Harpers Ferry

The small town where the Shenandoah meets the Potomac witnessed more American history per square mile than almost anywhere in the country. Harpers Ferry — now in West Virginia — housed a federal armory that made it a strategic prize throughout the Civil War, changing hands a dozen times between 1861 and 1865. But it entered the national consciousness two years before the war began, on the night of October 16, 1859, when the abolitionist John Brown led 21 men in a raid on the armory, hoping to seize weapons and ignite a nationwide slave rebellion.

Brown's raid collapsed within 36 hours. He was captured by a detachment of Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, tried for treason and murder in a Virginia court, and hanged on December 2, 1859. The failure was almost beside the point. Brown's willingness to die for abolition electrified the North and terrified the South in equal measure. Southern leaders read the raid as proof that Northern antislavery sentiment was an existential threat. Northern moderates who had dismissed Brown as a fanatic found themselves moved, against their own expectations, by his composure on the gallows.

During the Civil War, Stonewall Jackson captured Harpers Ferry in September 1862, forcing the largest Union surrender of the war — 12,500 soldiers in a single morning. After the war, the town became home to Storer College, one of the first institutions in the nation to offer higher education to freedmen, and a gathering place for early civil rights organizing — including W.E.B. Du Bois's Niagara Movement, which convened there in 1906 on the ground where Brown had made his stand.