It took me six days to drive the 700-odd miles from Boston, Massachusetts, to the grave of Charles Grandison Finney in Oberlin, Ohio. My last-minute trip wasn’t terribly well planned. I had allowed for some audible calls, serendipity, and unrelated detours. (Like an opportunity to tour the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum in Jamestown, New York. It was fabulous.)
My journey was part historical tourism and part pilgrimage. There’s nothing like being in a particular city or region to make history and its stories come to life, even if you are hundreds of years removed.
I’d long wondered how, in a nation that fetishizes size, tiny New England managed to inject so much of its culture into the American mainstream. I’d been reading about the Puritans for years, but at some point I realized that my interest was less in them and more about the legacy they left to America.
New England Puritanism, historians tell us, ran its course by the early 1700s. But elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees. This culture was transmitted in a variety of ways, through the establishment of schools, universities, publications, lecture series, social and political causes, commercial enterprises, as well as in the founding of cities and towns throughout the United States.
Long confident in their superiority, New Englanders sought to impose their culture on the country at large. Their first major regional expansion ran through Western New York State onto the northeastern quadrant of Ohio known as the Western Reserve.
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Charles Grandison Finney is considered the father of modern revivalism, the activist brand of American Protestantism that emphasizes mass religious conversion through vigorous preaching and emotional appeal. Born in Connecticut, raised in Oneida County in Western New York, and finishing his career at Oberlin College, Finney’s journey —both geographically and spiritually—exemplifies the great Yankee migration westward after American independence.
Between 1790 and 1820, an estimated 800,000 New Englanders set off Westward, most either settling in or passing through Upstate New York. Yankee farmers in search of fertile land—and in the case of Massachusetts also running from high taxes—quickly overwhelmed the early Dutch settlers in the counties on the west side of the Hudson River Valley. Sloops carrying families and their household goods from Connecticut sailed up the Hudson while sleighs and ox carts trudged over the mountains that separate New York from Eastern Massachusetts. During one three day period in 1795, roughly 1,200 sleighs carrying men, women, children, and furniture passed through Albany on their way Central and Western New York.
Among these early migrants were Revolutionary War veterans who had received land grants for their service in lieu of cash payments. Others responded to the handbills being distributed by land speculators offering new farms at low prices and on long-term credit. Some individuals struck out on their own, but most migrated in large family groups and even villages. Whatever their preferred mode of migration, most New Englanders tended to either buy land from someone they knew back home or settle near acquaintances. Men headed west during the summers to clear land, then back east for the winters before making their final move, carrying letters and messages and connecting their fellow settlers to their hometowns.
Many New Englanders found prosperity in upstate New York’s Genesee Valley, where wheat harvests were both more abundant and cheaper to produce than in New England. Newly arrived settlers turned dairy farming, what was a small industry back home, into a major one in New York. There were few towns in the region without at least a few “Yankee-Yorkers” and many more where New England transplants made up a majority. By 1830, Yankees dominated the region’s politics, commerce, and culture so much that it had become commonly known as the “Second New England.” Their migration fueled the rapid growth of Syracuse, Utica, Buffalo, and Rochester. According to one estimate, by 1855 four out of every five persons who migrated to Upstate New York from one of the surrounding states was born in New England.
Like so many migrants, New Englanders sought to preserve the ways of their home region even as they adapted to their new environments. The first decades of nationhood were heady for all Americans, but perhaps particularly so for New Englanders. Their sense of superiority made them eager to retain their cultural distinctiveness in a diverse new nation in which the locus of power was quickly shifting westward.
Between 1799 and 1815, Congregationalist minister and president of Yale Timothy Dwight made five trips to Central and Western New York and published his observations in the massive multi-volume book, Travels in New England and New York. A self-consciously proud New Englander, Dwight strongly identified with the westward migrants he called his “countrymen” and lauded the extent to which they carried their “intelligent, ingenious, acute, versatile” character to their new home, which he predicted would continue to develop “as a colony from New England.”
