So today is the 155th anniversary of John Brown’s oddly-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry. As much as I’d like to boil the event down to one or two pithy lines, my reading on the subject has not refined my thoughts. Instead, it’s just tossed new thoughts on the pile.

So the best I can do are some pictures worth a thousand words, more or less. Let’s say twenty.

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Tidd was the only private in an army full of captains, but he was also one of the only ones who managed to escape.

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Newby was the first to die. The townspeople shot him in the neck with a railroad spike and he bled out.

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The sword actually saved Brown’s life. Not because he swung it at anybody, but because somebody tried to stab him and their sword blade ran into the buckle on the sheath of Washington’s sword and bent their sword in half.. Seriously. John Brown had a magic sword.

This is not a picture of the sword, as the sword has disappeared and nobody knows where it is today.

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Would the raid have gone better if they had stuck to the plan? Undoubtedly, yes.

Every time Brown deviated from the plan it resulted in disaster.

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Early in the raid Brown’s son, Oliver, accidentally shot him as he was working as night watchman for the railroad. So the first casualty of the raid was a black guy, and from what I can tell he was an important man in the community there. Killing him seems to have badly shaken the confidence of the raiders and discouraged slaves from joining them.

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The plan could have worked at several points — Brown could have left the armory after taking all the weapons and gotten away easily. Instead, he stayed. He stayed and stayed and stayed until the situation became too terrible to leave. It’s a tribute to his personal magnetism that anyone stayed with him.