John Brown (1800-1859) Harriet Tubman (c. 1820-1913)

John Brown is one of the most controversial figures in American history. From an old English family with a tradition of opposing slavery, Brown was writing as early as 1834 of his intention to devote his life to abolish slavery. In 1855 he deliberately moved to Kansas with his five sons in order to bring that territory into the Union as a free state. Insisting that he acted as an instrument of God, Brown led an 1856 attack that killed five proslavery men in relation for raids and murders by their side.

Then he worked out a plan to establish a stronghold in the Appalachian Mountains where escaped slaves and freed blacks could take refuge. He rented a farm near Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and from this base he launched an attack with 21 men on October 16, 1859. He seized the town and the U.S. Armory there, but the local militia kept them under siege until a troop of U/S/ Marines, led by Robert E. Lee, assaulted the engine house where Brown and his followers were making their last stand. Ten of them were killed, and the wounded Brown was captured. Tried and convicted of treason, Brown was hanged in Charlestown on December 2. If his raid failed, Brown’s eloquent defense during the trial convinced many Northerners that the abolition of slavery was a noble cause that required drastic, possibly violent action. Although his violent tactics were not approved by n\many, Brown became something of a martyr. He inspired the words to a marching song that was the unofficial anthem of the Union troops, “John Brown’s Body Lies A’mouldering in the Grave”.

Tubman was an escaped slave who believed so strongly in her right to liberty that she risked her life repeatedly to help other slaves reach the North. Born to two slaves in Maryland, she was first named Araminta, only later assuming the name “Harriet”. She worked as a field hand and was forced by her master to marry a fellow slave, John Tubman. In 1849 she made her way to the North and she soon became active in the so-called underground railroad, the network of individuals – white and black, free and slave, committed abolitionists and the merely sympathetic – who worked from about 1840 to 1861 to help slaves escape from the South. Harriet Tubman made at least 19 trips back to the South and led other slaves North – sometimes “encouraging” them with a loaded pistol, it was said. In 1857 she was able to get her own parent up to New York; altogether she was credited with leading at least 300 blacks to freedom. On her early trips she led the fugitives to safety in such northern cities as New York and Philadelphia. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made those cities unsafe, she led the people in her care to Canada.

Illiterate but possessed of great natural skills in planning, she came to know many of the prominent abolitionists and was probably one of the few who knew about John Brown’s plans to raid Harper’s Ferry. Illness prevented her from joining him there. During the Civil War, she served as a nurse, cook and laundress to the Union Troops in South Carolina; she also was said to have gone behind Confederate lines as a spy on occasion. On one expedition with troops, she helped free 750 slaves. After the war, she lived in Auburn, New York, where she worked to help children and the elderly, suing the profits from her autobiography for her causes. Harriet Tubman’s actions helped to sharpen the conflict between the North and South, but her own life became a vindication of the need to end slavery.