But despite his pride in the migrants’ progress, Dwight felt compelled to remind them of their shared ancestral past, warn them of the moral dangers of the frontier, and urge them to recreate the “long-established institutions and habits” that sustained them in Old New England. In an 1816 address to emigrants that was also published and distributed a year later, Dwight appealed to the collective memory of their pious ancestors who had laid the foundations of New England’s “invaluable civil, literary, moral and religious institutions.” He exhorted them to build a future with the burden of the past and future in mind. “Yes, brethren and friends,” he wrote, “you are peculiarly acting for posterity. The institutions which you establish may bear your image and superscription for centuries to come. … It becomes you, therefore, in laying the foundations of literature, morals, and religion to dig deep and choose the very best materials.” Presumably there was no question in any reader’s mind where those materials could be found.
Dwight’s call to forswear immorality in the wilderness was clearly not an unfamiliar message to the descendants of Puritans. The first decades of American nationhood was a history-conscious time, particularly for New Englanders. Americans of all stripes were sifting through and reframing the past in ways they hoped would guide the future. Starting in the 1790s, a historical society movement emerged in the northeast and quickly spread throughout the country. History became a favorite topic in everything from magazines to books. From 1790 to 1830 both historical fiction and nonfiction accounted for a growing percentage of the country’s bestsellers—climbing to an astonishing 85% of top-selling titles in the 1820s.
Given both their high literacy rates and the sense of chosenness they had inherited from their ancestors’ belief that they had formed a communal covenant with God, it is no surprise that no one memorialized the past like New Englanders. Nearly half of the historical societies established in the U.S. between 1790 and 1830 were based in New England, and half of the historians listed as active in the era by the Dictionary of American Biography were from the region. Eager to place the Pilgrims and Puritans at the center of America’s emerging civil religion, New England historians sought to cast them as proto-revolutionaries and republicans—in other words, as the true progenitors of modern America.
At stake here was more than just regional pride. The disestablishment of religion written into the new nation’s Constitution presented a significant challenge to New England society. What had long made the region’s culture distinct from the rest of the country was the intertwining of its religious, political, and social orders. Religious freedom then could be seen as a threat to the traditional social order. Lyman Beecher, the famed Presbyterian minister, Temperance movement leader, and onetime mentee of Timothy Dwight at Yale, went so far as to imply that the American Revolution was leading to New England’s undoing. Divested of its “Institutions and habits,” Beecher sermonized, “like Samson shorn of his locks, she will become as weak and contemptible as any other land. But let the family and the school be organized and ordered according to the ancient pattern—let parents, and schoolmasters, and pastors, and churches, and magistrates, do their duty—and all will be well.”
If that weren’t enough, the territorial expansion brought on by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 fueled the region’s leaders with new anxieties, “concerns,” as historian Joseph Conforti has written, “about a burgeoning federal union that was politically, ethnically, and physically the antithesis of a compact, homogeneous land of steady republican habits.” So intense was the fear of being swallowed up by the expanding new nation that a short-lived secessionist movement emerged in New England long before one sprung up in the South.
Yet, all the anxiety back home didn’t dampen the optimism of migrants heading West. Nor did the calls to transplant traditional New England institutions truly succeed on the frontier. Even when migrants tried to recreate some of the “corporate sense of town life” that they left behind, the freer environment out west doomed it to failure. As historian Robert H. Abzug put it simply, “the towns and cities in western New York lacked the ruling structures and traditions of New England’s establishment.” Dissenters from old New England—like the Baptists, Methodists and freethinkers—all proselytized and competed with each other openly, which made it impossible for the political, social, and religious social orders to merge, which, again, is what gave New England towns their sense of unity and common purpose. Furthermore, the rapid expansions of both the industrial economy as well as the populations of cities like Utica and Rochester made any solid sense of community hard to come by. Between the post-Revolutionary faith in liberty the migrants brought with them and the unsettled social structures of the cities they settled in, traditional orthodoxies from New England, or anywhere else for that matter, were bound to be challenged.
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I woke up in Utica, New York on a frosty April morning with a song I learned in fifth grade stuck in my head. I’d never understood the significance of “Low Bridge, Everybody Down,” or why it was taught to suburban Southern Californians in the 1970s, but decades later I still knew all the words. It’s a nostalgic little tune, ostensibly about the camaraderie 19th-century barge workers felt—with both humans and mules—as they hauled cargo up and down the Erie Canal.
