The historical backdrop of Midnight Rising is critical to understanding not just the events leading up to Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry but also the broader antebellum period in the United States, a time marked by escalating tensions between abolitionist and pro-enslavement forces and a series of political and social conflicts over the institution of enslavement. The Missouri Compromise (1820), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) were all attempts to balance or quell tensions between the North and South, yet each only served to deepen the divide.

Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 was a culmination of these growing tensions. As an ardent abolitionist, Brown sought to initiate an armed revolt of enslaved people, believing it was divinely ordained. His actions at Harpers Ferry, though ultimately unsuccessful in sparking a wider insurrection, dramatically highlighted the country’s irreconcilable differences and pushed the nation closer to civil war. The raid, therefore, stands as a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the Civil War, illustrating the extremity of the national crisis over enslavement.