John Brown
John Brown killed five pro-slavery settlers with broadswords on a Kansas creek in 1856, seized the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in 1859 to start a slave rising that did not come, and was hanged in a way that made him, to half the country, a martyr and, to the other half, the proof that the halves could not live together. He was born in Connecticut in 1800 to a tanner who was an abolitionist and raised in Ohio, and he failed at everything he tried for fifty years - tanning, sheep, land speculation, a wool business, bankruptcy in 1842 - while fathering twenty children and holding, as a Calvinist, that slavery was a sin God would punish and that he might be the instrument. Kansas made him. When the territory was opened to settlement in 1854 and its future as slave or free was to be decided by who moved there, five of his sons went, and he followed with a wagon of rifles; after pro-slavery men sacked Lawrence in May 1856 he led a party to Pottawatomie Creek by night and hacked five of their neighbours to death in front of their families. He fought through the summer, lost a son at Osawatomie, and became Osawatomie Brown in the Northern papers, which forgot the creek. The Harpers Ferry plan was three years in the making and paid for by the Secret Six, Boston abolitionists who preferred not to know the details: twenty-one men would take the armoury in Virginia, arm the slaves of the district, and carry a guerrilla war down the Appalachians. On 16 October 1859 they took it. No slaves came, the townspeople and militia shut them in the engine house, and a company of marines under Robert E. Lee stormed it on the 18th; ten of the raiders were killed, including two of his sons, and he was wounded and taken. Virginia tried him for treason in eleven days. His conduct in court and in the six weeks before the rope, calm and articulate and unrepentant, was reported in every paper in the country, and the note he handed a guard on the morning of 2 December 1859 said that the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away but with blood. Sixteen months later they began to be. The Union armies marched to a song about his body.
- Lived: 1800 CE – 1859 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: abolitionist, insurgent
