home

John Brown


==John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut on May 9, 1800, he was the son of a wandering New Englander. Brown spent much of his youth in Ohio, where he was taught in local schools to dislike mandatory education and by his parents to cherish the Bible and hate slavery. As a boy, he herded cattle for General William Hull's army during the war of 1812; later he served as foreman of his family's tannery. In 1820 he married Dianthe Lusk, who bore him 7 children; 5 years later they moved to Pennsylvania to operate a tannery of their own. Within a year after Dianthe's death in 1831, Brown wed 16-year-old Mary Anne Day, by whom he fathered 13 more children. Over the course of his first fifty years, Brown moved about the country, settling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. He helped finance the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Henry Highland's "Call to Rebellion" speech. He gave land to fugitive slaves. He and his wife agreed to raise a black youth as one of their own. He also participated in the Underground Railroad and, in 1851, helped establish the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave catchers. == ==Despite his contributions to the antislavery cause, Brown did not emerge as a figure of major significance until 1855 after he followed five of his sons to the Kansas territory. There, he became the leader of antislavery guerillas and fought a proslavery attack against the antislavery town of Lawrence. The following year, in retribution for another attack, Brown went to a proslavery town and brutally killed five of its settlers. Brown and his sons would continue to fight in the territory and in Missouri for the rest of the year. John Brown began to think more seriously about his plan for a war in Virginia against slavery. He sought money to fund an "army" he would lead. On October 16, 1859, he set his plan to action when he and 21 other men (5 blacks and 16 whites) raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown was wounded and quickly captured, and moved to Charlestown, Virginia, where he was tried and convicted of treason. ==

==Although many perceived John Brown as crazy, he made a significant impact on the United States today. He led a gang of former slaves such as Frederick Douglass, and advocated abolishing slavery, through raiding banks and things of that sort. When he was jailed and tried, he said his actions were for the purpose of the idea of freedom for slaves. So everyone knew that John Brown was against slavery. This may have given this idea of abolishing slavery to many people in the US. Brown also predicted a civil war in the US over the question of slavery, as happened later. ==