John brown

Abolitionist John Brown leads 18 men in an attack on the Harpers Ferry armory. The raid to seize the weapons failed and Brown was captured, tried, and hung. At his trial, Brown said: “Now,…

On this day in 1859 abolitionist John Brown led the attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Brown, a minister and fierce opponent of slavery, sought to obtain weapons from the arsenal to defeat the slaveocracy in the South.

John Brown, militant American abolitionist and veteran of Bleeding Kansas whose raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 and subsequent execution made him an antislavery martyr and was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities that led to the American Civil War.

John Brown (1800-1859), a white American abolitionist, was hanged for treason, murder and insurrection after his failed attempt to take over the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry to gain arms for a …

To the Editor: In his review of John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s book The Tribunal , Christopher Benfey resurrects the John Brown of old-time history books—murderous, inept, politically marginal, probably insane—while ignoring the findings of several recent biographers and historians.

John Brown daguerreotype c1846-47.

John Brown was an American evangelist who was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching na...

Bleeding Kansas