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Find Refresh online or in the eye drops section at all major retailers. FSA and HSA eligible. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next, the story of one of America's most divisive figures, both of his time and perhaps hours, due to the methods he employed to aid in the destruction of slavery. We're, of course, talking about John Brown. Here to tell the story is David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown, Abolitionist.
Let's get into the story. I don't agree with John Brown and what he did. There was a legal course in America for him to follow. John Brown was a horse thief from Kansas. He stirred up trouble out there in the Kansas-Nebraska wars and all he did, and he wasn't in the majority.
A majority of people maybe have the right to change the law, but a majority of 21 does not. A slave was property. No man in this society today has a right to go into my house to steal my television set, to break my windows. No man in the 19th century had a right to go and steal another person's property. That's exactly what Brown intended to do. What Brown stood for was wrong. He was morally wrong. He killed. Slavery's wrong. I mean, we all know that. How can you do anything else but to pull a John Brown?
How can you do anything else, debradably, realizing maybe that you're sinning or that you're doing something wrong? Four million people, human beings, not numbers, not dates, not facts and figures, not words, but human beings, deserve to be free. John Brown can be best explained by the adage, one man's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.
I prefer to see him as kind of a good terrorist. John Brown was born in 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, and his father and mother were Calvinistic congregationalists. Religion was very important to John Brown. His father headed, heard a sermon by the antislavery Calvinist Samuel Hopkins in Connecticut, and this kind of antislavery Calvinism was passed down to John Brown.
My father was so strong in his beliefs that abolition was the answer, not repatriation, that at a point in my life, he actually split the church over that issue and went off and formed a whole other church called the Free Congregational Church and took half the congregation with him. He didn't attend church in the ordinary sense. He did attend church sometimes. He lived for a while in Pennsylvania, and in Pennsylvania, he went to a church that they allowed black people in the church, but the black people had to sit way in the back. For example, in the wintertime, they get frozen back there.
It was away from any heat or anything. So he got up and went into the back of the church and said, please take my seat. He told the African Americans, please take my own seat.
So he was actually dismissed from that congregation. But his main thing was reading the Bible, learning the Bible. Though I only had a very small formal education, I had worked very hard to educate myself. I read voraciously. I had memorized the entire Bible when I was very small, 10 years old. And at one point he thought of becoming a minister.
That didn't work out. He decided to, in a sense, be a practical minister by applying what he viewed as Christianity to enslaved people. His father ran a tannery, and at age 12, he was sent on a cattle drive alone by his father over the countryside. He sent me to Detroit. That's almost 200 miles from where we lived with 100 cows and a contract with the U.S. Army.
Now remember, this is the War of 1812. I made that distance by myself through pretty much an untracked wilderness, kept it all together, bartered with the men at the end, sold the cattle, got my money. And for a time I lived with a man there in Detroit. He had a young boy about my age who was black. He was a slave. And one day, for reasons I never quite understood, and I hope I never do understand, the boy did something wrong. And the man picked up a shovel and beat him about the head so severely that his eyes and his ears bled.
The boy was driven outside with a shovel, and John Brown was invited indoors to sit at the table with the white family. John Brown said, that's when I devoted my entire life to abolitionism. The injustice of that scene just never, never left him. I was outraged.
I could not believe a human being could treat someone on such slim grounds so poorly. I swore at that moment that I would be the eternal enemy of slavery and put an end to this evil. By the time he was 18, John Brown had personally led one slave to freedom and defiantly declared in public that all runaways who came knocking at his door would be welcome. Brown became a radical abolitionist. Frederick Douglass said, my commitment to enslaved people was like a candle to John Brown's shining sun.
I could live for the slave. John Brown died a slave. John Brown felt that the Calvinist idea of predestination applied to him. He felt chosen really by God to wipe out slavery. That was his mission.
That was the main thriving thing in his life. Slavery was, as John Brown viewed it, a war against an entire race of people. And he was very inspired by the Calvinist leader of the English Revolution of the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan warrior. Cromwell himself fought for freedom, but the freedom from tyrannical oppression by King Charles. He didn't really concern himself with enslaved people, but John Brown kept the biography of Oliver Cromwell right next to his Bible on his shelf.
