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prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance.AP/Wide World Photos

The Harlem Renaissance as a movement represented a rebirth of African American culture in the United States. As a product of black urban migration and black Ameri-cans’ disappointment with racism in the United States, the renaissance was aimed at revitalizing black culture with pride. In political life, literature, music, visual art, and other cultural areas, African Americans in the 1920s put forth their individual and collective sense of dignity in the face of an American culture that often considered them second-class citizens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. See chapter eighteen, 400–417. Clas-sic, and still excellent, account of the Harlem Renaissance, balancing narrative with interpretation of primary evidence. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Standard monograph on the movement.

———, ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Vast collection of primary docu-ments from the period.

Kellner, Bruce, ed. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictio-nary for the Era. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. A useful reference tool on people, places, and a variety of other subjects pertaining to the movement.

Kramer, Victor. The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined. New York: AMS, 1987. A large volume of scholarly essays on a wide range of topics within the movement.

Perry, Margaret. The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliog-raphy and Commentary. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982. A wonderful research tool on nineteen influ-ential period authors, complete with citations of published works.

Singh, Amritjit. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Literary study of wide cross-section of black authors.

Waldron, Edward E. Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978. A mono-graph on the influential civic leader’s role during the period.

R. A. Lawson

HARPERS FERRY, CAPTURE OF. On 9 Septem-ber 1862, in Frederick, Maryland, General RoSeptem-bert E. Lee issued his famous “lost order.” To clear the enemy from his rear, Lee directed General Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson to capture the garrison at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and then hurry northward to rejoin the main army. The combined forces would then move through Hagerstown into Pennsylvania. But the “lost or-der” had come into the Union general George B. Mc-Clellan’s possession. The defenders of Harpers Ferry put up unexpected resistance against Jackson’s siege on Sep-tember 14 and did not surrender until the following day. Jackson rejoined Lee at Sharpsburg twenty-four hours late, a delay that nearly led to disaster at the Battle of Antietam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gallagher, Gary W., ed. The Antietam Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Teetor, Paul R. A Matter of Hours: Treason at Harper’s Ferry. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

Thomas Robson Hay /a. r.

See also Antietam, Battle of; Maryland, Invasion of.

HARPERS FERRY RAID. The Harpers Ferry raid from 16 to 18 October 1859 was led by the abolitionist John Brown. Brown captured the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (subsequently West Virginia), at the con-fluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. With the weapons seized there, he intended to arm the great num-ber of slaves he thought would join him. But the plot was a failure, and Brown and most of his followers were either killed outright or captured and later executed. Neverthe-less, the raid, and the myth of John Brown it created, accelerated the sectional divide over slavery and indirectly helped achieve Brown’s agenda.

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John Brown. The wounded abolitionist lies down among his captors after his failed attempt to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., and provoke a mass insurrection by slaves; his raid was a contributing factor leading to the Civil War, and many Northerners came to regard him as a beloved martyr.

Background

John Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800. He was a deceitful businessman, a defendant in litigation in twenty-one separate cases. However, he was able to inspire loyalty among low and influential men alike. He had become an ardent sympathizer of the slaves by the 1830s. In 1855 he moved with five of his sons to Kansas, where the slavery issue was bitterly contested. On 24 May 1856, Brown led a party on a raid of Pottawatomie Creek, a frontier com-munity near Lawrence. In what has become known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown and his followers killed five proslavery men. The massacre exacerbated national tensions over slavery by suggesting that antislavery forces were willing to commit violence. It also suggested that Brown saw himself as an agent of God. Murky evidence about Pottawatomie allowed Brown to avoid arrest. From 1856 to 1859 he traveled between Kansas and New En-gland, organizing antislavery raiding parties. In early 1858 he began seeking support for the Harpers Ferry raid. The Plot

By 1858 Brown had cultivated support among leading northern antislavery and literary figures. That year he ap-proached his contacts with a plan to take an armed force into Virginia to rally the slaves, and resist by force any effort to prevent their being freed. Evidently Brown

viewed Virginia, a slave state, as ready for black revolt. Brown consulted with Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, George Stearns, Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and Samuel Gridley Howe. Several tried to dissuade Brown, but all except Douglass ended up agreeing to provide him with the money nec-essary to launch the Harpers Ferry raid. They became known as the Secret Six.

John Brown’s intentions at Harpers Ferry are mys-terious. After his capture he asserted that freeing slaves was his only object, not killing slaveholders. On the other hand, on 8 May 1858 in Ontario, Canada, he shared with several dozen Negroes and white men a “provisional con-stitution” that provided for confiscating all the personal and real property of slave owners and for maintaining a government throughout a large area. Since Brown did not expect to have more than a hundred men in his striking force, the large army necessary for this operation would have to be composed of liberated slaves. Moreover, Brown’s little band already had plenty of guns at its disposal. Therefore, the only thing to be gained by attacking the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was weapons, presumably to arm thousands of slaves. We can conclude that Brown did not intend to kill people in the Harpers Ferry raid unless they got in his way. But he also intended to

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to give them the means to do so.

