Determined to make war on Southern slavery, militant abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859) organized and led a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (October 16–18, 1859), with a view to sparking slave uprisings throughout the South. In the years before the attack, Brown played a significant part in the deadly raids and reprisals that made Kansas Territory "bleed" as proslavery and free-soil factions fought to define the identity of the state-to-be. (Brown's settler sons called for means to protect themselves from proslavery Missourians; when Brown took weapons west, he found a sense of divine purpose.) In 1858 he developed the Harpers Ferry plan with the covert assistance of a group of Northern abolitionists known as the "Secret Six."

On October 16, 1859, Brown and his band of twenty-one volunteers succeeded in seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but the raid was quashed after a brief, intense fight between raiders and the militia. Slaves did not flock to Brown's side as he had hoped. After his capture, he was imprisoned and then tried at Charles Town. Initially he dismissed these legal proceedings as a "mockery" (quoted by David S. Reynolds, [New York: Knopf, 2005], 348). His words and bearing during his last days made an enormous impact on public opinion in the North and South. In the words of historian David Reynolds, "[t]he raid did not cause the storm. John Brown and the reaction to him did" (309). As a result of Brown's extraordinary performance, Northerners "began to see in Brown a hero" (357). Brown was sentenced to death on November 2; six days later, in a lecture delivered on November 8, 1859, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Brown would "make the gallows glorious like the cross" (366). Brown's execution on December 2, 1859, confirmed his martyrdom. Once war broke out in 1861, the song "John Brown's Body" "quickly became a Union favorite" (Franny Nudelman, [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004], 14); Deborah Webb was one of many writers to compose new lyrics for the tune.