Canadian Negroes and the John Brown Raid E-Book

Fred Landon

• Herausgeber: Alien Ebooks
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 14

Beschreibung

John Brown's raid on Harpers' Ferry in 1859 was a failure for a number of reasons but was one of the events that led to the American Civil War. Fred Landon relates the beginnings of the raid, from the initial planning in Chatham, Ontario in 1858 and how several Canadians of escaped slave origins played a key role in the affair.

Leseprobe

CANADIAN NEGROES AND THE JOHN BROWN RAID

Canada and Canadians were intimately connected with the most dramatic incident in the slavery struggle prior to the opening of the Civil War, the attack of John Brown and his men on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on the night of Sunday, October 16, 1859. The blow that Brown struck at slavery in this attack had been planned on broad lines in Canada more than a year before at a convention held in Chatham, Ontario, May 8-10, 1858. In calling this convention in Canada, Brown doubtless had two objects in view: to escape observation and to interest the Canadian Negroes in his plans for freeing their enslaved race on a scale never before dreamed of and in a manner altogether new. It was Brown’s idea to gather a band of determined and resourceful men, to plant them somewhere in the Appalachian mountains near slave territory and from their mountain fastness to run off the slaves, ever extending the area of operations and eventually settling the Negroes in the territory that they had long tilled for others. He believed that operations of this kind would soon demoralize slavery in the South and he counted upon getting enough help from Canada to give the initial impetus.