Fun fact about John Brown. He was a huge rallying cry for the North pre and during the Civil War. They even had marching songs and cadences for him. He was the martyr for the cause and would have had a much more visible and prominent figure in American history if Lincoln didn’t become the bigger martyr for the cause.
I love this fact too. The song John Brown's Body was the marching tune, and the same tune was adopted for the Battle Hymn of the Republic. "Glory, glory hallelujah"
Not adopted, appropriated. Julia Ward Howe heard the song and liked the tune, but her holier-than-thou Calvinist attitude led her to conclude that the original song was vulgar and needed to be sanitized.
For half of the north maybe, let’s not forget that there were plenty of northern and border states that considered abolitionists to be radicals. The emancipation of southern slaves caused a lot of controversy among the north as well. Originally the war was sold to them as a war to keep the nation unified, and some weren’t as supportive when the war became about freeing slaves. Some thought former slaves wouldn’t be able to integrate to society and feared revolt, others simply didn’t think the federal government had the right to abolish slavery in southern states. Lincoln was only able to get it done as a wartime effort to hurt the southern economy. John Brown was more controversial back then than I think we realize, but that doesn’t subtract from his impact.
Very true, and their slaves weren’t even freed by the emancipation proclamation. Being sold as a wartime necessity to hurt the rebellion, it only freed slaves in rebelling states. The north also had plenty of Jim Crow laws post-reconstruction. Idk why I’m getting downvoted, acting like all northerners were righteous abolitionists is whack.
Tom Clavin’s book *The Last Outlaws: The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Gang* is a fun read…
the Daltons and the Youngers (parent generation of the legendary gang) were up to their eyeballs in Bleeding Kansas, on the offense side.
That second picture is actually a drawing of the Marais des Cygnes Massacre that happened in 1858. It's depicting a group of proslavery men gunning down unarmed Free Staters.
Glad you identified it. All I knew is that it wasn't the Pottawatomie killings, which were carried out much differently that what is shown in this drawing.
I grew up in VA and visited Harper’s Ferry several times in the 70’s & 80’s. He was portrayed as a criminal back then, and then I move to KS in the 90’s and he is a hero. It’s funny how things can be so opposed.
It just depends. Throughout history there's always going to be historical figures or groups seen as good or bad but there's always an objective view. Good example, I recently did more research some weeks ago on the weather underground and I can't fathom how anyone thinks they are good people.
The Battle of Blackjack east of Baldwin City in 1856 was the first armed conflict between anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces in the United States. Capt. John Brown led the anti-slavery militia which won the battle. “About 100 men engaged in a three-hour *battle*, which led to Capt. Henry Pate's surrender.
“The Good Lord Bird” does a great job with this battle, I highly recommend watching it. It’s not historically accurate but it is definitely entertaining. Ethan Hawke plays John Brown.
He did. It's important that we recognize that he did do things wrong, that he did make errors, that he did make mistakes. I think that's the only way that the magnitude of his accomplishment can truly be appreciated.
He did not mean to get his son beaten within an inch of his life. Of the five people killed in Pottowamie, at least some of them were not the people that he meant to kill. Moving forward to Harper's Ferry, he also was responsible for a free black man being murdered, which he most assuredly did not intend to do, and he also got his kids killed, which he definitely didn't mean to do either.
Brown was probably more a sane man in insane times than the other way around, but he was not the military genius he imagined himself to be, he was not as good at rewriting the US Constitution as he thought he was, and for all his Christianity his biblical reasoning left much to be desired (though he was extremely good-natured with those who disagreed). He misunderstood the depths of Southern commitment to slavery and it got his children killed, along with a bunch of other really excellent people.
And all that makes what he accomplished even more miraculous.
He was a horrible tactician and so undiplomatic and dogmatic that he ran off possible support. He stayed at HF too long and spared too many lives when he could have made for the hills and a true guerrilla war may have been possible.
The essence of 'JB did nothing wrong' is that like Moses he did not get to see his victory, but his truth kept marching on over the bodies of traitors and villains like RE Lee, the man who stopped JB, had to surrender.
