Have you ever seen a picture of John Brown, the fiery-eyed abolitionist who led a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., on Oct. 16, 1859? Just one glimpse and you can tell the anti-slavery crusader was all business. Turns out that Brown had ordered long spears, or pikes, for his abolitionist army – about 1,000 of them. They were about seven feet tall and for “slashing and impaling” any defenders of slavery who got in the way, The Associated Press reports. But, the Harpers Ferry raid didn’t go as Brown had planned. In fact, he and his men were rounded up and hanged about 36 hours later, thus officially ending any notion of arming free Blacks and slaves to rebel against slaveholders. That meant that the pikes ordered from a Connecticut blacksmith and stockpiled at a Maryland farm were never used as planned. Today, they are rarely seen, but when they do surface, they are worth a pretty penny. For example, two years ago a John Brown pike sold for an astounding $13,000. “If you see one of these every three or four years, it’s unusual. That tells me a bunch of them were burned or destroyed. Otherwise, you’d see more of them,” said Dennis Lowe, who oversees Civil War material at Heritage Auction Galleries. During the 19^th century, nothing rattled the South like rumors of an impending slave revolt. Therefore, news of Brown’s capture and execution  was played to the hilt by pro-slavery forces, and the pikes were held up as symbols of what Yankees were trying to impose on southern farmers who relied on free labor. If Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry had been successful, it’s likely that slavery would have ended six years earlier.

TAGS: abolitionist, Harpers Ferry, John Brown, raid

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