What Will Trump Do If He Wins?

If there was one event which probably precipitated the Civil War, it was John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859. Once the word got around that Brown had come down to Virginia to seize some guns, distribute the weapons to slaves and then lead his ‘army’ in a crusade to abolish slavery, the Southern states realized they could no longer maintain the slave system without forming a separate country which began with the secession of South Carolina the following year.

Why did the Federal Government build an arsenal in Virginia when they already had a factory in Springfield, MA producing military guns? In fact, Brown was a machinist at the Springfield arsenal when he planned and then carried out his Harper’s Ferry raid.

Congress appropriated money for two arsenals in 1794, with George Washington given authority to choose both sites. He located the first manufacturing facility in Massachusetts to pay off his good friend Henry Knox, another member of the Continental Army’s senior staff, whose remarkable overland movement of cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in 1775–76 broke the British siege and probably resulted in the American colonies winning the Revolutionary War.

The second arsenal was built at Harper’s Ferry, a small town on the Virginia side of the Potomac River about 40 miles above D.C. George Washington had surveyed the…