John Brown
John BrownBorn in Torrington, Connecticut on May 9, 1800, John Brown was the
son of a wandering New Englander. Brown spent much of his youth in
Ohio, where he was taught in local schools to resent compulsory
education and by his parents to revere the Bible and hate slavery. As a
boy he herded cattle for General William Hull�s army during the war of
1812; later he served as foreman of his family�s tannery. In 1820 he
married Dianthe Lusk, who bore him seven children; five years later they
moved to Pennsylvania to operate a tannery of their own. Within a year
after Dianthe�s death in 1831, Brown wed sixteen year old Mary Anne
Day, by whom he fathered thirteen more children.
During the next twenty-four years Brown built and sold several
tanneries, speculated in land sales, raised sheep, and established a
brokerage for wool growers. Every venture failed, for he was too much
a visionary, not enough a businessman. As his financial burdens
multiplied, his thinking became increasingly metaphysical and he began
to brook over the plight of the weak and oppressed. He frequently sought
the company of blacks, for two years living in a freedmen�s community
in North Elba, New York. In time he became a militant abolitionist, a
"conductor" on the Underground Railroad, and the organizer of a
self-protection league for free blacks and fugitive slaves.
By the time he was fifty, Brown was entranced by visions of slave
uprisings, during which racists paid horribly for their sins, and he came
to regard himself as commissioned by God to make that vision a reality.
In August 1885 he followed five of his sons to Kansas to help make the
state a haven for anti-slavery settlers. The following year, his hostility
toward slave-staters exploded after they burned and pillaged the
free-state community of Lawrence. Having organized a militia unit
within his Osawatomie River colony, Brown led it on a mission of
revenge. On the evening of May twenty-third, 1856, he and six
followers, including four of his sons, visited the homes of pro-slavery
men along Pottawatomie Creek, dragged their unarmed inhabitants into
the night, and hacked them to death with long-edged swords. At once,
"Old Brown of Osawatomie" became a feared and hated target of
slave-staters.
In autumn 1856, temporarily defeated but still committed to his
vision of a slave insurrection, Brown returned to Ohio. There and during
two subsequent trips to Kansas, he developed a grandiose plan to free
slaves throughout the South. Provided with moral and financial support
from prominent New England abolitionists, Brown began by raiding
plantations in Missouri but accomplished little. IN the summer of 1859
he transferred his operations to western Virginia, collected and army of
twenty-one men, planned to arm the thousands of chattels who, learning
of his crusade, would flock to his side. Instead, numerous bands of
militia and a company of United States Marines under Bvt. Colonel
Robert E. Lee hastened to the river village, where they trapped the
raiders inside the fire-engine house and on the eighteenth stormed the
building. The fighting ended with ten of Brown�s people killed and
seven captured, Brown among them.
During his trial, Brown�s last speech attempting to justify himself
infront of the Commonwealth of Virginia in Charlestown...
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