John brown

John Brown - Abolitionist - 1859 Raid on Harpers Ferry, VA

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.

Bleeding Kansas

photo of John Brown

John Brown was an abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States.

Did you know all this about the history of West Virginia?

A few years back a distant cousin contacted me about the Darling family. We talked via email for awhile and then I learned that she lived in Gleneden Beach on the Oregon coast, about an hour’…

Film clip. Voices of a People's History. Dramatic reading by David Strathairn of John Brown’s last speech delivered on November 2, 1859.

An abolitionist raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in an attempt to start an armed revolt against the institution of slavery.

Adam Gopnik on the radical nineteenth-century abolitionist John Brown’s centrality to the Civil War.

One of hundreds of thousands of free digital items from The New York Public Library.

He better grow a beard.