John Brown (abolitionist)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John Brown rode to his own execution on the 2nd of December 1859, sitting on his coffin in the back of a furniture wagon. The wagon carried him from the county jail, through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers, to a small field where the gallows stood. Among the uniforms was Robert E. Lee. So was the future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. John Wilkes Booth was there too, having borrowed a militia uniform to get inside the lines.

  The condemned man was an American abolitionist, born in 1800. He would be the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States. Union soldiers would later march to a song that portrayed him as a heroic martyr. Southerners saw in his name the threat of more slave rebellions. Historians still argue over whether he was a visionary or a madman, a hero or a terrorist.

  This documentary follows John Brown from a Connecticut childhood to that field in Virginia. It asks how a tanner and wool merchant came to believe that violence was the only road left, after decades of peaceful effort had failed to end slavery. It asks who paid for his plan, and who refused to join it. And it asks why a raid that drew only a handful of enslaved recruits still helped push a divided nation toward secession and war.

  62862368

• 2. Faith and Leather

  ›

  On the 9th of May 1800, John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, the fourth child of Owen Brown and Ruth Mills. His grandfather, Captain John Brown, had died in the Revolutionary War in 1776. In 1805 the family moved to Hudson, Ohio, in the Western Reserve. The region was mostly wilderness then, and it would become the most anti-slavery part of the country.

  Owen Brown ran a tannery in Hudson and employed Jesse Grant, the father of the future President Ulysses S. Grant. He hated slavery and offered his home as a safe house to fugitives on the Underground Railroad, the network that helped escaping slaves reach freedom. When Western Reserve College refused to enroll a Black man, Owen backed Oberlin College instead and served as one of its trustees from 1835 to 1844.

  Grief shaped the boy early. His mother Ruth died in December 1808, a few hours after a newborn girl died. Brown wrote in his memoir that he mourned her for years. He respected his stepmother, Sallie Root, but never felt an emotional bond with her.

  At 12, while moving cattle far from home, Brown worked for a man who beat a Black boy in front of him with an iron shovel. Brown asked why, and was told the boy was a slave. Brown told this story to his family. His son-in-law Henry Thompson said it was the moment Brown decided to devote his life to improving the condition of African Americans.

  At 16, Brown left for New England, hoping to gain a liberal education and become a Gospel minister. He studied under Moses Hallock in Plainfield, Massachusetts, and meant to go on to Amherst College. A chronic inflammation of the eyes ended those plans, and he returned to Ohio.

  Back in Hudson, Brown taught himself surveying from a book. He then opened a successful tannery outside town with his adopted brother, Levi Blakeslee. The two kept bachelor's quarters, and Brown was a good cook. A widow, Mrs. Amos Lusk, baked their bread. As the business grew to include journeymen and apprentices, Brown persuaded her to run his household, and she moved into his log cabin with her daughter Dianthe.

  Brown married Dianthe in 1820. No picture of her is known, but he described her as "a remarkably plain, but neat, industrious and economical girl". Their first child, John Jr., was born 13 months later. Over 12 years of marriage Dianthe gave birth to seven children, among them a son named Owen.

  The Bible was Brown's constant text. He knew it so thoroughly that he could catch small errors in a recitation. He never used tobacco, and he drank no tea, coffee, or alcohol. After scripture, his favorite books were Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and he liked reading about Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell. He held that "truly successful men" were those with their own libraries.

  In 1825, Brown walked away from his thriving tannery in Hudson. His destination was a Pennsylvania farm, where hiding people from slave catchers would become part of the daily routine.

  1214162060

• 3. Station Master to Bankrupt

  ›

  Richmond Township in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, held Brown from 1825 until 1835, longer than he lived anywhere else. He bought 200 acres, cleared an eighth of it, and quickly built a cabin, a two-story tannery with 18 vats, and a barn. Inside the barn was a secret, well-ventilated room for hiding escaping slaves.

  Brown moved refugees across the state line into New York, to an important Underground Railroad connection in Jamestown, about 55 miles away. The escapees rode hidden in the wagon he used for the mail, the hides for his tannery, and his survey equipment. The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development estimates that his farm helped 2,500 enslaved people on their way to Canada during ten years as a stop. Brown also recruited other stationmasters to strengthen the network.

