10/16/1859
At around 8 p.m., John Brown and his eighteen men, styled the "Provisional Army of the United States," launched their attack on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry from their base at the Kennedy Farm across the Potomac in Maryland. By midnight they controlled sections of the Armory and Rifle Works and had taken several hostages. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation:
John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 237.