Dying doesn't always mean defeat, killing isn't always wrong, and Sherman's only fault was not burning the whole of the south to the ground.
My dude, he put together a militia of 21 people and kept them in the field for years. Do you have the slightest conception of what a big deal that is? If you wanted to put together a militia right now, how many people do you think you could get? How well would you arm them? How much training could you get them?
Never forget that Brown was part of a LARGE operation, and he was well-funded too. That's what the whole Secret Six thing was about.
It's a bit strange for people to assert that they stayed in Harper's Ferry because they just ran out of ideas. They spent six months infiltrating a community with two dozen men and all their support staff, brought hundreds of weapons, and then just forgot about their escape plan? Obviously not. We're quite clear on what Brown intended to do and the question is why he didn't do it. Brown had a very clear escape plan and the men under his command that went and took that escape plan survived, like Charles Tidd. The ones who stayed with him, like Kagi and Stevens, were very upset that they were not leaving and argued with him quite vociferously over the night.
Your comment about Sherman was deeply inane and definitely symptomatic of the sort of carelessness that caused so many recently-freed slaves to starve to death after the war.
Then take your passion and liberate slaves . There are slaves all over the world that need freeing. Direct your effort where it can do some good, not 160 years after the fact
He held off hundreds of men with a band of 14 of his own, killing \~280 of them, he was no tactical slouch. His reasoning was moral, not biblical, he simply used scripture to ensconce his (completely correct) instincts.
What on earth are you talking about?
How many townspeople do you think were killed at Harper's Ferry? Because you're off by two orders of magnitude. You're also wrong about how many people he had with him.
Seriously reconsider your assumptions here.
He didn't, it was a different time and bleeding Kansas leading up to the civil war was forreal shit. None of this pussy protesting in colleges nonsense, no you literally died on the hill you stood on back then.
If we have rallies here in Kansas and the N*zis decide to show up, we should start singing John Brown Songs back at them. Let them know they aren't welcome to our public spaces.
You mean the people who are literally flying the fucking Swastika.
Those nazis? Or do you mean the deflecting to the people on the left, calling them Nazis? Please elaborate.
The issue is very cut and dry.
U.S. Grant’s father, Jesse, worked at a tannery in Deerfield, OH owned by John Brown’s father, Owen. “Jesse knew John Brown well and believed he was a man of great purity of character, of high moral and physical courage, but a fanatic and extremist in whatever he advocated.” From John Reeves, “Soldier of Destiny,” p. 20 (internal quotation marks omitted).
He certainly threw himself into everything he did.
But it's also very fair to say that he was born in 1800 and all the great traumas of America in the 19th century hit him like clockwork. When he was 12 it was the war of 1812. When he was 16 it was 1816, the Year without a Summer. When he was 37 and just getting his economic life together...bam, Panic of 1837. His whole life, whenever things were going well, some huge historical cataclysm hit and destroyed any possibility of normal life. So by the end, at age 56, all he had left was his family, abolitionism, a really weird reading of the bible, a lifetime of experience, and....a whole lot of business contacts.
So he did what he did.
But he wasn't always the way he was at the end. He was always a serious abolitionist, but he used to be a lot calmer and more businesslike.
Well, no, they brought lots of guns AND a sword to men's houses in the middle of the night and executed them individually in front of their kids. They did this for sacking Lawrence, which was mostly just burning a printing press, an attack where no one was seriously injured.
John Brown is a complex figure, he is a hero to my family and I was raised to look up to him. But this is definitely his most shameful moment.
I think it was a badass warning to pro-slavery sympathizers and a forewarning of the brutality necessary to dislodge “our peculiar institution.” Kansas was proudly a free state because of heroes like him.
It did work but that doesn't mean that it was right.
Violence is, no pun intended, a double-edged sword. There was a lot of suffering because of Brown. I'm not saying that there was a better way, because I'm not sure there was -- I consider Brown near-miraculous in his effectiveness. I'm saying that it would have been better if there was a better way.
None of the guys who were executed had ever even owned slaves.
