Time trial of john brown

Booth Kennedy. He and various of his forces will stay at the Kennedy farm until their attack. Brown meets secretly with Frederick Douglas at a rock quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where Brown unsuccessfully tries to convince Douglas to join him at Harper's Ferry.

Brown leads 21 men on an attack on the armory at Harper's Ferry. They meet little early resistance and capture the armory. Hostages are rounded up from nearby farms. In an effort to prevent news of the attack from reaching Washington, the baggage master of an eastbound train is shot, but then the train is allowed to proceed.

Local citizens begin to fire on the arsenal, effectively pinning down Brown and his men. The bridge is seized cutting off Brown's escape route, and he is forced to move with his hostages into the engine house, a small brick building in the armory. Robert E. Lee, surround the engine house. Brown refuses to surrender and the marines storm the building. Brown and six of his men are captured. Ten of his men including two of his sons are killed.

Brown is questioned for three hours. After being declared fit for trial by a doctor, John Brown faces the first day of trial for murder, conspiracy, and treason in Charlestown. The defense concludes its case, having argued that Brown killed no one and he owed no duty of loyalty to Virginia, and thus could not be guilty of treason against the state.

After 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury finds Brown guilty of conspiracy, murder, and treason. Brown in sentenced to be hanged in public on December 2. After declining rescue attempts, Brown has a last meal with his wife. Brown writes a final letter to his wife. Around he is led through a crowd of 2, spectators and soldiers to the scaffold.

He is pronounced dead at AM. His body is later taken to North Elba for burial at the family farm. Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter and the Civil War begins.

The other was Samuel Chilton of Washington, D. He had been hired for a fee of one thousand dollars by John A. Andrew, a leading Boston abolitionist. Chilton told Judge Parker he was totally unprepared and asked for a short delay of a few hours to make some preparation.

But the Judge was weary of pleas for delay. He declared that Brown had no one to blame but himself for dismissing his previous counsel. Hoyt then summoned more of the hostages John Brown had collected in the enginehouse.

Hunter replied that he could only regard this course as calculated to waste time. Hunter gave up and allowed the parade of witnesses to continue, but he did not even bother to cross-examine them.

By the time the court adjourned for a one-hour recess, the defense had run out of witnesses. It was Saturday, and Judge Parker was determined to end the trial before nightfall.

But Brown was equally determined to prolong it until Monday. When the bailiffs summoned him to reappear in court, Brown again said he was too sick to rise from his jail bed.

The Judge demanded a report from the doctor, who said Brown was malingering. Parker therefore ordered him carried into court once more. But by the time Brown arrived, another hour had been consumed. Chilton then asked the court to compel the prosecution to elect one count of the indictment and abandon the others, arguing that it was unfair to force the prisoner to defend himself against three accusations simultaneously.

After vigorous support for the indictment from prosecutor Hunter, Judge Parker ruled that the jury had been charged and sworn to try the prisoners on the indictment as drawn. Only the closing arguments from the prosecution and the defense now remained. Griswold rose to ask for an adjournment after the prosecution had completed its statements so that he and Chilton could make a more respectable defense on Monday morning.

Once more there was a wrangle over this request for delay. Pulling himself out of his alcoholic fog, the county attorney declaimed for about forty minutes, while Hunter squirmed in his chair. The Judge and prosecutor Hunter could only glare in chagrin as John Brown, the moment the adjourning gavel fell, rose from his bed and without the least difficulty walked serenely back to his cell.

On Monday the contending attorneys met for the final round. In reply, prosecutor Hunter underscored the irrelevance of the lack-of-malice argument by explaining to the jury that anyone who killed while committing a felony was de facto guilty of murder in the first degree. Brown, he maintained, was attempting to become a resident, albeit a most unwelcome one, when he seized the arsenal.