And he became known as the Oliver Cromwell of abolitionism, the fighter, the fighter. John Brown's inspiration from religion was in a sense unique because he was the first person to, first Christian, to take up arms consistently against slavery before the Civil War. And you've been listening to David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist.
You're also hearing some readings from John Brown by Doug Dobbs. The story of John Brown continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country. Stories from our big cities and small towns, but we truly can't do this show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button.
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NYX, for your leaks, for your life. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds. When we last left off, John Brown had witnessed a slave, a child, beat over the head by a shovel, and had decided to dedicate his life to a mission he saw as truly holy, the destruction of slavery.
Let's return to the story. He went on to become a farmer and a tanner. He was married and had, well, a total of 20 children. The average family had about nine kids.
I mean, 20 was still very, very large. Seven with his first wife, she died in childbirth. I married in 1820 to a young lady named Diane The Lusk, June 21st, a June wedding. It was a great time. We had a good life together, and soon babies began to arrive.
Our very first we named John Jr. We lived from place to place as work came, and sometimes things didn't go so well. He didn't know how to keep books, so he barely kind of struggled to get by. There were many financial panics back in those days, and the economy went up and down, sometimes very unpredictably, and I got caught in many a situation where I borrowed way too much money.
I made very bad decisions sometimes about business and got caught, and I went eventually into bankruptcy at some points. They also had a lot of childhood illnesses. He lost four kids within one month of an illness that no longer exists because of a vaccine. Another child was killed when a boiling pot of water scalded her to death. They lost several others as well, so only eight of his kids outlived him.
Eight of his 20. By 1850, I'm living in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was in that year that the United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passed the Fugitive Slave Act.
Oh my. The states of the North, which had outlawed slavery, saw their laws run amok, run roughshod over, and slave catchers from the South could come into the North and drag people off with impunity. On the barrister pretexts, they could accuse someone of being a slave, perhaps even though they had never been one.
Dark days indeed. There were many who lived in Springfield who were of the African persuasion, who were in great fear of themselves being drug off in the night. Most abolitionists in the North at the time were peace people. They wanted to use persuasion and words to enforce the immorality and injustice of slavery and so forth, which was very admirable.
But slavery was, as John Brown viewed it, a war against an entire race of people, an ongoing war, even though he didn't particularly like war himself. I formed the League of Gileadites. There is danger by oneself alone, but there is strength in numbers. And so I taught them to gather together and protect one another. And I gave them knives, and I showed them how to use them.
And I said, if someone comes to take you off, don't go. It flourished. I had many friends in the black community who were dear to me as my own children and my own family.
I would do anything for them, and they would have done anything for me. He actually shocked a lot of white people because of his closeness to African Americans, not only to the fugitive slaves, and he lived among them, but also to leaders like Frederick Douglass. I deeply respected, though I disagree with him on many issues. We battled back and forth over the issue of the use of violence in the defense of freedom.
Frederick argued that should we go the route of violence, it would probably not go well for us and might not even achieve our goal. I argued back that we had to, that we were left with fewer and fewer options as time went on. Harriet Tubman I knew, the general. She called me the captain, I called her the general. She was an amazing woman. Such a vision, such strength of character, such determination, such a woman. When it comes later on to my raid on Harpers Ferry, I argued with Frederick Douglass, but Harriet Tubman was my ally. She was going to come with us.
Alas, she grew ill and was not able to come. Frederick Douglass becomes the first person to whom John Brown reveals his plan for liberating enslaved people in the South by making a raid, perhaps in Virginia, to try to emancipate enslaved people. So Frederick Douglass remains close to him, and he stays in Douglass's house in Rochester several times, and in one of his visits writes the new Constitution of the United States. He wrote what he called the Provisional Constitution because he thought the current Constitution avoided the whole slavery issue. So John Brown writes this Provisional Constitution, which begins with the idea of abolishing slavery. Slavery has to be abolished. He also rewrote the Declaration of Independence.
I mean, it takes a lot of moxie to do that. And he imagined forming a colony of African Americans in which these documents held sway. And when he was visited where he lived among mainly fugitive slaves that had escaped in the North, he really shocked a visitor who came to his house that not only were African Americans at the dinner table sitting right close to John Brown and his family, but also Brown would address them as, you know, Mr. Smith or Mr.