  In 1828, President John Quincy Adams named Brown the first postmaster of Randolph Township, and President Andrew Jackson reappointed him. He carried mail about 20 miles, from Meadville through Randolph to Riceville. He surveyed new roads, taught at a school that first met in his own home, and helped bring a preacher to a Congregational Society. When he declined to serve in the militia, he paid a fine at Meadville.

  In 1829, some white families asked Brown to help drive off Native Americans who hunted in the area each year. Brown called it a mean act and refused. He told the families, "I would sooner take my gun and help drive you out of the country."

  The year 1831 began a run of losses. His son Frederick died at the age of 4, Brown fell ill, and his businesses suffered, leaving him in severe debt. In mid-1832 a newborn son died, and Dianthe died either in childbirth or just after it. Brown was left with five children: John Jr., Jason, Owen, Ruth and a second Frederick. On the 14th of July 1833 he married 17-year-old Mary Ann Day, the younger sister of his housekeeper. They eventually had 13 children, seven of them sons who worked beside their father against slavery.

  In 1836 Brown moved the family to Franklin Mills, Ohio, where he taught Sunday school. He borrowed heavily to buy land, including property along canals then under construction. He also partnered with Zenas Kent on a tannery by the Cuyahoga River, though he left before it was finished. Like many Ohio businessmen, he invested too heavily in credit and state bonds, and the Panic of 1837 ruined him. In one dispute he was jailed after occupying a farm against the claims of its new owner.

  In November 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois, for printing an abolitionist newspaper. Brown was deeply upset, and his behavior grew more militant. He vowed publicly, before God and the witnesses present, "I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery."

  His church in Franklin Mills seated Black congregants in the balcony, and Brown objected. According to Henry Thompson, Brown and his sons John, Jason and Owen were expelled from the Congregational church for taking a Black man into their own pew. Brown never joined another church.

  For three or four years he floundered from one business to another, trying to escape debt. He bred horses until he learned that buyers were using them for racing, and then gave it up. He surveyed, farmed and tanned. Brown declared bankruptcy in federal court on the 28th of September 1842. In 1843, three of his children, Charles, Peter and Austin, died of dysentery.

  By the mid-1840s Brown had a reputation as an expert in fine sheep and wool. He partnered with Colonel Simon Perkins of Akron, managing flocks and farms with his sons, and eventually lived across the street from the Perkins Stone Mansion. In 1846 the wool trade sent him east to Springfield, Massachusetts, a city that would change him.

  3031464738

• 4. Springfield and Timbuctoo

  ›

  In 1846, Brown arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts, as an agent for Ohio wool growers dealing with New England makers of woolen goods. He also saw the move as a way to develop his scheme of emancipation. The city's white leaders, including the publisher of The Republican, one of the nation's most influential newspapers, were deeply invested in the anti-slavery cause. The connections Brown made there later brought him money from New England's great merchants.

  In 1844, two years before Brown came, the city's African-American abolitionists had founded the Sanford Street Free Church, now known as St. John's Congregational Church. It became one of the most prominent abolitionist platforms in the country. Brown belonged to the Free Church from 1846 until he left in 1850, and there he heard lectures by Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

  In 1847, after speaking at the church, Douglass stayed up a night talking with Brown. Douglass later wrote that after that night he kept writing and speaking against slavery but grew "less hopeful for its peaceful abolition." In 1848 Brown helped publicize his friend Henry Highland Garnet's republication of David Walker's An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, first printed in 1829.

  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required authorities in free states to help return escaped slaves, and it penalized anyone who aided an escape. In response, Brown founded the League of Gileadites, a militant group meant to stop the recapture of fugitives. Free Black men such as Eli Baptist, William Montague and Thomas Thomas ran it, at the risk of being seized by slave catchers and sold into slavery. As Brown left Springfield, he told the League to act "quickly, quietly, and efficiently" to protect escapees. From the founding of the League onward, no one was ever taken back into slavery from Springfield.

  Private sorrow continued. Brown's daughter Amelia died in 1846, and his daughter Emma died in 1849.

