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How Did John Brown Trying To End Slavery

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There are two main ways John Brown is remembered: he was both a murderer and a role model who fought against slavery because he believed that fight was God's plan for him. During the mid-1800’s when slavery was occurring in the United States, Brown, along with many other abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, was trying to prevent slavery from expanding. Abraham Lincoln said during his presidential campaign in 1860 that, "John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt of a white man to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed ("Cooper Union Address").” On the …show more content…

During the rebellion at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, there were twenty-one men that started the massive rebellion alongside John Brown, and all but two people either died or were captured in the revolt. Because the arsenal’s single guard surrendered, a free black man who was the passenger train baggage master ran to go and tell the passengers and was shot dead. This was ironic that the first person that died in this war to end slavery was a free black man, because that was the race John Brown was defending. This catastrophe at Harper’s Ferry caused no slaves to be freed, and John Brown was captured and then put on trial. The short execution, taking four weeks of waiting, was documented during the court case. John Brown said “In the first place, I deny every thing but what I have already admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended, certainly, to have made a clean thing of the matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri, and there took slaves, without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country, and finally leaving them in Canada. I desired to have done the same thing again, on a much larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection (“Address of John Brown to Virginia Court”). This quote explains in John …show more content…

When John Brown was a young boy growing up in Ohio, one of his earliest memories of slavery was a brutal beating of a slave boy. This gruesome event was one of the main reasons of why John Brown wanted to fight to end slavery. The fact that he witnessed it happen also had a bigger effect on his life than if he had only heard about it. As a grown man, Brown became known as a guerrilla fighter after the bloody Pottawatomie Massacre. Historian Edward Renehan states that, “Kansas is the birth of the Messianic Brown, it’s the birth of the Moses-like Brown, it’s the birth of the murderer Brown.” In November of 1859, Brown wrote to his friend from jail after Harper’s Ferry that, “You know that Christ once armed Peter. So also in my case, I think he put a sword in my hand, and there continued it, so long as he saw best, and then kindly took it from me.” This specific quote demonstrates how strong John Brown’s religious faith

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