Brown planned to strike at Harpers Ferry in the sum-mer of 1858, but his plans were interrupted by Hugh Forbes, an English soldier of fortune he had hired to train troops. Disenchanted by Brown’s reneging on his wages, Forbes publicized the plot by describing it to U.S. sena-tors Henry Wilson and William Seward. Wilson chastised the Secret Six, warning them that Brown’s scheme would compromise the antislavery cause. The Secret Six told Brown that he must go back to Kansas, which he did in June 1858. In December he led a raid into Missouri, where his band killed a slaveholder and liberated eleven slaves whom they carried (in midwinter) all the way to Ontario. This was Brown’s most successful operation ever. It could have capped his antislavery career and gained him a solid footnote in Civil War history books. But Brown saw his destiny in Virginia.

The Raid

In the summer of 1859, Brown went to Maryland and rented a farm five miles from Harpers Ferry. There he waited, mostly in vain, for additional men and money. By mid-October 1859 he had twenty-two followers and prob-ably recognized that his force never would be any stronger. On the night of 16 October, he and his band marched toward the Potomac with a wagonload of arms, cut the telegraph wires, crossed and captured the bridge, and moved into Harpers Ferry. Brown quickly seized the ar-mory and its rifle works. He then sent out a detail to capture two local slaveholders along with their slaves. This mission was accomplished. Meanwhile, Brown’s men had stopped a Baltimore and Ohio train, inadvertently killing the African American baggage master, but then al-lowed the train to go on its way. On the morning of 17 October, Brown took a number of the armory’s employees hostage as they came in for work. Otherwise he remained in the engine works of the arsenal, perhaps waiting, in his mind, for the slaves to rise. By mid-morning, Maryland and Virginia militia were on their way to Harpers Ferry, and the president of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad re-ported to Washington that some sort of insurrection was in progress. By the afternoon of the 17th, the militia had gained control of the bridges, driving off or killing Brown’s outposts. By 10 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, U.S. Cavalry, with his aide Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, had arrived to take charge.

Lee followed military protocol for the situation. He offered the Virginia militia a chance to capture the engine works (which they declined), gave the insurrectionists a chance to surrender, and was careful to avoid shooting Brown’s prisoners. On 18 October, Lee sent Stuart to ne-gotiate with the leader of the raid. A veteran of Kansas, Stuart was astonished to recognize Brown. Once Brown refused to surrender, Stuart waved in a dozen marines who charged with bayonets. It was all over in moments, without a shot fired. One marine and two of Brown’s men

were killed. Brown himself was wounded but was saved from death because his assailant, in command of the as-sault team, had only a dress sword. Altogether, Brown’s force had killed four civilians and wounded nine. Of his own men, ten were dead or dying, five had escaped the previous day, and seven were captured.

Brown’s scheme—leading an army of twenty-two men against a federal arsenal and the entire state of Vir-ginia—was amazingly amateurish. He left behind at his Maryland farm many letters that revealed his plans and exposed all of his confederates. He seized Harpers Ferry without taking food for his soldiers’ next meal. Most bi-zarrely, Brown tried to lead a slave insurrection without notifying the slaves. As an abolitionist, he took it as an article of faith that slaves were seething with discontent and only awaited a signal to throw off their chains. But the Harpers Ferry raid was so poorly planned and exe-cuted that slaves, even had they been as restive as Brown assumed, could not participate.

The Consequences

In the six weeks that followed the raid, Republican and Democratic leaders denounced Brown’s act. But he had shown a courage that won him grudging admiration in the South and legendary status in the North. Brown rec-ognized that the manner of his death might be a great service to the antislavery cause. After a one-week trial, during which he lay wounded on a pallet, he was con-victed of murder, treason, and insurrection. When he re-ceived his death sentence, he uttered words that became oratory of legend:

Had I interfered in behalf of the rich, the pow-erful, the intelligent, the so-called great . . . every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. . . . Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should . . . mingle my blood . . . with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and un-just enactments, I say, let it be done.

When Brown was hung at nearby Charles Town, on 2 December 1859, church bells tolled in many northern towns, cannons fired salutes, and prayer meetings adopted memorial resolutions. The execution dramatically deep-ened moral hostility to slavery. Such expressions of grief turned southern enchantment with Brown into panic. Southerners identified Brown with the abolitionists, the abolitionists with Republicans, and Republicans with the whole North. Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 fed ru-mors that the Republicans were letting loose dozens of John Browns on the South. Radical southern newspapers claimed Harpers Ferry showed that the South could have no peace as a part of the Union. John Brown’s raid moved southern sentiments from mediation toward revolution.

