Five days before Christmas, 1858, John Brown led his men on a raid into Missouri during which the homes of two slave owners were plundered. One of the slaveowners was executed - shot in the head. Eleven slaves were liberated. Brown also liberated several wagons, many horses and mules, five guns, and nearly $100 in cash. The Missouri General Assembly condemned the incursion and suggested the possibility of violent retaliation.

The opportunity came in mid-December when [John Brown's] Free State friend George B. Gill told him he had just been visited by a black man, Jim Daniels, who was held in slavery by a Missourian named Harvey G. Hicklan (or Hicklin). Daniels, disguised as a broom salesman, had snuck across the state line and reported to Gill that he, his pregnant wife, and their two children were on the verge of being sold to a Texas slave-owner. Brown assured Gill he would help Daniels…On the night of December 20-21, he rode with twenty men into Vernon County, Missouri.

On the evening of October 16, 1859, the liberator led fourteen other whites and four blacks from his rented Kennedy Farm in Maryland to Harpers Ferry, those six miles distant. There the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers unite to heave against a jagged semimountain, before flowing on to the sea….There transpired one of the most stupendous scenes in American history.