John Brown: Torrington’s (failed) Freedom Fighter
The antislavery beliefs of John Brown, the famed abolitionist who led a deadly, and failed, attempt to end slavery in America that hastened the start of the American Civil War, began in his childhood home in Torrington.
Brown’s Torrington home would stand 118 years after his birth before a fire reduced it to ash in 1918, it’s location marked by a granite monument raised in 1932.
Brown and his family did not live in Connecticut for long, moving to what was then considered part of the American West – Ohio.
The Brown family abhorred slavery, and John’s father, Owen Brown, invested resources acquired through his tannery into the early abolitionist movement in the 1830s. One effort was supporting the creation of Oberlin College as an integrated school with strong antislavery stances.
When he was in his late teens, John Brown returned to Connecticut, enrolling in the Morris Academy in Litchfield. He flunked out of school after a short while and moved back to Ohio to work for his father.
Brown lived a conventional life, attempting a career as a real estate developer, a canal builder, a tanner, until the severe economic depression of the 1830s/40s left him destitute. He declared bankruptcy in 1842 and lost most of his property a decade before his raid at Harper’s Ferry.
Now a 40-something failed businessperson, at some point Brown came to see himself as a messenger and emissary of God. His charge: eliminate slavery in the United States. One of his first known attempts to do so was supporting residents of the all-Black community of Timbuctoo in upstate New York, teaching them to farm. The region’s cold climate and mountainous landscape resisted agriculture, and the experimental settlement was abandoned.
In 1858, a year before Brown’s famous raid of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), Brown spent a month in the home of Frederick Douglass, planning the raid and writing a constitution for the new, slave-free state Brown planned to create. Douglass believed Brown’s plan was suicidal. “You’re walking into a perfect steel trap. You will never get out alive,” Douglass reportedly told Brown.
On July 3, 1859, Brown and two of his sons rented a farm in Maryland, about seven miles from the town he planned to make a battlefield.
Brown foresaw legions of fighters joining his crusade. He was wrong. By September, 18 had arrived, including another of his sons. A few more would arrive in October, but that was it. In all, Brown’s “army” totaled about 21 recruits – fugitive salves, free Black people, idealists and 20-something abolitionists. Brown told three of the recruits to guard the Maryland farm; the rest, 13 of them white, five Black, marched with Brown to Harper’s Ferry.
Brown and his retinue quickly secured the federal armory and arsenal. Historians posit he could’ve been successful if he seized the weapons, liberated local slaves and fled to wild land, but instead he made what many say was his mistake – he waited for slaves to flock. They did not.
Civilians pinned Brown down until militia arrived. By October 18, almost half of Brown’s men were dead. Eventually U.S. Marines arrived to finish the job, wounding and capturing Brown.
Brown was convicted of treason, murder and conspiracy. He was hanged December 2, 1859 (John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was there as a militiaman). He was quickly mythologized by Northerners as a martyr, by Southerners as a terrorist.
Union soldiers sang a song named after Brown as they marched into battle, one that provided the tune for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
