John Brown's Raiders, Jakki Dukes

1859: John Brown and 21 followers capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to launch a slave revolt. John Brown had worked to keep Kansas from becoming a slave state. Osborne Perry Anderson will report on the event in his account A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: “As in the war of the American Revolution, the first blood shed was a Black man’s, Crispus Attucks, so at Harpers Ferry, the first blood shed by our party, after the arrival of United States troops, was that of a slave.” Five Black and sixteen white supporters participated in the effort; only five people survived.