Story of John Brown?

Question

I want to know because of the album cover to Kansas' debut album, "Kansas". Does anyone know the story about him? All i know is that he was an abolitionist around the Civil War era.

Answer 1

John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was an American abolitionist who advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish all slavery. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas and the unsuccessful raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

President Abraham Lincoln said he was a "misguided fanatic" and Brown has been called "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans." His attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the state of Virginia, the murder of five proslavery Southerners, and inciting a slave insurrection. He was hanged, but his behavior at the trial seemed heroic to millions of Americans. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that a year later led to secession and the American Civil War.

Answer 2

He was a terrorist and murderer. His raid at Harper's Ferry was treason that started the inexorable decline into secession and war.  

Answer 3

To keep it short:  John Brown was a religious fanatic who thought that god called him to free the slaves.  He murdered many slave holders in Kansas and other places.  

He then had spear or pike heads made to arm the slaves that he planned on freeing.  He didn't think that the slaves were intelligent enough to be trained to use firearms, that is why he was going to arm them with pikes. (That doesn't show that he thought much of the race that the American Slaves came from does it?)

He then tried to take over the arsenal at harpers Ferry to arm his white supporters and thought that all of the Slaves would rise up in revolt to support him.   They didn't, and Colonel Robert E. Lee led a detachment of Unites States Marines to capture Brown and his group.

Ironically, Brown's men actually shot a free black who was in the area.

After brown's capture he was tried for treason AGAINST VIRGINIA, and hanged. (States were VERY separate before the War of Northern Agression Against the Southern Confederacy).