Harpers Ferry National Historic Park

They Passed This Way

Jefferson and Washington

Very little knowledge of history is needed to recognize the names of the many history-makers at Harpers Ferry. Thomas Jefferson stopped here with his eldest daughter Patsy in October 1783 on his way to Philadelphia to serve as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress. No town existed here them, only the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers crashing their way through the mountains in a drama that Jefferson declared "perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature." Another early visitor, George Washington, knew Harpers Ferry much better than Jefferson because of his years as a surveyor working in the area. Washington also knew the power of the rivers and, as president in 1796, persuaded Congress to establish a federal armory and arsenal here to help safeguard the fledgling republic and spur its industrial and commercial development.

Lewis and Clark Expedition

In March 1803 Washington’s armory supplied Meriwether Lewis with items needed for survival on the transcontinental expedition that he and William Clark planned to undertake. For protection and acquiring food, armory gunsmiths provided Lewis with modified Model 1792 contract rifles bearing Harpers Ferry lockplates, along with spare parts and tools, including a simple grindstone, to repair them. The Lewis and Clark expedition also obtained powder horns, pouches, bullet molds, knives, tomahawks, and an innovative portable iron boat frame, which he planned to cover with animal skins and use for transport beyond the Great Falls of the Missouri River.

John Brown

Fifty-six years later, weapons, slaves, and mountains lured abolitionist John Brown to Harpers Ferry. In October 1859, Brown attempted to seize the 100,000 rifles and muskets stored here as a first step in his revolutionary scheme to rid the nation of slavery. The plan failed when local militia and a contingent of marines and a contingent of marines under the command of Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, ordered here by President James Buchanan, seized Brown and killed or captured nearly all of his raiders. (Lt J.E.B. Stuart, destined to gain fame as a Confederate cavalry leader, served as Lee’s aide throughout the incident and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the raiders.) Although Brown soon died on the scaffold, his actions further divided the nation over the issue of slavery.

The Civil War, which John Brown’s raid helped to bring about, trapped Harpers Ferry on the border between North and South. After Virginia forces seized the armory in April 1861, Thomas Jonathan Jackson (in his first command of the war and not yet known as "Stonewall") dismantled the weapons-producing machinery and shipped it south to produce arms for the Confederacy. He returned to Harpers Ferry in mid-September 1862, during Lee’s first invasion of the North, and conducted a brilliant siege from the mountains that forced the surrender of both the town and the Federal troops stationed there – the largest surrender of United States troops during the Civil War.

Stonewall Jackson

Despite Stonewall Jackson’s success here, the Confederate army retreated from Maryland following the Battle of Antietam. This prompted President Abraham Lincoln to travel to Sharpsburg, Md., for talks with his army commander, Maj. Gen. George. B. McClellan. During a stopover at Harpers Ferry on October 1-2, 1862, Lincoln reviewed the Union troops stationed on the surrounding heights and even toured the fire enginehouse ("John Brown’s Fort") on the old armory grounds. As the war dragged on, Harpers Ferry became a major Union supply base. In August 1864 it became temporary headquarters for Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had been assigned the task of driving Confederate forces from the strategic Shenandoah Valley. One of Sheridan’s cavalry officers, flamboyant Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer, met with his wife Elizabeth in Harpers Ferry in September 1864, during a lull in the campaign.

Frederick Douglass

Sixteen years after the Civil War, in May 1881, Frederick Douglass, a former slave who had become a prominent journalist and orator, journeyed to Harpers Ferry to deliver an important address on John Brown for the 14th anniversary of Storer College, established in 1867 to educate former slaves. Douglass, who had quietly supported the old abolitionist’s activities in Kansas, remembered how he had cautioned Brown not to attack Harpers Ferry and declared him a martyr whose "zeal in the cause of my race was greater than mine."

By the first decade of the 20th century, John Brown and Harpers Ferry had become symbolic to the African-American struggle for justice and equality. For this reason, in August 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois, black educator, editor, and writer, brought the Niagara Movement, a black civil rights organization he had helped establish, to Harpers Ferry for its first public meeting. In "Address to the Country," presented at Storer College on the last night of the conference, Du Bois argued persuasively against "the exploitation of the worker, regardless of race and color." In 1909 Du Bois and other members of the Niagara Movement helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).