George Luther Stearns
Gerrit Smith
Theodore Parker
To equip, maintain, and transport the men needed to carry out his plan, Brown required a considerable amount of money and weapons. He had neither, but because of his Kansas activities, he was able to enlist the support of Northern abolitionists in his fight against slavery. Philosophers, scholars, religious leaders, philanthropists, and businessmen gave freely but discreetly to the cause. Chief among Brown’s backers was a secret committee of six: Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Boston, Mass., educator, minister, and reformer; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, militant clergyman of Worcester, Mass.; Theodore Parker, Boston’s outstanding Unitarian minister; Franklin B. Sanborn, editor and schoolmaster of Concord, Mass.; Gerrit Smith, former New York Congressman and a great Peterboro, N.Y., landowner; and George L. Stearns, industrialist and merchant of Medford, Mass. Through them Brown received most of the money and weapons that enabled him to launch his attack.
RENDEZVOUS FOR REVOLUTION
By the summer of 1859 Harpers Ferry was a quietly thriving little industrial and transportation community sitting on a narrow shelf of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia. Until its selection as the site for a Federal armory at the end of the 18th century, the town’s growth had been slow. What growth it did experience was due to its location on the wilderness route to the Shenandoah Valley. The land on which the town sat was first settled in 1733 by a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Peter Stephens, who operated a small ferryboat service across the rivers. At that time the place was called “Peter’s Hole” because it was dominated by three towering bluffs—Maryland Heights to the north, Loudoun Heights to the south, and Bolivar Heights to the west. When Robert Harper, a skilled Philadelphia architect and millwright, bought the land in 1747, he improved the ferry service and built a gristmill. Around these facilities at the base of Bolivar Heights the village of Harpers Ferry gradually developed.
In 1794, when relations between the United States and England were strained, Congress grew uneasy over the country’s military posture. Uncertain of the ordnance-producing capabilities of private manufacturers in time of need, it directed President George Washington to establish a number of armories where guns could be made and stored. One of the sites he chose was Harpers Ferry.
Washington was well acquainted with Harpers Ferry. As a young man during the middle part of the century, he had accompanied surveying parties that inspected the vast holdings of the Virginia aristocracy in this area. He considered Harpers Ferry “the most eligible spot on the [Potomac] river” for an armory. Abundant water power was available, iron ore was plentiful nearby, hardwood forests insured a steady supply of charcoal to fuel the forges, and the place was far enough inland to be secure from foreign invasion.