This or Mr. That, in the same respectful way that he addressed everybody else at the table. He was shocked by that. Here's a man who had been committed to the abolitionist cause, had written about it extensively, had a wonderful philosophical defense for why slavery should end and why abolitionism was a good thing, who was stunned that I would treat people as equals. He didn't understand me.
I didn't understand him. Most white people of the time, abolitionists included, believed that black people were inferior. In fact, many white Northerners advocated abolition only as a means of getting blacks out of the country entirely.
John Brown genuinely believed that all men were created equal. We had many setbacks through those 1850s, the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which turned Kansas into a battleground in 1854. The border Europeans came over from Missouri by the hundreds, by the thousands in fraudulent elections the fall of that year, and they would stand there and they would say, this foot of ground, one square foot around me, I claim this as my territory and that gives me the right to vote.
And then they would go in and vote, all heavily armed, all with the stink of evil about them, the sentimental. The political crisis of the 1850s in a sense begins with the Mexican War in the 1840s because what happens is that America takes over these vast territories, California, New Mexico, Arizona, but at the time they were just territories. And the question is, was slavery going to be allowed to expand into these territories or not? Then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which said that the Western territories could decide for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery. This was absolute anathema to the North because suddenly you had the prospect of all these Western states coming into the Union allowing slavery. And each of them would have representation in Congress, therefore they would overwhelm the American government, which would now become totally pro-slavery. The situation looked very, very dismal from the Northern standpoint and that's why you had the rise of the anti-slavery movement and the Republican Party, which at the time was anti-slavery. That arose around this kind of anti-slavery feeling, as did John Brown. As the decade wore on, the Dred Scott decision comes down in 1857 saying that a black man is not even a person. He is no more than cattle.
He is a thing to be owned. It was so disgusting. The insult of Charles Sumner, a United States Senator, caned on the floor of the United States Senate by a Congressman. And how does the South react? It sends Preston Brooks, the Congressman, more canes.
Hit him again. Was there no righteousness? Was there no justice? John Brown took action. I gathered my resources. Mr. Beecher down in New York City was most accommodating to send me some of his Bibles. We packed them up, Sharpe's rifles, and labeled them Beecher's Bibles, and off we went to Kansas. And you've been listening to author David Reynolds tell the story of abolitionist John Brown.
And what a story you're hearing indeed, how his faith and his religious zeal drove him. And when we come back, what happens next, here on Our American Stories. with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slipcovers made with performance fabric. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.
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That's washablesophas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health. But what about our sexual health? I've been there, feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addi.
And let me tell you, I've seen firsthand what a difference it can make in how you feel. Addi is the only FDA-approved pill clinically proven to help certain premenopausal women have more interest in sex, have more satisfying sex, and lower the stress from low libido. Addi has helped hundreds of thousands of women get their drive back, including me. Talk to your doctor or visit addyi.com to learn more about Addi, the little pink pill.
Individual results may vary. Addi, or flibanserin, is for premenopausal women with acquired generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSDD, who have not had problems with low sexual desire in the past, who have had low sexual desire no matter the type of sexual activity, the situation, or the sexual partner. This low sexual desire is troubling to them and is not due to a medical or mental health problem, problems in the relationship, or medicine, or other drug use. Addi is not for use in children, men, or to enhance sexual performance. Your risk of severe low blood pressure and fainting is increased if you drink one to two standard alcoholic drinks close in time to your Addi dose. Wait at least two hours after drinking before taking Addi at bedtime. This risk increases if you take certain prescriptions, OTC, or herbal medications, or have liver problems, and can happen when you take Addi without alcohol or other medicines. Do not take if you are allergic to any of Addi's ingredients. Allergic reaction may include hives, itching, or trouble breathing. Sometimes serious sleepiness can occur.
Common side effects include dizziness, nausea, tiredness, difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, and dry mouth. See full PI and medication guide, including boxed warning, at addi.com slash PI. Addi.
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NYX, for your leaks, for your life. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds. Also with us playing the role of John Brown is Doug Dobbs, a former AP history teacher. When we last left off, John Brown and his family had left for Kansas amid Bleeding Kansas, a dark time when pro-slavery settlers and their abolitionist counterparts fought for the future of the state.
