“Instead of being arrested, he was rewarded with a commission in the Union Army as was co-conspirator George Stearns. “
You’re treating events after the War had started with the days immediately after Brown’s failed revolution. If the Secret Six didn’t fear exposure for conspiracy they wouldn’t have been secret in the first place, and none of them would have fled the country nor had themselves committed.
In between Brown’s execution and the outbreak of the War the Boston literary elite, principally Emerson, had transformed Brown from a murderer into a saint. The Secret Six had no way of predicting that was going to happen.
“You’re treating events after the War had started with the days immediately after Brown’s failed revolution.”
It was not chronological complexities that prevented the Federal government from pressing charges against those that conspired to attack the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.
The reason the federal government did not attempt to punish the conspirators: they didn’t want to.