Just finished "Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War":



https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312429266?tag=arfcom00-20

I believe someone here recommended it in one of the Civil War threads; and, I can enthusiastically add my endorsement.  It really got into the nitty-gritty detail of Brown, where he came from, who he was, and all the whats-wheres-whos and whys.  If you are looking for granular details of him, "Bleeding Kansas", and the Harper's Ferry raid, this book haz it.

For me... even after reading it, I still really don't know what to think of the man.  Lunatic?  Murderer?  Prophet?  Visionary?  Saint?  Maybe all of the above, or none.  Certainly Malcolm X thought highly of the man... but you would expect that.

Frankly, anytime ANYone pulls the white-knighting, "I'm doing this just out of the goodness of my heart!!!", I have to fly the



flag.  Are you sure you're not really "See how wonderful and caring I am!!!" virtue signaling?  Fredrick Douglas, who was a (half)black man & former slave... well, it would make perfect sense that he would be a foaming-at-the-mouth abolitionist!

But John Brown was white; what was his stake in this?  The book revealed that he took loss hard, even of a pet; after he lost a wife, he wrote that he wanted to die.  He was hanged for his part in the Harper's Ferry raid; was this actually "suicide-by-police"?  It certainly didn't look like he'd planned to get out of there alive.  I know that as a young man, I struggled greatly with depression; had there been a WWII-type glorious war I could have throw myself into, slaying dragons and rescuing princesses and all that stuff, I would have done it in a heartbeat.  Dying in vainglorious battle & having stirring sonnets sung about me for centuries to come... right up my alley, baby!

And I think they made a mistake by hanging him; that simply made him a martyr (which I suspect/believe was his plan all along).  Had they simply locked him up in the looney bin for the rest of his life (as they considered), he would have been just a sad & pathetic old man, and quickly forgotten.  But, since he was old & near the end of his life, he wasn't likely to have any further real influence; but as a martyr, he could go on "fighting the good fight" forever.  And we see this today, with the leftist idiots in the "John Brown gun club", who are training to kill conservatives; apparently, slavery and lynchings are still happening daily, in every single town & hamlet, so we need these "modern-day heroes".

So what sayeth you, O Hivemind?  John Brown: hero?  Looney toon?  Visionary?  What?

Highly complex, troubled soul.  Hard man to get a handle on.  He was many things to many different people.  Who he really was we'll probably never know.

And gentlemen, that might just be the best FPNI I have ever seen.

John Brown’s Body is a pretty lit tune.

Looney toon is my vote. I think you nailed correctly some of the issues with taking him seriously. He also has to be viewed in context of the Second Great Awakening and cultural mysticism of that time.

For a hilarious but historically well-researched take on him and Harper’s Ferry, George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman and the Angel of the Lord” is a great read. (All the Flashman books are great reads  - as are all of Fraser’s many books).

https://www.amazon.com/Flashman-Angel-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0452274400

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I understand his body lies a'moulderin' in the grave.

Thanks, I'll check out the audiobook.

I heard he was harassing this reggae singer and he was shot.  He didn’t shoot the deputy though.

John Brown’s Body has several lit tunes.

FJB

I don't know enough to assess anything other than he was an abolitionist fanatic willing to resort to violence. At least he had a righteous cause.

I don't know what to think about him, but this is the most ironic sign combo at Harper's Ferry.
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If I remember my history correctly, John Brown was captured because he was betrayed by
a black slave. Someone who John Brown was trying to save.

That incident is not mentioned in any of the modern retellings of the story. That I've seen
anyway.

Zealot.

bump 4 da day cru

Wish I had that chunk o hair. That is all.

He was nuts.

That is the part that people should learn. If slaves had become very uncooperative when the civil war started the whole thing would of ended in days. Lot of the slaves were like opressed in third world dictatorships. Horribly treated and oddly loyal to their masters. Of course many of those bashing John Brown are really not paying attention to how communism is pretty close to making them into slaves. Will formerly free people turn on someone that tries to rescue them from a communist gulag?   There was a case in the phillipines during WW2 where a prisoner of war camp was liberated. Which of course made most prisoners very happy. There were a few that freaked out that "O no the Japanese will be mad". Bizarre way of thinking.

He was very active in my AO and depending on which side of the state line you live on, he is either a treasonous revolutionary or a hero. Complicated man but he died for his convictions and I respect that.

They made a documentary.  That's John Brown at the lower right.

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FPNI. Well said. I will also recommend Midnight Rising. Great book. So was Confederates in the Attic by the same author.