Let's return to the story. In 1855, Brown went to Kansas with money and guns given to him by secret supporters in the East. This was the time of Bleeding Kansas, the frontier territory where pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers fought their own civil war six years before the rest of the nation. Kansas was hanging in the balance between slavery and freedom.
What was happening was very corrupt. Roughians from Missouri, a neighboring state, would go across the border and terrorize the polling booths, take over the polling booths, and they elected a fraudulent pro-slavery government to try to make it a slavery state. This pro-slavery government was actually supported by the president, Franklin Pierce.
And again, if Kansas goes to slavery, it could be like dominoes and all the western territories, the future states, could have tumbled into the pro-slavery camp and the cause would be lost. So John Brown goes there with several of his sons and family members and he says, I'm going to fight if necessary to the death. And we worked and we built and we built some cabins and we got through that winter and it was an awful time. In the summer of the next year, by then I had formed a militia to defend ourselves and I was given word that the town of Lawrence, north of us, was under threat from a Missouri militia. We raced north as fast as we could.
We got there too late. Lawrence had been sacked. The town burned. The printing presses destroyed. Lawrence, an abolitionist stronghold, a place where free soil men could lift their heads and do business and feel safe, had been destroyed.
They deliberately set fire to the Union Hotel downtown. It was an awful time. I was beside myself. I couldn't believe that people could do this to one another. He was totally enraged. He also heard over the telegraph that Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery senator, had been pummeled virtually to death on the Senate floor by a pro-slavery man with a gold-headed heavy cane and had been left for dead. John Brown was just totally appalled by this violent activity. He said, okay, the time has come.
I'm just going to have to do something more here. And he literally has several battles with weapons, with guns, with pistols, horses and so forth. And in most of these battles, he's greatly outnumbered, but he becomes a kind of terror. Even though he's outnumbered, he usually wins. He scatters the enemy.
He charges almost like Oliver Cromwell, who during the U.S. Civil War was often outnumbered by the royalist troops against him, but he's just charged right at them and dispersed them. And he became kind of a very feared figure and very unusual because abolitionists were known to be peaceful men, pacifists, and using gentle persuasion. But he was under direct threat. The pro-slavery party not only had killed many more people than the anti-slavery party had in Kansas, they had made direct threat on the whole Brown family.
They said, we're going to wipe out the Browns. So at midnight on May 26 in 1856, I went down to Pottawatomie Creek where a man named Mr. Doyle had made threats against my life to my face, not knowing who I was. I had gone through his camp under disguise. He had told me that, yes, he was going to come and kill me and my sons, that my line could be wiped out. I said, it's too much.
It's just too much. And so we went down there on the night of May 24th and we dragged him from his bed and we drug his sons out into the field and we killed them. Now I didn't do it, but I was there and I gave my consent. It was an awful thing, but we had no choice. We had to strike back. We had to strike fear into the hearts of these ruffians. We had to let them know we would not be victims forever. They could not ride roughshod over us. We had to stand up for freedom. We had to stand up.
He has them hacked to death with swords. It created chaos, these murders, and the whole court system didn't know how to handle it. And eventually, a few years later, Kansas would be emitted as a free state, in part because of the very chaos that John Brown created. We danced back and forth with those fellows around Kansas for a while and then things began to settle down. I decided to lay low for a while, came back east. Then about Christmas time, 1858, I went back to Kansas. I had decided what I needed to do. I had been having this planned for a long time. We were pulling people out through the Underground Railroad by ones and twos and threes and fours, and there was no way we were ever going to end slavery.
There was no way to end this institution. We were just draining little bits and pieces here and there. So I decided I'd experiment on a small scale. So I took my militia and we went over to Vernon County, Missouri, and we attacked two places over there, two farms. We pulled out 11 people, 11 slaves.
Took some horses, took a few other things. We figured they'd earned them. They deserved them.
Liberated them, you might say. And we headed back into Kansas and went to ground and we hid. And while we were hiding there between Christmas and New Year's, my 11 who had escaped became 12. One of them was pregnant. She gave birth.
Bless her heart. From there, we worked our way up north, back over through Illinois, back to Ohio. Eventually, we got up into Detroit and I put them on the ferry across the river and saw them cross into Canada to freedom. They were free.