  In 1848, bankrupt and having lost the family house, Brown heard about Gerrit Smith's grants of Adirondack land to poor Black men. The site was so remote that Brown later called it Timbuctoo. He decided to move his family there and run a farm where he could guide the Black settlers trying to build farms of their own. He bought land at North Elba, near Lake Placid, from Smith for $1 an acre. The spot has been called "the highest arable spot of land in the State."

  The family lived about two years in a small rented house. After several years back in Ohio, Brown had the current house built as a place of refuge for them while he was away. His youngest son Salmon recalled, "frugality was observed from a moral standpoint, but one and all we were a well-fed, well-clad lot." Since 1895 the property has belonged to New York State as the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, and it is now a National Historic Landmark.

  505152371

• 5. Bleeding Kansas

  ›

  From 1854 to 1860, Kansas Territory was torn by a state-level civil war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces, a period known as Bleeding Kansas. Voters were supposed to decide whether Kansas entered the Union as a slave state or a free state. But it was unclear who counted as a voter, and widespread fraud favored the pro-slavery side, as a Congressional investigation confirmed. Eight killings between 1854 and 1856 were attributable to slavery politics, and abolitionists had taken no organized action against their opponents.

  In the spring of 1855, five of Brown's sons moved to the territory: John Jr., Jason, Owen, Frederick and Salmon. Brown followed later that year with his son Oliver and his son-in-law Henry Thompson, in a wagon loaded with weapons and ammunition. He stayed near Osawatomie with his half-sister Florella Adair and her husband, the Reverend Samuel Adair. From there he rallied support and became the leader of the anti-slavery forces.

  Pro-slavery rhetoric was fierce. The writer Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign declared that his side would make Kansas a slave state "though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims." On the 21st of May 1856, a sheriff-led posse from Lecompton sacked Lawrence, the center of anti-slavery activity. The posse destroyed two abolitionist newspapers and the Free State Hotel. One man died, a border ruffian.

  The next day, a telegraph report arrived of Preston Brooks caning Senator Charles Sumner in the United States Senate. Brown was outraged by the pro-slavery violence. He was equally angry at what he saw as a weak response from free-state settlers, whom he called "cowards, or worse."

  During the night of the 24th of May and the morning of the 25th, under Brown's supervision, his sons and other settlers took five pro-slavery settlers from their homes and killed them. This was the Pottawatomie massacre. It opened the bloodiest stretch of Bleeding Kansas, three months of retaliatory raids and battles in which 29 people died.

  Henry Clay Pate, who had taken part in the sacking of Lawrence and held a commission as a Deputy United States Marshal, set out with thirty men to hunt Brown down. During the search, Brown's sons Jason and John Junior were captured, charged with murder and thrown in irons. Brown and a free-state militia gathered to confront Pate.

  On the 2nd of June 1856, at the Battle of Black Jack, Brown, nine followers and 20 local men defended the Free State settlement at Palmyra, Kansas. Pate and 22 of his men were taken prisoner.

  In August, more than 300 Missourians under General John W. Reid crossed into Kansas to destroy the Free State settlements at Osawatomie. On the morning of the 30th of August, they shot and killed Brown's son Frederick and his neighbor David Garrison. Brown, outnumbered more than seven to one, placed his 38 men behind natural cover along the road. Firing from cover, they killed at least 20 of Reid's men and wounded 40 more. Then Reid ordered his men to dismount and charge into the woods, and Brown's group scattered across the Marais des Cygnes River. One man was killed in the retreat and four were captured. The Missourians plundered and burned Osawatomie.

  Though defeated, Brown won national attention for his bravery and shrewdness against overwhelming odds. Many Northern abolitionists now saw him as a hero. In September, at least 2,700 pro-slavery Missourians invaded again, and a skirmish broke out near Lawrence on the 14th. Serious violence was averted when the new governor, John W. Geary, ordered the warring parties to disarm and disband and offered clemency to former fighters on both sides. Brown was now infamous, and federal warrants were issued for his arrest. From then on he chose his routes and hosts with care.

  6166696863

• 6. The Virginia Scheme

  ›

  Mary Brown told an interviewer, while her husband awaited execution, that he had been planning his great attack for 20 years. Frederick Douglass said the plans came before Kansas. In his account, Brown spent the years between 1842 and 1849 settling business affairs, moving his family to Timbuctoo, and organizing in his own mind a raid to strike a blow against the whole slave system by running slaves off Southern plantations. His first biographer, James Redpath, wrote that Brown secretly cherished the idea of leading an insurrection as "the American Moses."

