John Brown: A Man of Extreme Faith Source of Photo

John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. His family moved to Ohio, where he learned through his education and his parents, to revere the Bible and hate slavery. He married Dianthe Lusk in 1820, and they had seven children. After she died in 1831, he remarried to Mary Anne Day, and they had thirteen more children.

Over the course of twenty-four years, he worked as a tanner, land speculaor, sheperd, and wool broking. Because of his tendency to be more of a visionary than a businessman, though, he failed in every venture. He also became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and he helped to organize a league of self-protection for free blacks and fugitive slaves.

As he grew older, he increasingly believed that he was commmisioned by God to punish the slaveholders and free the slaves. As a result of this belief, in 1855, he and five of his sons traveled to Kansas to ensure it would become a free state and a haven for anti-slavery settlers. His stay there went by fairly uneventfully until a group of pro-slavery settlers burned and looted the anti-slavery town of Lawrence. In revenge, Brown and a group of men from his Osawatomie River colony, captured pro-slavery settlers throughout the territory, and then murdered them out in the woods. Because of these killings, southerners began to fear and hate "Old Brown of Osawatomie." After his actions in Kansas, Brown began to focus his attention on Virginia. With the help of the "Secret Six", a group of New England abolitionists who helped fund his plans, he started a plot to spark a nation-wide slave insurrection. His plan was to raid the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and then travel into the South, freeing slaves and arming them, but he hoped to accomplish this without bloodshed. However, he would fight if he had to.

A series of miscalculations, though, caused his plan to end in failure. First of all, his "army" was only twenty-one men, instead of the thousands he predicted because almost no slaves rallied to his cause. Also, during the raid, a train came in and he initially fired on it, but then for some reason let it travel on to Washington. Thus, in thirty-six hours, the federal government knew of a raid on one of its federal arsenals. A company of marines, led by Bvt. Col. Robert E. Lee, stormed the engine house Brown and his men were holed up in and killed ten of his men and captured seven, including Brown.

Brown was tried and convicted for treason against the state of Virginia and was set to be hanged in Charlestown. He is remembered for his great eloquence during the trial and his speeches.

"Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"

John Brown's extreme faith is exemplified by this excerpt from his trial by his conviction and willingness to die for his cause. Although in his lifetime, he failed in his quest to destroy slavery, his actions helped spark the Civil War, which resulted in the freedom of all slaves.

Sources

1)http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1550.html

2)Oates, Stephen B. To Purge this Land with Blood

3)http://education.ucdavis.edu/NEW/STC/lesson/socstud/railroad/Brown.htm

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