On October 16, 1859, John Brown led 21 men on an assault at Harpers Ferry -- an event that shook the nation and [nudged it even closer toward civil war]. Among these raiders were five black men ...

The first victim of John Brown’s war ... raiders were dead or dying; five others were cut off. Two had escaped across the river. Brown gathered those who were left in a small brick building ...

and by the end of the Combahee River Raid on that June night in 1863, she had helped free some 750 more. After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, John Andrew, the abolitionist governor of ...