The bitterness and keenness of southern feeling on the subject of slavery and its issues, were greatly increased by a strange, wild attempt on the part of a man named John Brown, a native of New York, to produce a rising of the slaves in Virginia. Brown, it appears from his history, had become excited beyond all control on the slavery question, and having been a sharer in the difficulties and violent contentions in Kansas, he seemed to think himself called upon to devote his life and energies to the freeing of the slaves.

In October, 1859, occurred the famous John Brown raid into Virginia, in which an old man, who had obtained in Kansas the notoriety of a horse-thief and an assassin, invaded the State of Virginia at Harper's Ferry with a band of outlaws, declared his purpose to free the slaves, and commenced with a work of blood the first acts of sectional rebellion against the authority of the United States….

[John Brown] felt that he was commissioned by God to free the slaves in the South. He conceived the wild plan of posting in the fastnesses of the Appalachian Mountains small bodies of armed men, who should make descents into the plains, seize negroes, and conduct them back to his ‘camps of freedom.’ He made a beginning at the little Virginia town of Harpers Ferry, at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, where with only eighteen men he seized the United States arsenal and, raiding the houses of a few of the neighboring planters, forcibly freed about thirty of their slaves.