JOHN BROWN Biography - Activists, Revolutionaries and other freedom fighters

 
 

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JOHN BROWN

Name: John Brown                                                                     
Born: 9 May 1800                                                                     
Died: 2 December 1859                                                               
                                                                                     
John Brown (May 9, 1800 - December 2, 1859) was a white American abolitionist       
who advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish 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 and 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, but         
those charges were vehemently denied by the Republicans. Historians agree that       
the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that a year later led to           
secession and the American Civil War.