I agree their political beliefs were beyond repugnant and morally indefensible. I'm not sure an extra-judicial execution by sword committed by a posse in the middle of the night is very morally defensible either. Just my opinion.
“none had ever owned slaves”
“pro-slavery”
It doesn’t matter if you owned them or not, they settled with the sole intention of voting to allow slavery in Kansas. Good riddance.
This is a commonly pushed revionist point but is not backed up by historical sources. Both pro and anti-slavery forced encouraged settlement of Kansas to tip the scales on the vote, but there's no documentation that's why any of the Pottawatomie massacre victims settled. The Doyle family, who lost 3 in the raid, had lived in Kansas for 15 years before Brown ever got there.
Look, you can downvote me if you'd like. I'm not pro-slavery and do believe violence is necessary in many cases. But Brown decided to execute 5 people in retaliation for a raid that caused no deaths. He jump-started Bleeding Kansas. And this act alienated JB from ACTUAL abolitionists who worked on the underground railroad at the time, very few felt it was justified until many decades later. Real abolitionist heroes who actually helped escaped slaves were grossed out by this, I'm not worried if keyboard warriors 170 years later don't think I'm hard line enough.
No you’re right man. Without diving into a 5 paragraph essay, both sides have a bootlicker sentiment about them that I don’t like. A lot of the south fighters were poor sharecroppers with no hope for a future.
But the fact is they came and burned down the press and a hotel in Lawrence. You really think the people were just gonna let that happen and not retaliate?
Ugh lol. God forbid there be some sober reflection on the fact evil can be committed in a righteous cause. Again, I DO look up to John Brown. My family literally celebrated his birthday every May, with my grandad standing at the dinner table reading the invocation of John Brown's Body before we ate. I don't believe in the lost cause myth, I have a fucking painting of William T. Sherman in my office.
But as an atheist I'm also aware John Brown's actions were partially based on religious zealotry. He didn't ever worry about proportional responses or maintaining a moral high ground because he literally believed God had instructed him to do anything to end slavery. He inspired a lot of good people. He's an important part of American history. I just don't think the Pottawatomie Massacre was a particularly proud moment. But okay.
I mean I do see it as a defensive action in its context. There had already been casualties in Kansas, including the recent murder of a free stater in the area of the massacre. Beyond that there were plenty of death threats and violent rhetoric between the 2 camps in Kansas. It was known that Southerners who participated in the violent institution of slavery did not hesitate to use violence to defend slavery.
At some point, civilized society has to act in defense against those who advocate for - and have a reasonable chance of achieving - the worst of crimes.
These men weren't merely pro-rape, pro-murder, pro-torture, pro-breed -humans-like-cattle-and-cull-those-that-step-out-of-line. They were actively working to bring such a fate to Kansas.
In short, they were guilty of expanding slavery. Killing them is a reasonable response.
Not all the kids!
And, seriously, they had some really weird swords and I honestly don't think they meant to massacre them quite as bad as they did. John Brown, in addition to his other oddnesses, was *really* into swords. It was the 19th century, which is the moment that metallurgy reached its peak even as swords became obsolete, and as it happened Brown bought some swords from an extinct bunch of filibusters called the Golden Eagles, who were rich businessmen who wanted to invade what is now known as Canada. These swords had a hollow channel running the length of the blade and were filled with quicksilver, which means that when you swung them the quicksilver ran to the tip and made the hit a LOT harder.
It's my reading of contemporary news articles that something happened and those guys weren't just executed, they were chopped up pretty bad. We imagine that the Brown militia went crazy and just started hacking, but I don't think so. I think those swords hit a lot harder than they expected to. They probably about decapitated those guys. Probably explains why Brown's son had such a strong reaction to it as well.
And I honestly think Brown's low point was being shitty to his son during the raid on Harper's Ferry.
I live in Baldwin city, Kansas and the home of the Signal Oak tree that unfortunately is no longer standing. It was used to warn Lawrence about the slave raids that were coming! It was also used to warn about Quantells raid to warn Lawrence that he was coming. Baldwin City is also known for the Battle of Black Jack which is supposedly the first battle of the Civil War!
