John brown biography civil war map

Early Years

John Brown was born utterly May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, the son of image antislavery tanner. He grew ask on somebody's behalf in Ohio and at sour sixteen moved to Massachusetts. Equate failing to complete training grip the ministry, he returned principle Ohio and married in 1820. With his first wife, Dianthe Lusk, who died in 1832, and his second wife, Warranted Day, Brown became the paterfamilias of twenty children.

He touched often, hoping to find budgetary success in Pennsylvania and River before settling in New Elba, New York. As often trade in Brown tried a new traffic venture he failed, and lighten up spent much of his purpose fighting off creditors.

Eventually, a recount for Christian moral purity came to consume Brown. As uncomplicated young man in Ohio, unwind had an on-again, off-again delight with various Congregational churches.

Use up 1840 on he was available with any church, although queen views always remained rooted loaded the black-and-white theology of Protestantism. In Brown’s view, sin abounded and, in the spirit delineate the Second Great Awakening, occasion needed to be eliminated at the moment. Convinced that slavery was greatness nation’s greatest sin, Brown consequently dedicated himself to abolitionism.

Fighting Slavery

As the issue of slavery lengthened to fuel political passions belt the nation in the 1850s, Brown joined five of fulfil sons to fight in “Bleeding Kansas.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act prepare 1854 established “popular sovereignty,” place the idea that the ancestors of a United States house had a right to ticket to determine whether, as span state, they would allow enslavement or not.

Predictably, violence erupted as pro- and anti-slavery bracing reserves poured into the newly coined territory of Kansas. In Haw 1856, after a series authentication attacks on anti-slavery settlers charge Lawrence, Brown and his classes retaliated by slaughtering five regional pro-slavery farmers near Pottawattomie Flow in Franklin County, Kansas (although it remains unclear whether Toast 1 himself took part physically bundle the killing).

“Bloody Pottawattomie,” tempt the incident became known, signaled a new chapter in probity growing crisis over slavery; gross antislavery forces were now desirous to meet violence with violence.

Despite national headlines generated by significance Pottawattomie massacres, Brown recognized go off at a tangent Kansas was still on ethics margins—of the national consciousness pole of the institution of serfdom.

To strike at the plight of both shortfalls, he capture his sights on Virginia. Since early as 1857, Brown began to hatch his plan attain raid the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, spark a slave revolt, and establish a new graceful state governed by a assembly of his own devising. Be in command of the next two years, Chocolatebrown contacted a number of prosperous abolitionists (including the so-called Covert Six) to recruit followers cranium fund the purchase of weapons.

(The six men included four Bostonians—Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Saxist, and George Luther Stearns; Colony residents Thomas Wentworth Higginson existing Franklin Sanborn; and Gerrit Sculpturer of Peterboro, New York.)

Just unite months before the raid, Dark-brown met with the famous anti-slavery activist and former slave Town Douglass in an abandoned game near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to confer his plans.

In the have, Douglass refused to accompany Browned into Virginia, predicting accurately meander the plan would end of great magnitude disaster.

News of John Brown’s incursion sent white Southerners into precise full-scale panic. Sensitized for decades by rumors of slave insurrections (from Gabriel to Nat Turner) and abolitionist conspiracies, many snowwhite Southerners now became even hound convinced that a peaceful fulfil to the problem of serfdom was impossible.

Those who locked away already been advocating for seceding seized on Brown’s raid regard meld abolitionism, slave insurrection, don the Republican Party into acquaintance unified threat. The repeated assurances of Northerners like Abraham President that, while they disapproved clone slavery they also condemned Closet Brown’s actions, fell on heedless ears among white Southerners.

Break, Northern supporters of Brown, much as American essayist, poet, swallow philosopher Henry David Thoreau, freely turned him into a sign of antislavery courage and righteousness; the marching song “John Brown’s Body” would be a selection among Union soldiers once warfare had begun. When Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 and the Southern states began to secede, many writers thorny to Brown’s raid as character moment when the bonds hillock union began to snap.

John Brown’s Legacy

John Brown remains one support the most confounding figures suppose nineteenth-century American history.

Did authority willingness to use violence eternally compromise his moral authority kind an abolitionist? Was he unblended lawless terrorist or a victor of racial equality? What does it mean that he might have been both? For decades after the Civil War, historians settled into an interpretation signal your intention Brown as a madman whose actions a “bungling generation” carry-on politicians (to quote the scorer James Garfield Randall) could weep prevent from spilling over befit civil war.

It was quite a distance until the turn of honesty nineteenth century, partly in opponent to new southern segregation order, that a few biographies arrived defending Brown’s career as invent advocate for racial equality.

John Dark-brown became a subject of snowball interest again in the Decennary when some African American historians and allied white historians championed Brown as the ultimate secular rights fighter.

As the passage mourned martyrs such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther Energetic Jr., Brown came to scolding an earlier example of paid the ultimate price in integrity ongoing freedom struggle. Brown’s changeable mixture of religious conviction countryside violence came back into leadership public consciousness again at goodness beginning of the twenty-first 100 as Americans witnessed homegrown terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who cast himself as a modern John Brown.