  Brown's own words show his confidence. "A few men in the right, and knowing that they are right, can overturn a mighty king," he said. "Fifty men, twenty men, in the Alleghenies would break slavery to pieces in two years." He guarded the plan closely. Jeremiah Anderson, one of the raiders, said Brown took care not to share it even with his men. Brown's son Owen said in 1873 that he doubted his father had ever written down the entire plan.

  Through most of 1857, Brown met abolitionists in Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut to raise money. In January 1857, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, introduced him to influential Boston abolitionists. The Boston merchant Amos Adams Lawrence secretly gave him a large amount of cash. Most of the money came from a group later called the Secret Six: Sanborn, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  Recent research has also highlighted Mary Ellen Pleasant, an African American entrepreneur and abolitionist, who donated $30,000. William Lloyd Garrison backed Brown too, though as a pacifist he disagreed about the need for violence. In Boston, Brown met Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  The weapons came from several sources. The Massachusetts Committee pledged 200 Sharps rifles and ammunition, stored at Tabor, Iowa, and originally meant for free-staters in Kansas. Horatio N. Rust helped acquire 1,000 pikes for the planned rebellion. Everything was sent to the Kennedy Farmhouse in Sharpsburg, Maryland. Brown's target was the armory, arsenal and rifle factory at Harpers Ferry, which held an estimated 100,000 muskets and rifles. The better weapons were meant for Black and white officers, while the remaining fighters would carry pikes, shotguns and muskets.

  In January 1858, Brown visited Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, and wrote a Provisional Constitution to govern a new state in the region of his invasion. Then, on the 10th of May, he convened a Constitutional Convention in Chatham, Ontario, with Dr. Martin Delany's help. One-third of Chatham's 6,000 residents were fugitive slaves. Brown met Harriet Tubman there, and she helped him recruit. The convention's 34 Black and 12 white delegates adopted his constitution. Brown was elected commander-in-chief, John Henrie Kagi became his "Secretary of War," and Richard Realf was named "Secretary of State." Yet few delegates volunteered to fight.

  A crisis followed. Hugh Forbes, an English mercenary who had fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi, grew worried about Brown's strategy and tried to expose the plans to Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson. The Secret Six feared their names would become public. Howe and Higginson wanted no delay, but Parker, Stearns, Smith and Sanborn insisted on postponement, and Stearns and Smith carried the most weight as major donors. To throw Forbes off the trail, Brown went back to Kansas in June and stayed about six months.

  On the 20th of December, Brown led a raid in Missouri that liberated 11 slaves, took two white men captive, and looted horses and wagons. The Governor of Missouri offered a $3,000 reward for his capture. On the 20th of January 1859, Brown set out to take the freed people to Detroit and then by ferry to Canada. In Chicago, Allan Pinkerton, John Jones and Henry O. Wagoner arranged and raised the fare to Detroit and bought supplies. Mary Jane Richardson Jones, wife of John Jones, provided new clothes for Brown and his men, including the garb Brown was hanged in six months later.

  On the 12th of March 1859, Brown met Douglass and Detroit abolitionists George DeBaptiste and William Lambert at William Webb's house. DeBaptiste proposed blowing up some of the South's largest churches. Brown rejected the idea, feeling that humanity ruled out such needless bloodshed. Harriet Tubman, whom Brown called "General Tubman," joined his planning, raised funds, and offered her knowledge of support networks in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. Douglass and Garrison still opposed his tactics.

  Brown's men gathered at Springdale, Iowa, a Quaker settlement, and later at the Kennedy Farmhouse, four to five miles from Harpers Ferry. His daughter Annie and his daughter-in-law Martha, wife of Oliver, cooked and kept house there from August through September. Annie also acted as lookout and sometimes turned away curious neighbors.

  The raiders included three of Brown's sons: Owen, Oliver and Watson. Owen would be the only one to survive. Kagi, about 24, served as second in command and had printed copies of the constitution in a shop in Hamilton, Ontario. Aaron Dwight Stevens, a former soldier, drilled the men. Dangerfield Newby, 44, had been born a slave, escaped, and returned to Virginia to fight. Others included Shields Green, who had escaped slavery, John Anthony Copeland Jr., a free Black man, and Lewis Sheridan Leary, a harness maker freed by his white father.