Of course Brown had treated his prisoners well, Hunter pointed out. Why should he kill them and incite the country? Throughout these orations Brown lay on his back with his eyes closed. Chilton now asked Judge Parker to instruct the jury that they could not convict Brown of treason, but Parker denied the motion. Chilton then asked the Judge to rule on the question of jurisdiction. For three-quarters of an hour the court was in recess.

Then the spectators swarmed back to hear the foreman of the jury announce that John Brown had been found guilty on all counts. Reporters had expected whoops of elation, a storm of jeers, or at least wild applause, but there was not a sound in the hushed courtroom. Chilton now moved for an arrest of judgment, citing the well-debated errors in the indictment.

Judge Parker promised to hear arguments on it the following day, and the court adjourned after impanelling a jury to try Edwin Coppoc.

On Wednesday, November 2, everyone expected an early ruling by Judge Parker. But when Parker arrived in court he found the jury for the trial of Coppoc already in their seats. Brown was summoned to the courtroom, and Parker ruled against the motion for an arrest of judgment. Then the clerk asked Brown, still prone on his cot, whether he wished to say anything before the sentence was pronounced.

Brown arose, flustered. He had not expected sentencing so soon. He was under the impression that he and his confederates would be sentenced in a body. The law had condemned him, and he no longer needed to worry about arguments that satisfied judge and jury. In a voice that was to echo down bitter decades, John Brown spoke to America:. In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted: the design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country and finally left them in Canada.

I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection. This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, that teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them.

I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.

Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!

I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention, and what was not. I never had any design against the life of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection.

I never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of that kind. Let me say, also, a word in regard to the statements made by some of those connected with me. I hear it has been stated by some of them that I have induced them to join me.

But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness. There is not one of them but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part of them at their own expense.

A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me; and that was for the purpose I have stated.

Even the minor detail of his Missouri raid Brown distorted in the name of propaganda. His lieutenant, Stevens, had killed a slaveowner on that foray. But the larger lie concerned the intentions of his Harpers Ferry raid. Two weeks before the attack, one of the younger raiders, William H. God has given the strength of these hills to freedom; they were placed here to aid the emancipation of your race. His destination was south, not north. As for not inducing his followers to join him, he had, from the available evidence, cajoled all but one with promises of plunder far beyond anything they had seen in Kansas.

Even before he made his historic oration, newspapers were reporting the trial from a more and more partisan point of view. The sentence was to be carried out on December 2, a month from the day.

Now a new kind of contest began. From all over the nation men wrote to Governor Wise threatening, exhorting, and pleading with him not to hang John Brown. On the other hand, bellicose types in the South were eager to see Brown die no matter what the consequences. The headstrong Wise did not need advice from any direction.

He could see no difference, so far as martyrdom was concerned, between the noose and a life sentence in a Virginia prison. One involved a gathering of Kansas raiders and German immigrant volunteers who would storm the jail some propitious midnight. Another, even wilder scheme involved kidnapping Governor Wise and smuggling him aboard a seagoing tug, where he was to be held hostage until exchanged for Brown.

None of these plots came close to fruition, in part because sensible men saw they were all but hopeless and declined to donate the thousands of dollars needed to set them in motion. With magnificent courage, the fifty-nine-year-old Brown nerved himself for his final ordeal.

He refused to see his wife until the day before his execution. They reportedly brought tears to the eyes of his southern jailer as he read and sealed them. To the numerous visitors and correspondents who discussed aspects of his past life Brown frequently vowed that he had had nothing to do with the Pottawatomie murders.

But one letter was never answered by John Brown nor published by his admirers:. They were turned down. Slave Life and the Underground Railroad Homepage.

Reference Materials. The Civil War. Treasures of American History: National Challenges. Keywords Civil War , Brown, John , abolition , abolitionist , abolitionism , Harpers Ferry , Virginia , West Virginia , s , , radical , protest , slave , slavery , enslaved , federal arsenal , Douglass, Frederick , religion , violence , violent , raid , legacy , memory , time trial , time trials , time trial of john.

Newsletter subscription managed by MailChimp.