We hauled some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay
And we know every inch of the way
From Albany to Buffalo
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge, cause we’re coming to a town
And you’ll always know your neighbor
And you’ll always know your pal
If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal
With these lyrics in my head, I drove the 15 miles from my hotel in Utica to the town of Rome, New York, where construction of the canal began on July 4, 1817. The first leg of the famous 4-foot deep and 40-foot wide ditch was dug between Rome and Utica because the flat terrain in these parts didn’t require the kind of locks so much of the 363-mile canal would need to make its shifting elevations navigable. I got out of the car at one of the long since modernized locks just west of Rome, not far from the original one. I was struck by its combination of sturdiness and simplicity, its formidable iron water gates that were originally made of wood, and the stout cabinets that hold the gears that open and close them.
Its humble appearance notwithstanding, the Erie Canal is perhaps the single most consequential public work ever built in the United States. Completed in 1825, it was responsible for transforming New York City into America’s commercial capital by connecting it to the Midwest. But maybe more importantly, it triggered an economic boom that sparked the profound social, cultural, and religious movements that forged modern America. It was along its banks in Western New York that New England migrants shifted the focus of their sense of communal chooseness away from their regional homeland and onto the nation at large.
Nathaniel Hawthorne dubbed the Canal “one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany.” Once completed, goods could be transported at one-tenth the previous cost and in less than half the time. Barges carried produce and raw materials east, while manufactured goods, supplies, and migrants generally flowed west. During the first decade of operation, the population of Western New York grew faster than any other part of the country, Syracuse by 282%, Buffalo by 314%, and Rochester by a phenomenal 512%. Sitting at the junction of the Genesee River and the Erie Canal, Rochester was the most successful of the new cities created by the advent of cheaper transport and booming trade.
Rochester became America’s first inland boom town. Natural waterfalls powered it’s mills and the canal allowed for easy movement of raw materials and goods. The Genesee Valley transformed into one of the world’s great grain growing regions. With the Canal connecting Western New York to the Hudson River, its processed wheat could now easily reach New York City. In 1818, Rochester exported 18,000 barrels of flour; in 1828, that number reached 200,000 barrels. By the late 1830s, the Young Lion of the West, as its boosters came to call it, was producing 500,000 barrels of flour a year.
The economic effects of the Canal didn’t hit all the towns in Western New York at once. Utica’s economic boom had run its course before Buffalo’s had even begun. New migrants would pour into towns along the route first to build the Canal and then to take advantage of the opportunities it created. The increasing commercialization changed farming and labor of all kinds throughout the region. Before the Canal, farmers harvested crops largely for their kin and may have sold what remained in the marketplace. But commercialization encouraged farmers to prioritize the marketplace. They’d take their grain into Rochester to be milled and then transported to far-off consumers. In exchange the farmers were paid cash that they could then use to purchase manufactured goods that the Canal brought in from the East. It was in this way that a traditional inward-looking agricultural way of life became suddenly responsive—and thus vulnerable—to market demands and third parties.
This shift illustrates the broader social impact mercantile capitalism had on the region. Growing commerce and industry in town began to seduce young men away from the family farm. As Syracuse political scientist Michael Barkun has written, “the family unit ceased to be as formidable a concentration of common labor.” An even more profound consequence of the end of self-sufficiency of the family farm was the diminishing “economic significance of women, whose labor was no longer required to make at home” what could now be bought in stores. The declining economic role of women produced a sharp division between “a male sphere of labor outside the home and a female sphere of domesticity within it.” This division then created a social gap between men and women that sociologist Lawrence Foster thinks may have been the largest in American history either before or since. Now free of a variety of domestic economic duties, many women turned their attention to revival religion, where they played a critical role in recruiting new converts and working in the many benevolent societies the revivals inspired.
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The Rochester Charles Finney arrived in by way of the Erie Canal in September 1830 was a young, transient, fast-growing city whose population was far from stable. There, farmers, merchants, and migrant laborers mixed uncomfortably in the streets. Working toward a career in law until he was 29 years old, Finney had undergone a dramatic conversion to Christianity before becoming a preacher in July 1824. With a tenuous grasp of formal theology yet an uncommon ability to read and reach audiences with straightforward messages, Finney quickly earned a reputation for his friendly, energetic, and informal approach. Once ordained, he hit the road north of Syracuse as an itinerant missionary and preacher, spending, according to his autobiography, three to four hours a day in prayer and going where the spirit took him. Two years later, he made his way to Rome, Verona, Boonville, and Utica, where he fanned the flames of an intense religious revival that resulted in as many as 3,000 conversions. News of his achievement spread throughout the Northeast, and Finney became a national figure.
