[ Sharps Carbine from Raid on Harpers Ferry ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with two pretty incredible pieces of American history.
This is an 1853 Sharps Slant Breech carbine
and that is the head of a pike.
And both of these were part of the arms cache
that was assembled by none other than John Brown
for his October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry Arsenal.
Now John Brown is best known obviously for the
raid that would ultimately cost him his life in 1859.
But his entire life he was a dedicated, if not zealous, opponent of slavery.
He was an abolitionist absolutely to his core, he was a deeply religious man.
And made it his life's work to destroy slavery.
By force if necessary, perhaps in his heart by force ideally.
He had no qualms whatsoever about spilling blood in the service of abolition.
So he was notable for some of his activities on the Underground Railroad earlier in his life.
Reportedly some 2,500 former slaves passed through his farm on their way north to freedom.
He then really gained national notoriety in Kansas during the period known as Bleeding Kansas.
When Kansas was on the cusp of being admitted as a new state in the Union
and there was question, and ultimately outright guerrilla warfare,
over the question of whether Kansas would be admitted as a free state or as a slave state.
And John Brown was ultimately responsible for a couple of relatively cold-blooded murders
of slave-holders and slave-holding sympathisers in Kansas.
Now it's interesting at the time, he gained a reputation among the
abolitionist, intellectual ... cohort on the east coast in cities like Boston.
He was sociable, he made friends with people like Henry David Thoreau,
he was good friends apparently with Frederick Douglass, with Harriet Tubman.
And he built himself a reputation as essentially the goal to aspire to of ardent abolitionism.
Now when the warfare in Kansas started to die down in the late 1850s,
he ... formulated a plan for what would be his biggest operation yet.
And this was essentially a plan to start an armed slave rebellion in the South, in Virginia.
Now the Harpers Ferry Arsenal at that time was one of two arsenals
in the United States run by the US government, the other was the Springfield Arsenal.
And these arsenals were large industrial facilities, they manufactured new firearms,
they repaired firearms, they stored firearms, they were military hubs of the country.
And John Brown's plan was to raid the Harpers Ferry Arsenal,
capture the arms that were being stored there and essentially ignite a slave rebellion.
He wanted to create colonies of freed former slaves in the Appalachian Hills.
And he figured that if he created the example, if he showed up at the arsenal,
took control of it, that slaves in the area would flock to him as he put it "like bees to the hive."
Now in preparation for this raid he ... was able to gather a total of 22 men.
Among them 3 of his own 6 sons.
A varied mixture of white and black, he had fugitive slaves in his group,
he had freed ex-slaves in his group and he also had white men in his group.
And to support this he went ahead and he ... purchased about 200 Sharps carbines of this pattern.
And he also contracted to buy 1,000 pikes, and that's one of them right there.
The idea being he was going to use these arms, in addition to what he captured at the arsenal,
to distribute among ... the fighters of his envisioned slave revolt.
Now things didn't quite go as planned, but before we talk about what happened at Harpers Ferry,
let's take a quick look at these two items.
All of the guns that John Brown acquired were the same basic pattern.
They were Sharps 1853 Pattern Slant Breech
(that's a slant breech there, hence the name), Slant Breech carbines.
They are cavalry carbines so they have a sling bar there on the side,
and a relatively short barrel with also a relatively short stock.
This is an interesting pattern in that it is different from the Sharps carbines
that were used by the Union Army in the Civil War that would follow just a few years later.
And ... that difference is discernible right here.
The ... 1853 pattern has a pellet primer system
where you actually have a stack of thin wafer-like primers here.
And ... when the hammer goes forward a pellet primer is essentially ... popped forward
out of this stack onto the percussion cap nipple there,
where it is immediately slapped into place by the hammer and detonated.
The military pattern of Sharps carbines would instead use a Maynard tape primer system.
Let me see if I can get this up close so you can see it.
That little slot right there is where a pellet primer will come out.
You really can't see that under the hammer,
but if I take the hammer off ... now I can show you.
That right there is going to push a primer forward, see it there.
And this thing is controlled by that little peg, which runs in that track in the hammer.
This particular carbine has this fantastic inscription on it,
noting that it was captured by the Independent Greys
at the insurrection at Harpers Ferry October 18th 1859.
And specifically by R. William Grahame, Richard William Grahame.
The Independent Greys were one of the Baltimore militia companies that responded to the event.
And they were responsible for collecting up the arms
that were left at the farmhouse by Brown's forces.
They only had 19 men, they couldn't carry 200 rifles and 1,000 pikes with them,
so they left most of the stuff at this farmhouse where they had been staying
planning to ... distribute it out as it was needed.
Now it's not clear if this particular gun came out of the ... arsenal fighting itself,
or was captured from the farmhouse, because the men who went to the arsenal
also carried some of these Sharps rifles.
But when they took over the farmhouse the Independent Greys,
and presumably some of the other militia who were there,
were allowed to keep a rifle each for themselves
in a sort of action that probably wouldn't happen that way today.
And so a number of them passed into personal collections as a result of that.
And this one fortunately has had that provenance marked right on it.
[Apologies; my footage of the pike head was corrupted and unusable.]
The actual raid on Harpers Ferry kicked off on the night of Sunday, October 16th 1859.
John Brown and his men had been staying in a rented farmhouse
just across the Potomac River from the arsenal, just a couple of miles away.
And they heard a rumour that the local sheriff was going to come and investigate the place,
thinking that something was awry, and so that kind of made their decision it was time to go.
They packed up, they left 3 men at the farmhouse with much of their stash of weapons.
