John Brown

John Brown

John Brown was born on May 9th , 1800 , in Torrington , Connecticut . He was a devout Christian who believed that slavery was an evil sin which would destroy the United States if it was not dealt with . He spent much of his youth in Ohio , where he was taught in local schools to resent compulsory education by his parents , to respect the Bible , and to disgust slavery of any sort . He married Dianthe Lusk in 1820 , who bore him seven children . After Dianthe died in 1831 , Brown married 16-year-old Mary Anne

Day , by whom he fathered thirteen children

During the next 24 years , John Brown built and sold tanneries (Workplace where skins and hides are tanned , speculated in land sales , raised sheep , and established a brokerage for wool growers . Every business he ventured in failed because he too much of a visionary , and not a businessman . His thinking became way too metaphysical , and he began to think more about the weak and oppressed . He began to seek the company of black people , and for two years , he lived in a freedman 's community in North Elba , New York . He became a militant abolitionist and a conductor ' on the Underground Railroad (Underground Railroad was set up to free slaves and send them to Free states or to Canada

Brown was entranced by visions of slave uprisings where the slave owners would pay horribly for their sins , and he pictured himself as commissioned by God to make that vision a reality . In 1855 , Brown followed five of his songs to Kansas to help make a haven for anti-slavery settlers . The same year , his hostility towards slave-states exploded after they burned and pillaged the free-state community of Lawrence . He had organized a militia within his Osawatomie River colony and led a mission of revenge . On the evening of May 23rd , 1856 , Brown and six followers (including four of his sons , visited the homes of pro-slavery men along the Pottawatomie Creek , and hacked them to death with long-edged swords . John Brown had become known as Old Brown of Osawatomie ' and was the feared and hated target of slave states

In autumn of 1865 , Brown returned to Ohio . He developed a plan to free slaves through the South and provided with moral and financial support from prominent New England abolitionists , Brown began by raiding plantations in Missouri (this accomplished little though . He transferred his operations to western Virginia , where he collected an army of twenty-one men (including five blacks , and raided the government armory and arsenal at Harper 's Ferry on October 16th . He planned to arm thousands of slaves who from learning of his crusade would flock to his side . This did not happen as he thought it would Instead , bands of militia and a company of U .S . Marines under Bvt . Col Robert E . Lee went to Harper 's Ferry and trapped Brown 's army ' inside a fire-engine house . They stormed the building on the 18th and the fighting ended with ten...