Compelled by the allure of a nation without slavery, a man from pre-Civil War Chester County was drawn into an abolition movement — though one that employed terrorism to accomplish its goals and ended in a bloody failure.

According to a recent feature in Main Line Today written by Mark E. Dixon, Osborne Perry Anderson, who at the time was a free African-American living in West Fallowfield, joined up with violent abolitionist John Brown, became “elected” as a “congressman” in Brown’s new anti-slavery government during a “Constitutional Convention” in the Canadian city of Chatham, Ontario, and helped launch the infamous raid on the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal in West Virginia.

“In the end, (Brown’s) Canadian sojourn yielded only one committed recruit: Osborne Anderson,” historian Tony Horwitz said in the Main Line Today article.

Throughout Anderson’s misadventure were ties to Chester County, including the West Goshen household where he lived before following Brown and his employment at a Canadian anti-slavery newspaper founded by the daughter of a West Chester shoemaker.

“Most whites — even most abolitionists — believed blacks were too submissive to take up arms,” the article explained. “Brown’s insistence not only that they could fight but that their participation in their own liberation was essential to achieving equality was powerfully attractive to Anderson.”

Though he found great purpose in Brown’s group — “There was no milk-and-water sentimentality — no offensive contempt for the Negro — while working in his cause,” the article quoted him as saying.

“In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united in one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self. No ghost of a distinction found space to enter.” — Anderson nevertheless wound up fleeing for his life when on Oct. 16, 1859, he was among the 22 who seized control of the Harpers Ferry armory but couldn’t withstand the arrival and counterattack of U.S. Marines.

One of two who escaped from defending the armory and the only one to survive, Anderson retreated back to Chester County but was turned away with a threat of arrest should he ever return. He then made his way back to Canada and eventually published a viewpoint of the story.

Read much more about Chester County’s role in Anderson’s life and the Harpers Ferry raid in Main Line Today here.