From the Library of Congress:
Late on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one armed followers stole into the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept. The men–among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave–hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an “army of emancipation” to overturn the institution of slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Col. Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town’s United States arsenal and its rifle works.
The upper hand which nighttime surprise had afforded the raiders quickly eroded, and by the evening of October 17, the conspirators who were still alive were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on October 18 to storm the building.
…
For his actions, Brown was quickly tried and convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and sentenced to death by hanging. The simplicity and sincerity of Brown’s address after his sentencing astounded listeners on both sides of the issue. While awaiting his fate in the Harper’s Ferry jail, he received a sympathetic letter from Massachusetts writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “I think of you night and day,” she wrote, “bleeding in prison, surrounded by hostile faces, sustained only by trust in God and your own heart. I long to nurse you–to speak to you sisterly words of sympathy and consolation.”
Brown declined her offer, asking instead that she contribute to the financial support of his surviving family which included two daughters-in-law whose husbands had been killed in the raid. “Would you not,” he wrote, “as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?”
There’s much more.