During his six months in Rochester, Finney preached in Presbyterian churches almost every night and three times on Sundays. But, his audiences drew from almost every Protestant denomination. He held smaller prayer meetings in churches and homes. He sent pious women out to make home visits to Christian wives of reputed sinners to encourage them to bring their husbands into the fold. Group prayer was at the center of Finney’s unique strategies. According to one historian, “It was a simple, urgent activity that created new hearts in hundreds of men and women, and it generated—indeed it relied upon—a sense of absolute trust and common purpose among participants.” This practice helped strengthen families who felt in need of it. By March 1831, conversions had begun to bridge broader social divisions and give the community—at least the Protestants within it—a sense of unity.
Historians call the periodic revivals that erupted between 1790 until the mid-19th century the Second Great Awakening. While it started in New England, it reached into the South as well as the Western frontier. Nowhere, however, did it reach the frenzied pitch that it did in Western New York, particularly in areas most heavily populated by Yankee-Yorkers.
The 1831 revival in Rochester was part of the national and regional awakenings, but both by virtue of its size and overall social impact, it also needs to be seen as a phenomenon all its own. While in New England church membership grew by one-third in 1831, in Rochester it doubled in six months. Finney’s revival benefitted all Protestant congregations, broke down whatever theological quarrels they had with each other, and mobilized a broad community of Christian believers. When all was said and done, Finney preached 98 sermons in Rochester between September 10, 1830 and March 6, 1831. Even Lyman Beecher, the staid Presbyterian eminence Gris who initially opposed both Finney’s style and theology, called the awakening of 1831 “the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion that the world has ever seen.”
Finney’s success in Rochester wasn’t merely due to his oratorical skills or to his unorthodox methods. He was also preaching a message that many clearly wanted to hear. More than developing any new theology, Finney captured the spiritual zeitgeist and articulated it. In a part of the new nation that was both optimistic about democracy and anxious about the collapse of the old systems of order and meaning, he helped soften the harsh Calvinism of their Puritan ancestors. While the Calvinist doctrine of predestination emphasized God’s supreme role in human salvation, Finney was moving toward a doctrine he later called perfectionism that emphasized what humans could do to help achieve salvation. The very act of conversion, which is at the core of revivalism, was itself an example of how human agency could open the convert up to God’s saving grace.
Instead of viewing humans as entirely dependent on the will of God, Finney forcefully declared that people could choose to be saved. That reassessment of human agency was a revolutionary product of its time, but it had even broader theological and social implications. Calvinists had believed that Jesus would one day return suddenly to purge the world of sin and usher in a thousand years of peace under His reign. Now more optimistic about human potential, Finney and his followers believed that humans could help bring about the Second Coming by ridding the world of sin themselves. After all, if believers were able to help save themselves, then they were capable of saving humanity. This shift in emphasis toward a belief in human capacity to improve the world reflected the priorities of the new age of industry and democracy, and appealed directly to the Yankee-Yorkers who were already predisposed to believe in the Puritan idea of a covenant between a Christian community and God. This old idea was thus given new urgency even as the old New England hierarchy was breaking down. After 1831, the goal of revivals throughout the northern states wasn’t merely to convert masses of individuals, but to Christianize the world.
The religious frenzy of the time and place wasn’t restricted to Charles Finney. The first three decades after the opening of the Erie Canal—which historian Whitney Cross later dubbed a “psychic highway,” saw a striking number of religious experiments emerge in upstate New York, including Mormonism, Adventism, and spiritualism, as well as several utopian communities. Though each distinct in its way, all these movements were born of an overwhelming desire to make sense of a rapidly changing world and reestablish moral order. No spiritual legacy of the era, however, had as sweeping influence on the future of the U.S. as the movement for social reform that Finney’s revivalism had fueled.
Yankees were no stranger to reform movements. Their Puritan ancestors had excelled at monitoring their neighbors’ behavior as a way to maintain social order, and Yankees had continued that tradition. Indeed, as one contemporary critic put it, they were famous for “the holy enterprise of minding other people’s business.” What Finney’s movement had done was marry the revivalists’ focus on personal conversion with the tradition of reform, thereby turning it into nothing less than a social crusade. It gave Yankees license to project the Puritan notion of a community forming a covenant with God onto the entire United States.