Once the Civil War erupted, the ghost of John Brown inspired the Northern armies through the popular song “John Brown’s Body.” Its best-known version spoke of John Brown’s body moldering in the grave, of his

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parture to become a soldier in the army of the Lord, and of hanging the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, on a sour apple tree. In November 1861, Julia Ward Howe, the wife of Secret Six member Samuel Gridley Howe, visited an army camp and heard the song. She awoke in the middle of the night with a creative urge to write down the words of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Upon publication, this version of the John Brown song became exalted. The words of the “Battle Hymn” have come down through the years as the noblest expression of what the North was fighting for in the Civil War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. The best overall work among many.

Rossbach, Jeffery. Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory ofSlave Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Evaluates Brown’s and his sup-porters’ assumptions about the slaves’ responsiveness. United States National Park Service. John Brown’s Raid.

Wash-ington, D.C.: Office of Publications, National Park Service, 1974. Good visual representation of key locations at Har-pers Ferry at the time of the raid.

Timothy M. Roberts See also Antislavery; “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.

HARRIS V. McRAE, 448 U.S. 297 (1980), a case in which the Supreme Court upheld by a 5 to 4 vote the power of Congress to exclude elective abortions from cov-erage under the Medicaid program. The Hyde Amend-ment, named after Representative Henry Hyde and passed in several versions since 1976, barred the use of federal funds for abortions except when the mother’s life was in danger or when the pregnancy resulted from rape or in-cest (the latter clause was later repealed). Although a Re-publican, Hyde received enough bipartisan support for the bill to be enacted by a Democratic Congress and president.

Cora McRae was one of several pregnant Medicaid recipients who brought suit, alleging that the Hyde ment violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amend-ment and the religion clauses of the First AmendAmend-ment. At the time, the plaintiffs had reason for optimism because the Supreme Court had held that the government must subsidize other rights, such as the right to counsel, for the indigent. In addition, Congress had established the Med-icaid program in 1965 under Title XIX of the Social Se-curity Act specifically to give federal aid to states choosing to reimburse the indigent for medical treatments they could not afford. McRae contended that Title XIX obli-gated states receiving Medicaid funds to fund medically necessary abortions despite the Hyde Amendment’s pro-visions. Indeed the federal district court granted McRae injunctive relief, ruling (491 F. Supp. 630) that although

the Hyde Amendment amended (rather than violated) Title XIX, it nevertheless did violate both the Fifth and First Amendments.

In 1977, however, the Supreme Court upheld state laws similar to the Hyde Amendment, suggesting that abortion would not be treated like other rights. Harris v.

McRae applied the same reasoning to the national

gov-ernment, reversing and remanding the district court rul-ing while holdrul-ing the Hyde Amendment constitutional. “Although government may not place obstacles in the path of a woman’s exercise of her freedom of choice,” wrote Justice Potter Stewart, “it need not remove those of its own creation. Indigency falls in the latter category.” The dissenters, especially Thurgood Marshall, argued that the decision ignored “another world ‘out there’ ” in which poor women could not get abortions without as-sistance from Medicaid. The Hyde Amendment fore-shadowed a number of attacks on abortion rights after 1989, both in individual state legislatures and, in 1995, in a federal ban on abortions in military hospitals and for those covered by federal health plans. The Hyde Amend-ment was still in effect in the early 2000s, although states retained the right to subsidize abortions with their own funds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baer, Judith A. Women in American Law. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991.

Bingham, Marjorie. Women and the Constitution. St. Paul, Minn.: The Upper Midwest Women’s History Center, 1990. Hoff-Wilson, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice. New York: New

York University Press, 1991.

Judith A. Baer /a. r.

See also Abortion; Medicare and Medicaid; Pro-Choice Movement; Pro-Life Movement; Women’s Health.

HARRISBURG CONVENTION. After the Tariff of 1824 proved unsatisfactory to the woolen interests and following the defeat of the Woolens Bill of 1827, the friends of protection called a convention at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to agree on a new bill. Protectionist advo-cates held meetings throughout the northern states and sent 100 delegates from thirteen states to the convention at Harrisburg, from 30 July to 3 August 1827. The con-vention produced a memorandum to Congress that set forth the special needs of the woolens manufacturers and the general value of protection. Because the tariff bill of 1828 was drafted and passed for political ends, the de-mands of the memorandum were ignored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stanwood, Edward. American Tariff Controversies in the Nine-teenth Century. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.

Robert Fortenbaugh /c. w.