  On the way to the farmhouse, Brown wrote to Kagi that he would sign into a Hagerstown hotel as "I. Smith and Sons."

  9189979487

• 7. Raid, Trial, Last Words

  ›

  The raiders marched on Harpers Ferry on the night of the 16th of October 1859. Brown intended to take the armory, the arsenal, the town and then the rifle factory. After that he would free the enslaved people in town and move south with any who wished to join. He told his men to take prisoners from those who disobeyed and to fight only in self-defense. They entered without resistance, cut the telegraph wires, and captured the armory, where a single watchman stood guard.

  Hostages came next, rounded up from nearby farms. One was Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington. The raiders also told local slaves that their liberation was at hand. When an eastbound Baltimore and Ohio Railroad train approached, Brown stopped it and then, for reasons no one has explained, let it go. At the next station with a working telegraph, the conductor wired the railroad's headquarters in Baltimore. The railroad then alerted President Buchanan and Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise.

  By the morning of the 18th of October, a company of U.S. Marines under First Lieutenant Israel Greene had surrounded the engine house, later known as John Brown's Fort. Colonel Robert E. Lee of the army held overall command. Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart approached and promised the raiders their lives would be spared if they surrendered. Brown replied, "No, I prefer to die here."

  Stuart signaled, and the Marines broke down the door with sledgehammers and a makeshift battering ram. Greene cornered Brown and struck him several times, wounding his head. Within three minutes, Brown and the survivors were prisoners.

  Brown's men had killed four townspeople and one Marine, and ten people were wounded. Four of the raiders were never captured. Most of the enslaved people were returned to their slaveholders, though some escaped. A man named Phil was captured with Brown, and a man named Jim drowned in the Shenandoah. Governor Wise, Senator James M. Mason and Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio arrived to question Brown for several hours. He admitted he had not received the support he expected from white or Black people.

  Governor Wise asked that Brown be tried in a Virginia state court, and President Buchanan did not object. The charge was therefore treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, not against the nation. That choice made Virginia the offended sovereign, and it deepened the divide between North and South.

  Brown was tried with the survivors Copeland, Coppoc, Green and Stevens on charges of murder, conspiracy to foment a slave insurrection, and treason. On the 2nd of November, after a week-long trial in Charles Town and 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Brown guilty on all three counts. He was sentenced to hang in public a month later. Reporters sent their accounts by the new telegraph, and papers across the country reprinted them. It was the first trial in the United States to be reported nationally.

  Before the verdict, the judge and the prosecutor, Andrew Hunter, kept reporters away from Brown, fearing his words would inflame tensions, especially among the enslaved. Brown was frustrated, because he wanted to explain his motives through the press. Once he was convicted, the restriction ended. He spoke with reporters and anyone else who came, except pro-slavery clergy. He received more letters than ever before and wrote hundreds of eloquent replies, many published in newspapers.

  Brown refused to be rescued. Silas Soule, a friend from Kansas, got himself arrested for drunken brawling so he could slip into the Jefferson County Jail and offer to break Brown out. Brown declined. At 59, he said, he was too old to live as a fugitive, and he preferred to die as a martyr for the cause. He wrote to his family that his blood would do "vastly more" for the cause than all he had done before, and that "I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose."

  From exile on Guernsey, the French writer Victor Hugo tried to win a pardon with an open letter published in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. He warned of a possible civil war and told America, "You save your shame, but you kill your glory." His 1861 pamphlet, John Brown par Victor Hugo, included an engraving of a hanged man that became widely linked to the execution.

  On the 1st of December, Mary Ann Brown visited her husband for several hours, with Wise's permission. On the last morning, Brown read his Bible and wrote a final letter to her that enclosed the will he had written the day before. He believed that famous people's last words were valued, so he handed his jailor, Avis, the words he wished to be remembered by: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

  Brown, who had refused to have a minister with him, walked to the gallows without any sign of fear. He was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and pronounced dead 35 minutes later. Walt Whitman, in his poem Year of Meteors, described watching the execution.