They were no man's property anymore. I said to myself, that's what we're going to do. He became a kind of symbol of anti-slavery activism that then culminates in his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. So that summer, I began to lean on the plans in earnest. I rented some property down in Southern Maryland, right across the river from Harpers Ferry. And I watched the warehouse where my rifles were stored. They were marked mining equipment by this point. I was posing as Mr. Isaac Smith, a mining prospector. And so I could travel just about anywhere and look at just about anything with a prospect of maybe a mine being on their property and generating great wealth.
Everybody was glad to see me. And so I looked and I poked and I wandered and I went all over the place and I made contact with people and we set up a plan. We were going to take a group of people across the river into Harpers Ferry and we were going to steal a bunch of rifles and we were going to get up in the mountains, just south of there. We were going to build some readouts, some forts up on top of the hill there and we were going to send out folks down to the plantations in the lowlands and say, come, come away, be free. We weren't going to do by tens, not even by twenties, more hundreds.
We were going to get thousands to come out and thousands beyond that. And we were going to run them up the ridge all the way to Canada. My aim was nothing less than to crash the entire economy of the south. They had as much money wrapped up in their slaves as the north did in their factories. If I could get their factories to run away, all their bills would come due at the bank, all those loans, all those mortgages and they'd have nobody to work the fields and nobody to pick their cotton. And those bills would come due.
I could bring down the whole system, crash the whole thing. It was a prize too big to ignore. And you're listening to David Reynolds tell one heck of a story about abolitionist John Brown. You're hearing tremendous readings by Doug Dobbs, a former AP history teacher.
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That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health. But what about our sexual health? I've been there, feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addi.
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Let's get back to the story. John Brown and his tiny band of raiders, 22 in all, took up arms against slavery here at Harpers Ferry in 1859. At that time in the slave states, we had 4 million people held in perpetual bondage by less than half a million slave owners with powerful political and legal protection. The time came, October 16, 1859, and I gathered our men and we went down the road and we cut the telegraph wires and we went into Harpers Ferry. A band of raiders, white and black, stole into the sleeping town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
They called themselves the Provisional Army of the United States and took their orders from their commander in chief, John Brown. They overpowered the guard and took control of the United States armory and arsenal and the whole rifle works about a half mile up the road. The raiders secured the two bridges into town, freed slaves from surrounding farms and plantations, took hostages, cut the telegraph lines, and in just a few hours, found themselves typing for their lives.
The shots sprung at the local militia, we hunkered down in the firehouse, eventually the Marines showed up. John Brown could have escaped if he had gone earlier, but he kept waiting for more and more enslaved people to come. He delayed too long, he stalled. Maybe at one point he said, well, I'll just be a martyr for the cause, who knows, but he delayed, he got trapped, surrounded, and then Robert E. Lee was brought out from Washington and sent Jeb Stuart, both of them would become later Confederates. He came to the door of that firehouse and said, will you surrender? And I said, no, sir, I will not. And he stepped away from the door.
That's the last I saw of him. He gave a signal and the Marines came. They busted in the door and a lieutenant came through the door wearing a dress sword, didn't even have time to get his real saber. And he came at me with that sword and of all things, that sword hit my belt buckle and it bent double and snapped in half. I thought, Lord save me.
And he did. But then he began to beat me about the head with the sword and the hilt. And that was the end of that. I lost consciousness, came to, we were all captured and it would all gone south.
It was all a mess. John Braille was dragged out and people thought he was bleeding to death. He was bleeding very severely, but he answered questions for two hours. Then he was taken to jail. Then when he was brought to court, he was still so severely wounded that he had to be carried in every day on a stretcher. And for a while there, I was in grave despair that awful things would come from this to hurt people I loved. But eventually God showed me that this was indeed the best path. And I got to speak my peace in court and I got to call slavery for what it was in a Virginia courtroom.
In Thomas Jefferson's backyard, I advocated for the freedom of those who had been enslaved. He was weak from his wounds and attended most of the trial in a cot, but he spoke so eloquently for his cause that one commentator observed it was slavery on trial, not John Brown. His defense lawyers tried for an insanity plea, but he would have none of it.