IMO, contributory factors should be considered.

Second Great Awakening.  Yankee ship captain James Riley was shipwrecked in Africa where he was captured and enslaved by Abrabs.  He is forced marched across the Sahara and had to survive on drinking urine.  Ransom is paid by the British ambassador and Riley returned home and wrote of his experience in An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig “Commerce,” Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa , in the Month of August, 1815, with an Account of the Sufferings of the Surviving Officers and Crew, who were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs of the Great African Desert or Zahahrah. His book was the best seller of its time and it influenced many New England Americans against the evils of slavery.  Modern book on the subject matter is Suffering in the Sahara.

A lot of Kansans (and Missourians) came from the Applacians Mountains.  These are descendants of people who during the American Civil War used the war to seek revenge for a slight/wrong/feud.  Others like John Brown came from Yankee land where they were part of the Second Great Awakening.  Anyone not agree that oil and water don't mix?

Throw the Missouri Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Act that required citizens to assist in the apprehension of slaves (this enraged the Norhtern States) and we have the powder keg of the era.

Factoid:  first man killed in the John Brown Raid on Harper's Ferry was a freeman, Shepherd, who was in RR man responsible for the luggage at the depot.

This post pretty much nailed my thoughts on the man.  He was a very complicated person and it is difficult now, as it was then, to determine whether he was a hero or villain.

I live in John Brown's AO, if you couldn't tell from my handle, and have found and visited many of the places where his actions occurred to include Harpers Ferry.  During my studies, I ran across some interesting testimony about the Pottawatomie Massacre from James Townsley, a man who accompanied Brown on this raid. Also, some affidavits from the victims of Pottawatomie. It makes for some interesting reading.

Statement of James Townsley

Affidavits filed regarding the Pottawatomie Massacre

He was probably bat shit crazy, but this is where I stand.

Some absolutely fascinating history happened along the Missouri / Kansas state line in those days.

Like any other disease (and slavery was a disease) it had origins that preceded him.  You could consider slavery our fatal flaw.

rabid dog brought down by a R E Lee.

Yup.  People were watching him closely on the gallows, and he didn't shake nor cry; he went to his death like a man.  Whatever you think of him, props for that.

Evidently the band thought highly of him.

His hanging was watched by an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth.

Thank you for those.  I was figuring Arf would come up with further info.

He’s one of the guys Antifa idolizes.

Look up John Brown Gun Club. Bunch of armed commies.

Yup, referenced that in the OP.  Again, apparently slavery is still in full swing, so we need these modern-day "heroes".

Meh.  So far as I know, every country had slavery.  Never understood the wailing & gnashing of teeth over American slavery, but not Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or every other country's slave trade.

Yeah, good cause; just maybe cold-blooded, 1st-degree murder wasn't the best way to go about righting it.  The British ended their slavery in the 1830's, and w/o a single drop of blood shed.

So was Quantrill’s savage attack on Lawrence. The MoKan border was a wild, cold blooded place at the time.

Not saying that any of it was necessarily right.

He was a true believer willing to die for his beliefs.

John Brown wanted to spark off an armed slave revolt and secure their freedom through force of arms.  Antifact does not distinguish that apart from overthrowing of a government (in this case the Constitution).   They take him out of context much like their predecessors, the bolshelvik German Spartacus movement took their name from that Thracian who raised a slave army against Rome.

He was a terrorist.

He and the Harper's Ferry attack really should be paid attention to because we may very well be living though an echo of that piece of history.

Stonewall Jackson cited this event as a turning point for him. Before that event he was very much on the side of a unified America. He was a proud American patriot.

After the trial and sentencing of John Brown, whose plan was to arm all the blacks in the south so they could kill white southerners he saw that people in the north revered John Brown and what he was trying to do. While the south treated him as a criminal, the north saw him as a martyr. He realized that half of his countrymen hated him and would be happy to see him dead. That is when he flipped and joined the side for dissolving the union.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Megalomanical fanatic, IMHO.

He opposed slavery so he murdered and butchered men, women, and children in that cause.  He became a martyr to the American people and we fought a war in his cause that ended slavery.  I think he's burning in hell but there's no more slavery so...

With a few good men.

Ashli Babbitt.

Yea, but again, the Brits ended slavery w/o a drop of blood shed, so... seems like we could have avoided this whole song-and-dance.

Butt... butt... butt... my Jan 6 terrorist insurrection!!!  (Never mind that Demoncraps did this multiple times b4 this )

Meh, they were making a move, we had to get it on.

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