The Start of the Civil War

I suppose it is easy to dispute the beginnings of the Civil War. Jimmy is of course the expert in the family but I'll give it a whirl.

History will celebrate 150 years of the Civil War in the year 2011. Some will look at October 1859 and John Brown's famous Harper's Ferry raid as the true start of the War. Although most argue that the Civil War started 16 months later, this raid arguably triggered the conflict to come.

John Brown and his followers raided a federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, VA, hoping that a slave insurrection throughout the South would follow. His plan was shaky from the start, even his good friend, Frederick Douglass tried to talk him out of the raid, calling Harpers Ferry "a perfect steel trap" offering no hope of escape for Brown if there was any trouble. His words proved prophetic when, 2 days after his arrival in Harper's Ferry, Brown was surrounded and captured in the early morning hours of October the 18th by one Robert E. Lee, then merely a colonel in the U.S. Army. Eventually hung in December of 1859, Brown failed mainly when his army of liberators, the runaway slaves he hoped to arm and lead in a guerilla war from the surrounding mountains, failed to materialize. Undeterred, he continued to fight and "impress everyone with his willingness to die" (Sky Montgomery, Park Ranger, Harpers' Ferry). In the end 10 raiders did die, including 2 of his sons and several former slaves, including three Oberlin, Ohio black men.

Given this raid being a trigger for the Civil War, some could argue that the War started even earlier, and here in Ohio, the Northern Ohio city of Oberlin to be exact. In fact Aughor Nat Brandt nicknamed Oberlin the "Town that started the Civil War" in his 1991 book about the city's uprising to prevent runaway slave John Price's return to Kentucky.

Oberlin was a busy stop on the Underground Railroad, Oberlin College was the first college in the country to officially admit blacks (John Brown's father was a member of the board of trustees). So there was significant support in the area for runaway slaves, and the movement to free slaves in the United States. You'll find John Brown here too, in Oberlin, where he found strong support for his militant (and sometimes violent) views and anti-slavery campaigns.

Oberlin residents were proud of the fact that no fugitive in Oberlin as ever returned to the "bondage" of slavery. When John Price was held captive in a nearby Wellington Hotel by slave catchers, dozens of Oberlin students and residents performed a daring rescue, freeing Price but leading to their own arrest and subsequent jailing in Cuyahoga County Jail for violating the Fugitive Slave Act. John Copeland and Lewis Leary participated in the raid, and were freeded early in the year 1859, and were feted along with the other rescuers at the First Church of Oberlin, the same church that would conduct their memorial service after their deaths from the raid of Haper's Ferry (Copeland was hung, Leary shot as he tried to escape capture). They had, seemingly, come full circle in the anti-slavery movement.

And of course some could win that argument that the Civil War truly began the day the first slaves were transported by ship to the United State from Africa in chains, below deck, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder in the town market.

It's never that simple of course, but whatever your thoughts -- there was trouble brewing in Ohio 150+ years ago, trouble that led to a brutal war.