  86991009636

• 8. Martyr or Madman

  ›

  Even before the trial ended, Professor of anatomy Arthur E. Peticolas asked prosecutor Andrew Hunter and Governor Wise for Brown's body to dissect. National attention led to the body being given to Brown's wife instead. Brown himself had wanted his body burned, the ashes urned, and his dead sons dug up and treated the same way. The sheriff of Jefferson County said Virginia law did not allow burning, so the body went north in a wooden coffin with the noose still around its neck.

  The body was supposed to be prepared for burial in Philadelphia. When Mary and the coffin arrived on the 3rd of December, Mayor Alexander Henry met the train with many policemen and warned that order could not be kept if the casket stayed. He had a fake casket, covered with flowers and flags, carefully lifted from the coach. The crowd followed the decoy while the real casket went on. Many pro-slavery medical students and faculty in Philadelphia left the city en masse on the 21st of December, never to return.

  The coffin passed through Troy, New York, and Rutland, Vermont, then crossed Lake Champlain by boat to North Elba. Brown was washed, dressed and placed, with difficulty, in a 5 ft 10 in walnut coffin. He was buried on the 8th of December 1859, after a five-day journey. The Reverend Joshua Young offered a prayer, and James Miller McKim and Wendell Phillips spoke. Church bells rang across the North and minute guns were fired. Black businesses across the North had closed on the day of his execution. Watson Brown's body was found and buried at North Elba in 1882. In 1899 the remains of 12 other raiders, including Brown's son Oliver, arrived there. They could not be identified well enough for separate graves, so they share a single casket donated by the town, with a collective plaque.

  The pro-slavery activist Edmund Ruffin bought some blades from Brown's pikes and sent one to the governor of each slave state as a reminder of Northern enmity. Ruffin is also credited with firing one of the first cannons at Fort Sumter in 1861. Jefferson Davis feared "thousands of John Browns." The South reorganized its decrepit militia system, and by 1861 those militias formed a ready-made Confederate army.

  On the 14th of December 1859, the U.S. Senate appointed a bipartisan committee to investigate whether any citizens had supplied Brown's men with arms or money. It heard 32 witnesses. The report, written by chairman James Murray Mason, a pro-slavery Democrat from Virginia, appeared in June 1860. It found no direct evidence of a conspiracy but implied that Republican doctrines had caused the raid. Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln rejected any connection and called Brown "insane." One senator wrote to his wife that members on both sides were mostly armed. Mississippi Congressman William Barksdale attacked Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania with a Bowie knife in the House. The historian James M. McPherson judged that Brown backers Samuel Howe and George Stearns told several falsehoods in their testimony.

  Northern abolitionists were divided. Immediately after the raid, William Lloyd Garrison called it "well-intended but sadly misguided" and "wild and futile" in The Liberator. Yet he defended Brown's character and argued that supporters of the American Revolution could not consistently condemn him. Frederick Douglass said Brown's zeal for his race was "as the burning sun to my taper light," adding, "I could live for the slave, but he could die for him." Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked that Brown "will make the gallows glorious like the Cross."

  Harriet Tubman thought Brown was the greatest white man who ever lived, and she said he did more for American Blacks than Lincoln did. In 1863, Julia Ward Howe wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic to the tune of John Brown's Body, with the line "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."

  Historian James Loewen found that American textbooks, until about 1890, treated Brown as perfectly sane. From about 1890 until 1970 they generally portrayed him as insane. Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, wrote a favorable biography in 1910, but it also called Brown a muddled, bumbling and homicidal madman. In 1978, the historian Albert Fried replied that those who judged Brown dysfunctional were really revealing their own predilections. In 1931, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans put up a counter-monument to Heyward Shepherd, a free Black man and the first fatality of the raid. They claimed without evidence that he had been a representative of local Black people who would not take part.

  The argument continues. Paul Finkelman compares Brown to modern terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh, yet says he was "a bad tactician" and "not crazy." James Gilbert argues that Brown's deeds fit contemporary definitions of terrorism. David S. Reynolds credits Brown with starting the Civil War and warns that it is misleading to equate him with modern terrorists. Stephen B. Oates holds that Brown had no racism and treated Black people as equals.

  Malcolm X once said that white people could not join his Organization of Afro-American Unity. But he added, "if John Brown were still alive, we might accept him."

  25923678