He had a safe house, weapons and a mole planted among unsuspecting residents.

He had wealthy backers, a juicy military target near Washington and fanatical followers ready to die for their cause.

He was a religious zealot who hated what he saw as an evil and corrupt system. And 150 years ago this week, in what is now the quaint tourist town of Harpers Ferry, W.Va., he fueled the smoldering fires of the Civil War, helped doom slavery in the United States and prepared the way for the civil rights movement and beyond.

He was John Brown, an abolitionist patriarch who sired 20 children, directed his share of the bloodletting in "Bleeding Kansas" and hoped to start a slave insurrection that would spread from the mountains of Virginia to the plantations of the deep South.

On the drizzly Sunday night of Oct. 16, 1859, Brown, then 59, led 19 armed soldiers of his Provisional Army from their rented farmhouse in Maryland across a covered bridge over the Potomac River to seize the huge federal arsenal and armory in Harpers Ferry, where 100,000 guns were stored.

The gang, helped by a member who had lived in the town for a year, cut telegraph wires, took hostages, seized the government complex and waited for the revolution to begin. But local militias rather than legions of fleeing slaves poured into town. Brown was surrounded in a brick firehouse, and he and his surviving men were captured after a 36-hour standoff.

Ten of his men were killed, including two of Brown's sons and a former slave, Dangerfield Newby, who had joined Brown to free his wife and six children from a Virginia farm 50 miles away, historians say. Angry onlookers cut off Newby's ears for souvenirs.

Four civilians also died, including a free black railroad baggage handler, Heyward Shepherd, who is thought to have been inadvertently shot by Brown's men.

Brown's subsequent trial was a media sensation -- he was a saint in the North, a demon in the South. He wrote more than a hundred letters from jail, sometimes three a day, arguing his cause. And his hanging two months later was one of the most celebrated executions in U.S. history, historians say.

Before he left jail for the gallows in Charles Town, W.Va., the morning of Dec. 2, 1859, Brown passed a note to an attendant: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." The war began 16 months later.

On Wednesday, a four-day academic symposium on Brown began in Harpers Ferry, covering topics such as Brown and the media, Brown and civil rights, and Brown and the Northern abolitionists, many of whom funded and then abandoned him.

Today, Brown feels coldly modern, some experts say, mirroring the fanaticism of a 21st-century terrorist. In 1856, he had led his fighters in an attack at Pottawatomie, Kan., in which they butchered six pro-slavery men with broadswords, hacking off fingers and arms. In the South of 1859, Brown "was viewed almost the same way we would view [Osama] bin Laden," Brown biographer David S. Reynolds said.

In addition, Brown was eager to be a martyr in what has been called his holy war.

"There's no question John Brown's meaning and reputation changed after 9/11," said Yale historian David Blight, noting that students seem more hesitant since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to embrace Brown's methods, despite his cause.

Yet Brown was also a man of his tortured time, experts say. His aim at Harpers Ferry, said National Park Service ranger Marsha B. Wassel, was not necessarily to spread terror but to damage slavery as part of the moral crusade of 19th-century America.

"There are so many John Browns," Blight said. Some see John Brown as a "true saint: the individual, romantic Christian hero who would risk all to destroy an evil institution and hang on the gallows for it," she said.

"Then there are those . . . who [see him as] the arch-villain of American history . . . the worst possible thing that can happen in a society, a person that takes all law and morality in his own hands," Blight said.

"And his life is all wrapped around this deepest, biggest, most divisive issue we've ever had: slavery and race."

Brown also raises the issue of using violence for social change, scholars say.

"What is one's moral obligation when faced with an unjust system?" Columbia University historian Eric Foner asked. "These are questions which are perennial. They come up in every country at one time or another, in every kind of issue."

"Most of the abolitionist movement believed in nonviolence," Foner said. "They believed in what they called moral suasion. They believed that slavery was itself a form of violence and that you couldn't overturn it by violence or you'd be sort of adapting the same tactics, so to speak, as the enemy.

"Brown believed that the only way to overthrow slavery was by violence," he said. "Now, that actually turned out to be true."

Brown's role in the chain of historic causation from American slavery to having a black president in the White House is debated. "I think he's a crucial link," said Spencer R. Crew, professor of American and African American history at George Mason University.

Would the Civil War have taken place without John Brown? "No doubt," Foner said. "On the other hand, Brown did catalyze this kind of sectional antagonism. . . . It's not much longer . . . after Brown's raid . . . that Northern troops are marching into Virginia singing 'John Brown's Body.' "

Harpers Ferry still sits on a rocky prow of land where the Shenandoah River joins the Potomac, a quiet place with ice cream stores and souvenir shops. The arsenal, armory and other munitions works are long gone.

But the trains still come over a railroad bridge from Maryland, just as Brown and his men did. And the mournful horn of the locomotives seems to echo through the town from the past and the future.

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Washington Post; Used by Permission