Nor would Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise. They are mistaken who take him for a madman. He is cool, collected, and indomitable. He inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth and intelligence. It's a great irony of history that, as Henry David Thoreau said in his speech on John Brown, John Brown has won higher praise among Southerners than among Northerners. The Northerners say, oh, he was kind of a madman, he was kind of wild and everything. The Southerners, it's not that they agreed with John Brown, they hated what John Brown stood for, but there was this kind of code of honor in the South.
This idea of, you know, sticking by your guns and really fighting for, and also kind of remaining cool and calm. And the people that captured John Brown, the Southerners, and who witnessed him up close, said he was the coolest person that we've ever seen in danger. I mean, he had been wounded pretty severely when they were captured, but he lay there for two or three hours on the ground. He was bleeding, interrogated by Southerners, and they kept on trying to rile him and everything. And they said, well, why did you come here? He said, I just came here to emancipate enslaved people.
That's all. Who sent you here? And he said, nobody sent me here. He didn't want to expose his backers.
He has the secret six of backers of the North, but he didn't betray them. He just says, I came of my own volition, and I feel I was directed by God and by my own morality to try to free people. And so he went on and on. Booth, by the way, tried to be the new John Brown, but in reverse. He was a complete white supremacist. He thought John Brown was the grandest man of the century.
Why? Because John Brown was incredibly brave on his, on the scaffold. John Brown, you have been found guilty of murder, conspiracy, and treason, and I hereby sentence you on December 2nd in the year of our Lord, 1859, to be taken from your cell to a public place and that you be hanged until you are dead.
And may God have mercy on your soul. On the last day of his life, John Brown woke up. He actually slept very well in prison. Some people in prison would get totally depressed and lose sleep.
He says, you know, I'm, I'm sleeping fine. My, my conscience is clear. I am awaiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind and cheerfulness, feeling the strong assurance that in no other way possible could I be used to so much advantage.
To seal my testimony for God and humanity with my blood will do vastly more toward advancing the cause I have earnestly endeavored to promote than all I have done in my life before. So he woke up, filled out his will, and then when he walked out of the jail, there's a huge legend, even to this day, that he bent down and kissed an enslaved woman who was carrying a baby. It never happened. It could have happened because he did say, I would rather walk to the gallows with an enslaved woman than with the greatest clergyman on earth.
However, what did happen is that he did leave to his jailer a little note that the jailer read later. And it said, I, John Brown, am now convinced that slavery will only be abolished after very much bloodshed. This nation will have to be purged in blood. Two years later, the Civil War began, and it would cost at least 620,000 lives.
Some people have upped that number to 750,000, but a real bloodbath. Then he was taken to the gallows, taken on a cart he had to sit on his pine coffin. There was a big worry, concern that there was going to be an attempt to rescue him.
Indeed, there were rescue forces being sent. So Robert E. Lee and the later famous Stonewall Jackson, there were several later famous Confederate people who helped to organize a very heavy guard of horses and armed people around the gallows to prevent any attempt at escape. But John Brown at that point didn't even want to be captured. He, you know, he knew he was going to be a martyr. He was the first up the stairs to the gallows and he turned to his jailer and he said, I want to thank you for your services. This was his southern jailer, you know, and then he walked to the middle of the platform and he said, just don't keep me waiting forever here, okay, for like 15 or 20 minutes or something. As it turned out, he had to wait because the troops were scrambling to get into place. But finally, the gallows drops and he takes a few minutes to die. He quivers a lot in his legs, but Emerson simply said, John Brown makes the gallows as glorious as the cross.
His prayers do not exist. It is not accurate to suggest that John Brown's raid was the direct and specific cause of the Civil War. It is, however, proper to note that the evocative image of John Brown's body became the standard under which thousands upon thousands of men and boys marched off to do battle in their own land. So that's why, in a sense, you have to call him sort of a good terrorist, it seems to me. Would I recommend his militant use of violence?
No. And I think that a lot of people misinterpret him in that way. But I would defend his use of language and his devotion to principle.
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. A special thanks to David Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist. And my goodness, what a way to end the peace. John Brown predicting that the nation will have to be purged in blood.
The story of John Brown, the Oliver Cromwell of abolition, here on Our American Story. Behind every successful business is a vision. Bringing it to life takes more than effort. It takes the right financial foundation and support. That's where Chase for Business comes in.
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