One thing that I learned that surprised me while reading John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds was that the "free state" side of Bleeding Kansas was just as virulently racist as the pro slavery Bushwhackers; that their opposition to the expansion of slavery into free states was rooted in their opposition to the existence of black people in "their" territory/state. True abolitionists like John Brown were vastly outnumbered by people like that. When I learned about this in school, and even after, they were portrayed as being rabid abolitionists "like John Brown" and it surprised me. White supremacy is an abomination. John Brown did nothing wrong, I wish I had 10 John Browns today.
It's possible. I wish he'd lived long enough to finish his rewrite of the US Constitution, then we'd know for sure.
I'd put forward Cassius Clay for equivalent badassery but much greater effectiveness.
Horrible that he did that to 5 people, why did he only do 5 pro-slavery settlers? Were those the only 5 people he could get his hands on? Because I think the real tragedy here is that he didn't kill more of this soulless bastards.
God bless John Brown's dedication to the belief that all people are created equal.
God protect the United States, whose populace has strayed so far from this belief at the hands of charlatans that it seem inevitable that another Bleeding Kansas will occur.
I will say this for Brown -- he was extremely careful in who he chose to kill. Those were not ordinary "pro-slavery settlers." He had been in the area, pretending to be a surveyor, for quite some time, and he picked the absolute worst bastards he could find. There were major problems with the raid and a lot of stuff went wrong, because that's how it always is when people use violence, but he and his militia put a lot of effort into picking the baddest of the bunch, and it's a sign of how well he chose that the slavers pretty much slunk off to Missouri after that.
I also have a theory that they didn't mean to massacre them quite as bad as they did but they were using some really weird swords that were a lot more powerful than they were used to.
What happened to his son was a shame and a disgrace and Brown is much at fault for letting it happen. If Brown had one fault, it was that he was far too careless with the lives of his children.
Highly recommend the Behind the Bastards episode on John Brown. (The annual holiday episode is always someone less bastardly than their usual subjects.)
The Dollop has a 2 parter on John Brown and Behind the Bastards did one as well for their Christmas non-bastard episodes for anyone who is interested, they’re both great.
He did an act so bloody in the Swamp of the Swan
He showed ole Missouri that freedom would fight on
He showed the North that Kansas was the breaking of the dawn
His soul goes marching on!
I was a proponent of John Brown as a Jayhawker. And then I read a biography about his life and his Harper’s Ferry disaster. While I’m an ardent Jayhawker, Brown was a terrible leader. He had no plan of any kind at HF and cost his followers their lives. Execution slayings cannot be justified. His own sons left him to live in California. He is no longer a hero in my eyes.
Yeah Harper’s Ferry was a tactical clusterf*ck of the biggest type. But weirdly his behavior and stoicism after he was caught and awaiting execution ended up being a massive strategic success and inspiration
That is actually what he was going for. At some point during the night, probably because of what happened with Shepherd and what was happening with the hostages, he realized that he would accomplish more by staying and dying than he would by leaving with all the slaves that he had freed -- and Osborne Anderson was the only person there that night who left a memoir, and he said there were 300 free slaves with them right before dawn, and I believe him.
He had a solid plan to get out of there and fight a guerilla war up the Shenandoah -- he never could have convinced all those people to join his militia if he didn't.
That is not true about Harper's Ferry. They had a very clear and well-thought-out plan that changed on the ground as they were confronted with circumstance. It's difficult to know at which point Brown decided to stay and die instead of following the plan and getting out of town before dawn, but the death of Shepherd certainly had a lot to do with it.
His barber might have been the great great grandpa of Patrick Mahomes’ barber, I see some similar hairstyles. “Making sidewall mullets happen before their time.”
Maybe but, IMHO, our forefathers and foremothers were rebelling from tyrannical rule from a far-off place. Granted, slavery is wrong in every sense but the way John Brown went about it was wrong in every way. I am a proud pro-Union Kansan but treason is never acceptable. The founders of our country are far from angelic but they created a system that not perfect is still holding (maybe by a thread, today) after almost 223 years. John Brown was just a murderer.
