John Brown

Amid the festering hostilities between North and South in the 1850s, John Brown’s zealous opposition to slavery grew. After leading retaliatory strikes against proslavery mobs in Kansas in 1856, he began making plans for the 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Brown intended to commandeer firearms and initiate a slave rebellion. The plan failed, and Brown was captured, tried, and hanged. His insurrection found favor among many Northerners sympathetic to his cause. In the South, however, Brown’s actions signaled that slaveholding states must either face diminished power against an increasingly aboli-tionist North or sever ties with the United States.

This portrait of a fiery Brown cloaked in a U.S. Army blanket is an imaginative interpretation of an engraving published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1859. Through the dark shadows that dominate the painting’s lower right, it is possible to discern manacles binding Brown’s wrists.