“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.
“The reason the federal government did not attempt to punish the conspirators: they didn’t want to.”
I don’t buy that. James Buchanan was President and while a Pennsylvanian he was friendly towards the South. His critics called him a “doughface”, a Northern politician sympathetic to the South.
Moreover Buchanan considered abolitionists to be violent and a danger to the country, and before Harper’s Ferry Buchanan had issued a reward for the capture of John Brown for crimes he had committed in Kansas.