And the remaining 19 crossed over the river, entered into Harpers Ferry,
they cut the [telegraph] lines, they occupied the train stop,
and took over a number of the buildings including notably the brick firehouse on the arsenal grounds.
And announced their intentions to free the local slaves.
There were some 18,000 enslaved people in the surrounding counties,
of whom virtually none responded to this call.
Brown had hoped that his actions would precipitate a huge rush of former slaves
to him to be armed and take up the struggle, and they didn't.
It's interesting that he had actually also attempted to enlist
Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in this raid.
He wanted Frederick Douglass to act as the President of a new
provisional government that he wanted to put together.
Douglass decided to have nothing to do with the event,
Tubman apparently was dubious about its chances of success, wisely in retrospect.
And what ended up happening is he didn't attract former slaves like bees to the hive,
he attracted local militia and ultimately the US Marines like bees to the hive.
The initial reports were of a much more substantial force of men than Brown actually had.
Having risen in insurrection and taken over the arsenal, militia was deployed.
And ultimately the government sent a detachment of US Marines
under the command of some guy named Robert E. Lee, who would have no future historical ...
OK, the same Robert E. Lee, who would have a huge part in the Civil War.
Lee's ... second in command, his lieutenant, was none other than Jeb Stuart,
also to have a significant role in the upcoming Civil War.
The Marines were ultimately the force that would put an end to this insurrection, to this raid.
Local militia had been kind of shooting it out back and forth with Brown's men,
who at this point were all surrounded in the firehouse.
This was a brick building, it gave them some good protection from gunfire.
And they cut firing loopholes in the doors.
They tried to shoot back at their opponents outside, didn't have a whole lot of success.
Ultimately a handful of local militia were wounded in the affair.
At this point probably half of John Brown's men were wounded inside the firehouse,
a number of them had already been killed.
In fact on the morning of the 18th, when things really came to a head,
Brown's own son Watson was in the firehouse with him,
essentially writhing in his death struggles against four bullet holes.
And reportedly John Brown told him at one point to essentially be quiet and "die like a man."
Brown was absolutely a zealot in his belief.
It was a justified belief, it was one that wouldn't come to general recognition
for quite some time after his death.
But Brown brings up a really interesting conundrum
of the actions one can take in pursuit of a justified goal.
At any rate, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here.
The Marines send in Jeb Stuart to negotiate.
He comes up to the door of the firehouse under a white flag,
John Brown answers, they have a short discussion.
Brown wants to be allowed to retreat over to the other side of the Potomac,
at which point he says he will release his hostages
and then he and his men will take their chances on the run.
Stuart declines to allow him to do that and they essentially decide to agree to disagree.
Stuart retreats back and Lee orders the Marines to breach the doors,
which they do using a ladder as an improvised battering ram.
They knock a hole in one of the doors and Marines start going into the building.
It's really quite interesting, one of the very first Marines in encounters Brown inside.
The Marine is armed with a sabre, proceeds to stab John Brown in the belly.
And doesn't miss, but manages to hit Brown's belt buckle and bends his sword.
And ... that in particular is a really interesting historical "what if".
Because what it led to was instead of being killed on the spot,
this Marine ends up hitting Brown over the head with the hilt of the sword, knocks him unconscious.
And Brown is captured. Injured, fairly seriously injured, but survives to be tried.
All the Marines end up storming into the building, they take everyone else captive.
... I believe 5 members of the 19 survive, and all 5 of them are put on trial.
Ultimately they're all found guilty of murder, treason, and inciting Negroes to riot or revolt.
And they're all executed on December 2nd 1859.
Now what makes that incident with the sword interesting
is much of John Brown's legacy at the time, and still to this day,
is set by the letters that he wrote from prison between his capture and his execution.
He was pretty darn good at PR, in addition to being an absolute stalwart defender
of slaves' rights, of abolitionism in general.
He had a pretty significant circle of supporters and friends
in the North-eastern intellectual establishment of the United States.
Men like Thoreau, obviously Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman.
... Ralph Waldo Emerson, these ... men and women were all writing in support of Brown.
And ... a lot of the support of this comes from the correspondence
that he was able to publish from prison before his execution.
Which allowed him to develop a reputation as a martyr,
much more so than as the insane nut that a lot of people were portraying him as at the time.
Now ultimately John Brown's actions are debatable
in ... whether or not they ultimately helped the abolitionist cause.
They were incredibly polarising at the time.
And it's pretty well accepted that Brown's raid was kind of the last straw
that led to an inevitable secession and Civil War.
Had it not been for John Brown's actions, the election of 1860 would probably have been
a much more normal one Democrat vs one Republican sort of affair.
Instead of breaking the Republican Party into factions and allowing Lincoln to be elected.
... Had Lincoln not been elected, had Lincoln not been in a position to have the party fracture
and give him the plurality of votes, there's a pretty decent chance that a Democrat
would have been elected, that the Civil War would have been avoided (at least for a time).
And who knows, perhaps a more peaceable resolution
to the country's problems could have been had instead of an outright civil war.
Would that have ultimately been better for the enslaved population? We don't know.
... It's all historical "what if", but it makes to my mind a fascinating historical "what if".
Combined with an absolutely fascinating personality, a man who would absolutely give no quarter.
And believed without any doubt whatsoever in the rightness and the justness of his actions,
and his perfect willingness to take blood for those beliefs.
Anyway, I'm starting to wander a bit here.
It is extremely cool to be able to handle and see artifacts like this
direct from the Harper Ferry raid by John Brown.
So a big thanks to Morphy's for giving me access to these.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, appreciated a chance to take a look at these yourself.
Thanks for watching.