On December 14, 1859, the United States Senate passed a resolution to establish a select committee to inquire into the invasion of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and the seizure of public property that occurred there during October of that year. As directed by the resolution, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, the presiding officer of the Senate, appointed as members of the committee James. M. Mason, a Democrat from Virginia (chairman); Jefferson Davis, a Democrat from Mississippi; Graham N. Fitch, a Democrat from Indiana; Jacob Collamer, a Republican from Vermont; and James R. Doolittle, a former Democrat turned Republican from Wisconsin. After holding hearings and examining witnesses, the committee delivered its majority and minority reports on June 15, 1860.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown and 17 others entered Harper's Ferry for the purpose of capturing the federal arsenal located there. John Brown and his sons and sons-in-law had been active in the violence over slavery in The Territory of Kansas, and he had become acquainted with some of his associates there. They took hostages, detained and then released a mail train en route to Baltimore, and in the process killed three white men and one free Negro.
Local citizens attacked the raiders, and John Brown along with some of his men and some hostages, took shelter in an engine house. A contingent of United States Marines stormed the engine house, killing some of the raiders and capturing others, including John Brown. Four other men were to bring a store of weapons from John Brown's base of operations in nearby Maryland, but they did not arrive in Harper's Ferry and fled the scene.
The weapons included 200 Sharps rifled carbines, 200 revolver pistols and 1,000 pikes – each a steel knife blade riveted to the end of a five foot wooden handle. After his capture, John Brown stated that his purpose was to arm the slaves and use them as a military force in Virginia. Of the 22 raiders, ten were killed in Harper's Ferry, 10 were executed, and five escaped – one of the raiders who entered Harper's Ferry and the four who remained in Maryland.
The committee divided along party lines. Although the majority and the minority did not differ as to the facts, they split over the breadth of the committee's inquiry, the context in which it was evaluated and the implications it held for the future. In addition to exploring the facts of the raid, the committee was charged with advising whether the Congress should enact legislation to deal with any such future invasion of a state.
Both reports agreed that no such legislation was called for. The minority argued that the inquiry should have stopped with that conclusion and complained that the majority went beyond the committee's mandate to inquire into the actions and beliefs of certain abolitionists who had aided John Brown although without knowing – so they claimed and in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary – that he planned a campaign of violence.
The majority clearly believed otherwise, owing in part to John Brown's reputation from the Kansas violence and the cavalier way in which the abolitionists had entrusted 200 rifles to him for safekeeping. In this connection the committee elicited from some of the witness strong statements about their desire to end slavery and about their belief in a "higher law" that empowered them to challenge slavery.
The majority concluded that John Brown and his colleagues were "lawless ruffians" against whom the laws of the states were proof and that the United States was without the power to legislate. The majority warned that "If the several states, whether from motives of policy or a desire to preserve the peace of the Union, if not from fraternal feeling, do not hold it incumbent on them, after the experience of the country to guard in future by appropriate legislation against occurrences similar to the one here inquired into, the committee can find no guarantee elsewhere for the security of peace between the States of the Union."
The minority took a different tack, observing that "It is almost astonishing that in a country like ours, laden with the rich experience of the blessings of security under the protection of law, there should still be found large bodies of men laboring under the infatuation that any good object can be affected by lawlessness and violence." And as illustration of this view they referred to the filibusters who invaded neighboring countries for the apparent purpose of bringing such lands under American dominion for the expansion of slavery, those who violated the laws against engaging in the slave trade and the border ruffians who entered the Kansas Territory for the purpose of securing the permanence of slavery there.
The minority continued, "While this act of violence and treason, and the alarm, suspicion, suffering and death it involves are so deplorable, we cannot but see that the lessons which it teaches furnish many considerations of security against its repetition", not the least of which was that the ages might not produce another John Brown and provide him with resources.
An interesting footnote to the committee's hearing and dueling reports is that, shortly after the Senate adopted the resolution to establish the select committee, Senator William Bigler, Democrat from Pennsylvania, offered a bill, designated S. 72, that empowered that the President to summon and employ the militia "whenever the United States, or any State or Territory thereof, shall be invaded, or be in in imminent danger of invasion, from any place whatever, whether external or internal, to the United States". The bill was referred to the select committee on the invasion of Harper's Ferry. When Senator Mason offered the committee's report to the Senate, he also moved that the committee be relieved of any further obligation to consider Bill S. 72.
When after the 1860 election the states of the deep south began to secede, President James Buchanan lamented that, although he believed that secession was unlawful, he lacked to authority to take action against it. Had Bill S. 72 become law, it might have provided the legal authority that the president said he lacked based upon the argument that the secession governments constituted domestic invasions. If it had been enacted and provided the power, the question remains whether President Buchanan would have had the backbone to use it.
President Buchanan has never rank highly within the pantheon or American deities, so it is easy to think ill of him. President Buchanan had sent a vessel to Charleston with supplies for the garrison at Fort Sumter, but Confederate batteries at the mouth of the harbor fired on it and drove it away. President Lincoln advised the Confederates that he was sending food to Fort Sumter, but if the expedition was fired upon it would put ashore additional troops and ammunition. General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, in commend of Confederate forces at Charleston, regarded Fort Sumter, if held by an adequate force, a perfect Gibraltar. The situation forced the Confederates to fire on the fort before it was strengthened. When the Confederates fired on the national flag, they largely unified northern public opinion in favor of using force to preserve the Union, a luxury that President Buchanan did not enjoy.
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