Earlier Yankee reform movements like Temperance or Sabbatarianism saw themselves as upholding traditional social order. Sabbatarianists were pushing to reestablish strict observance of the Sabbath in a liberalizing society, while Temperance activists were trying to limit the sale and consumption of alcohol. Revivalist-infused social reform, on the other hand, was more radical. Not only was it untethered from traditional religious and social orders, it sought to answer the big question that revolutions in society and the economy were forcing them to ask: What does a nation righteous enough to bring about Christ’s Second Coming look like? The enormity of this question led them to push boundaries previous reformers did not and reimagine the basic structure of society, primarily the existence of slavery and the subordinate role of women.
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It’s hard to overstate the outsize role Western New York played in the abolitionist and women’s rights movement in the ensuing decades. It was a hotbed for the former, and the birthplace of the latter. Indeed, they were linked in many ways, not least because the two primary organizers of the very first gathering devoted to women’s rights, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had met each other at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. That first women’s rights gathering was the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which was followed two weeks later by an even larger meeting 52 miles away in Rochester. Three years later, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony on a street corner in Seneca Falls, where the latter had come to attend an abolitionist meeting. The two became friends and went on to collaborate for 51 years on women’s rights, with Anthony as the on-the-ground organizer and Stanton as the writer and thinker.
In 1847, abolitionist Frederick Douglass moved to Rochester after learning of its active local black community and especially the work of Austin Steward, an escaped slave from Virginia who had spent six years in Canada. In Rochester, Douglass published his first abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, and ran a station of the Underground Railroad out of his home. Long aligned with reformers for women’s rights, Douglass was an ally of both Stanton and Anthony.
Before heading west from Rochester, I visited several of the historical markers dedicated to Douglass. His home on South Avenue is now a K-7 elementary school (named after 20th-century Rochester civic leader James P.B. Duffy). There is, however, a Frederick Douglass Community Center around the back of the parking lot. But 300 yards down the street, in Rochester’s gorgeous Highland Park Bowl, stands an inspiring 8-foot-tall bronze statue of Douglass in an open frock coat that sits on a 9-foot pedestal. Unveiled in 1899, four years after Douglass’ death, it was the first statue ever erected in the United States to honor an African American. On its base are some quotes from Douglass that capture the unique blend of religious and political zeal, human love, and idealism that capture the spirit of antebellum reform. “The best defense of free American institutions is the hearts of the American people themselves,” reads one. “One with God is a majority,” reads another. But just as “religion had given birth to abolitionism” in Western New York, as historian Milton Sernett wrote, it would soon pit “Christian against Christian.”
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After his successful revival in Rochester, Charles Finney headed to Buffalo, Boston, and New York City, where he made the Chatham Street Theater his home base for a few years. It was then that he had, according to his autobiography, “made up [his] mind on the question of slavery, and was exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention” to it. In 1833, he refused to allow slaveholders to take communion in his church. The following year he declared in a sermon that he couldn’t recognize as Christians men who trafficked in their fellow humans. In 1835, he accepted a position teaching theology in Oberlin in the Western Reserve, a strip of Ohio along Lake Erie that had been largely settled by migrants from Connecticut. Founded by John J. Shipherd, an Upstate New York-born Presbyterian minister and Finney acolyte, and his Connecticut-born missionary friend Philo Stewart, Oberlin began as a utopian community, very much part of the wave of revivalist-inspired perfectionism that was moving westward.
The success of the Erie Canal had stimulated the growth of the Great Lakes region, providing a conduit for both Yankee migrants and their religious and social passions. Shipherd and Stewart shared a mutual displeasure with what they felt was an absence of Christian principles on the Western frontier. They decided to establish a place where they could train missionaries who could bring salvation to the West.
Despite its westward orientation, Oberlin was nonetheless modeled on the ideal of an old-fashioned New England town and was steeped in Puritan typology. Echoing John Winthrop, Shipherd had written that if religion is “a city set upon the hill, then Oberlin is on the pinnacle of that hill.” The colony’s original 140 residents had to sign a covenant binding them to both God and to one another not unlike those used by their ancestors in 17th century Massachusetts. As in covenants of old, all of the proscriptions and prescriptions of the Covenant of the Oberlin Colony carried within them what today would be called the community’s mission statement. Oberlin’s reason for being, it read, wasn’t just to bring the “Gospel of peace” to their neck of the woods, but to the greater Mississippi Valley, to the entire nation, and to the world. Not unlike Finney, Oberlinians soon made abolitionism “an appendage” to their evangelism, the primary means by which they would seek to save America.
