Question/Problem 3: How did ideas and events contribute to the conflict between North and South?

John Brown, a northern abolitionist, participated in the Kansas violence in 1856. In 1859, he tried to free slaves in Virginia. Read the following description of his attempt and southern reaction to it. Answer the questions below.

...the papers blazed with reports from Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia. According to the Chicago Press & Tribune, a band of Northern abolitionists -- most of them young, five of them black -- had tried to capture the remote mountain town, seize the federal arsenal there, and ignite a full-scale rebellion. For two days the raiders shot it out with local militia and threw Harpers Ferry into bedlam, until a column of U.S. horse marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and captured them. The leader of the attack was old John Brown, late of Kansas fame, who warned Southerners that God had appointed him to liberate their slaves 'by some violent and decisive move.'

Though no slave uprising had occurred and Brown has been jailed, Harpers Ferry produced 'a profound sensation' in the Southern states, where people reacted with even greater hysteria than had followed Nat Turner's rebellion back in 1831. For thousands of Southerners, from poor whites in Virginia to rich planters in South Carolina and Mississippi, Harpers Ferry was hardly the work of a handful of independent Yankee revolutionaries. On the contrary, Southerners thought it the vanguard of a Northern abolitionist - Republican juggernaut that would plunge the South into a racial blood bath.

1. What United States military officer led U.S. troops in capturing John Brown?

2. According to Brown, by what authority was he acting?

3. Were any slaves freed?

4. Using information from the article and from what you have learned, why would Southerners feel they would be plunged "into a racial blood bath?"

5. Explain the ways this act contributed to the conflict between the North and the South.