In May 1856, in response topro-enslavement ruffians attacking Lawrence, Kansas, Brown and his sons attacked and killed five pro-enslavement settlers at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Brown Desired a Rebellion After acquiring a bloody reputation in Kansas, Brown set his sights higher. He became conv...
Was John Brown in Bloody Kansas? Was John Brown a feminist? Did people think John Brown was insane at the time? Did northerners support John Brown? Did John Brown think that violence was needed? Was John Brown a Jehovah's witness?
A friend of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, both of whom admired Brown but were unwilling to participate in his raid, Brown was a veteran of ''Bloody Kansas'' and spent more than a year planning his raid. Within hours, however, the men were surrounded and John Brown's r...
By the time he was 50 years old, Brown was convinced God had selected him as the champion to lead slaves into freedom, and if that required the use of force, well, that was God’s will, too. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave citizens of those two territories the right to ...
Bleeding Kansas Brown’s first militant actions as part of the abolitionist movement didn’t occur until 1855. By then, two of his sons had started families of their own, in the western territory that eventually became the state ofKansas. ...
How did he, alone, come to the conclusion he came to: to engage in bloody acts of war, to be the advance force, to hurl himself into battle when no one else was willing to act? John Brown is the common man who is able to confront the disappointment and frustra...
In January 1858, Brown left Kansas to seek support for his planned Southern invasion. In April, he sought out a diminutive former slave, Harriet Tubman, who had made eight secret trips to Maryland's Eastern Shore to lead dozens of slaves north to freedom. Brown was so impressed that he be...
John Brown was now at his work; no longer the mere fingers, but the soul of him had found a task. He set before himself this object, to free Kansas from the slave-holders’ grip. The Free-State men had met and agreed to pay no taxes to a Legislature illegally elected. They organize...
Brown, his face slashed and bloody, holds one of his dying sons in his arms. Wax bodies litter the ground. Down the hall, Brown is sentenced to death in a courtroom scene, followed by a touching tableau of goggle-eyed John saying goodbye to his wife, and then a final diorama of ...
School textbooks have not forgiven Brown for his interracial band, his fearlessness, and his armed response to slavery. The textbook, “The American Pageant” by Bailey and Kennedy describes Brown’s exploit as “insane,”“mad exploit,”“crack-brained scheme,”“bloody purpose.” ...