Within a few years, Oberlin had begun sending out abolitionist missionaries across the West. Its Collegiate Institute—later Oberlin College—was the first institution of higher learning in the U.S. to admit men and women of all races. As other schools began to expel abolitionist students, Oberlin welcomed them. By 1835, Oberlin was already a major hub for anti-slavery activism in the West and likely home to more “Anti-Slavery reformers per capita than any other town in America.”
Its distinctiveness notwithstanding, Oberlin was not entirely unlike what so many New England settlers had hoped to achieve in towns throughout Ohio’s Western Reserve. Promotional sales literature had sought to lure settlers from the Northeast by calling the strip of Ohio “New Connecticut.” Of the 212 townships surveyed in the Western Reserve, a majority featured open public spaces at their center as had been the custom in New England. Ninety of those towns were settled primarily by New Englanders. Town planners all over the Western Reserve—including Oberlin—had hoped that the physical landscape they laid out would guide the community’s moral behavior.
Just as abolitionism had become associated with revivalism in the 1830s, so, increasingly over the next few decades did Yankee identity, particularly in the Western Reserve. Appeals to migrants’ Puritan heritage as a way of eliciting a sense of moral superiority became more aggressive. Wielding history and heritage was no longer just about carving out a place in America’s emerging national myths, but as a way to muster the righteousness to do battle over slavery in the present.
By the mid-19th century, both sides of the struggle over slavery invoked the sanctity or evil of the Puritans. Pro-slavery Ohio Congressman John S. Cox called Puritanism a “reptile” that needed to be crushed. And why? Because, he said, abolitionism was “the offspring of Puritanism.” Similarly, both friends and enemies of the abolitionist John Brown considered him “a deep-eyed Puritan.” Born into a religious family in Connecticut, Brown lived his entire life within the sphere of the New England diaspora, 20 of them in Hudson, Ohio, 50 miles east of Oberlin, where his father served as a college trustee. More importantly, Brown himself strongly identified with his Puritan ancestors.
In his autobiography, Henry Adams, the historian and scion of the old New England political family, described the profound indignation he felt when he first confronted slavery as a teenager in the mid-1800s. His politics, he wrote, were suddenly no longer “so modern” but “took a strong tone of the seventeenth” century. Suddenly he found himself thinking “as dogmatically as though he were one of his own ancestors.” Slavery, he then concluded, “drove the entire Puritan community back on its Puritanism.” Of course, antebellum Yankees were separated from their 17th-century ancestors by almost as many years as we are from them. Resurrecting the memory of the Puritans, then, was about more than just invoking righteousness. It was also about identity and destiny.
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My first stop in Oberlin was Westwood Cemetery, where I had to ask for help to find Charles Finney’s tombstone. It was near the western tip of the memorial park by a pond that was currently home to a flock of honking geese. It was a gorgeous blue spring morning, and I confess to being moved by the high mindedness of the historical plaque at the cemetery entrance. “The grave markers in Westwood bear testimony to Oberlin’s early and continued commitment to major national moral and social issues, chief among them abolition of slavery, higher education for all regardless of race or gender, defense of democracy, missionary activity, temperance, suffrage for all, and civil rights.”
After leaving Finney’s grave, I drove to Martin Luther King Jr. Park to see the monument to the three Oberlinians who died in John Brown’s ill-fated 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. On the night of October 16, Brown led a small band of men in an attack on a federal armory at the confluence of the Potomac River and the Shenandoah. Brown’s band was made up of 21 men, 16 white and five black—three of whom were from Oberlin. Lewis Sheridan Leary, a harnessmaker, was killed during the raid. Both Shields Green, a former slave, and Oberlin graduate John Anthony Copeland Jr., were captured and executed.
The raid was part of an elaborate plan to spark an armed slave revolt that Brown hoped would bring about the destruction of slavery. While Brown and his men may have failed in their quixotic attempt to put an immediate end to human bondage in America, the raid on Harper’s Ferry inflamed white Southern fears of Northern abolitionism and heightened tensions between the South and North. Fourteen months later, the country erupted in Civil War. Its culmination would bring the Puritans’ heirs their greatest opportunity to date to shape the entire nation in their image.
