson was thus the only one of Brown’s men to witness the events at Harpers Ferry and live to tell about them. With the assistance of Shadd, Anderson then wrote A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, published in Boston in 1861. Subsequent to Brown’s raid, the South, believing itself more and more threatened by northern abolitionists, began to arm; eighteen months later, the Civil War began.