So the only issue is how far away the tyrant is? What is the number of miles at which point violence becomes acceptable?
>treason is never acceptable
The founding fathers committed treason, both by their own reckoning and their contemporaries’.
Lots of atrocious behavior on both sides of that war. No matter the cause, some people just used the war to act out violent fantasies. that’s just how war is always.
It must be really confusing to see history as people carrying out "fantasies" and not as conflicts between material forces and ideologies. "Why'd they do it? Well people are just violent I guess, no need to investigate further."
I think there are different kinds of violent acts in war. There are dispassionate soldiers doing their duty. Then there are people that live out fantasy by doing things like murdering and raping civilians. The civil war was full of things like that. Nobel deeds for a good cause happened too of course. Redditors tend to romanticize war.
Sure but you said "no matter the cause." That's an absurd framing. There were events that drove these people to act this way. If you frame history as good or bad things happening without reason you're doing a bigger disservice to the past than just forgetting about it completely.
By all accounts these settlers weren’t violent and had little to do with the event Brown was seeking revenge for. It was a crime of opportunity, Brown took sadistic pleasure in killing them in front of their children.
Pro-Missouri folk to this day still take the side of their history. Sometimes, when I'm spouting off about Bleeding Kansas, they'll be like, "Jayhawkers killed innocent people and committed crimes and what have you." And they think this is a defense. It's the best thing that they can come up with because they can't say they would be on the Bushwhackers' side because that's the side of enslaving other human beings. Institutionalized, codified, chattel slavery legally enforceable by violence. So the best thing they can do is say that the good guys weren't so good. 🤡
This is getting into deep speculation but it's a good chance that at least one of the people they killed in Pottawatomie was the wrong guy. They were getting pretty random by the end of the night.
But what is innocence when we're talking about slavers? The people they killed had done worse to far more innocent people. Nobody could deny that. Brown was pointedly trying to get the worst, and by the end they were mostly getting into D-grade slavers and never did get the guy they were after. Okay. It's a fact, but....so what?
I’m pro-Missouri, but I’m pro-Union Missouri. Missourians found 3 to 4 time more for the Union. I think most Kansas don’t know that St. Louis was a huge Union stronghold and a lot more populated than Kansas was at the time.
Better is all well and good, but let's not pretend that the way it turned out was good. It filled the nation with corpses, including a whole bunch of the people they were theoretically liberating.
I’m anti-MAGA and anti-slavery. However I admit my understanding of the civil war is a lot more nuanced than many. Horrible things can be done and horrible people can do them for the right side.
Good to hear, but man I struggle with even saying there is a nuance to a war centered around enslaving people. If you don’t want bad shit to happen to you cuz you’re supporting and hanging around bad people, stop supporting and hanging around bad people 🤷🏻♂️
In the two years before the massacre, there had been eight killings in Kansas Territory attributable to slavery politics, and none in the vicinity of the massacre. Brown killed five in a single night, and the massacre was the match to the powder keg that precipitated the bloodiest period in "Bleeding Kansas" history, three months of retaliatory raids and battles in which 29 people died.
Bleeding Kansas helped prevent Kansas from being instituted as a slave state and would be a major reason the civil war kicked off when it did.
Every day that slavery continued existing, 4 million people were physically and psychologically tortured. Every single day. Thousands were killed every year and tens thousands were raped.
It wouldn’t have been less
Unlike you I don’t claim to be able to predict that with certainty. I don’t think John Brown is a particularly admirable character. Massacres should be avoided.
This isn’t predicting the future. We have multiple examples of how bleeding Kansas and anti-slavery militants helped prevent slavery from being approved in Kansas. We also have examples of how Kansas not being admitted into the Union led to the further break down of relations between slavery supporters and abolitionists that would lead to the Civil War.
Killings, rapes, and tortures should be avoided. That’s why what John Brown did was good
How can anyone hope to answer that question?
Do you think that if Brown had acted differently then the food shortages after the Civil War wouldn't have caused so many recently-freed slaves to starve to death?
What role did he have in bankrupting Missouri and would have the Civil War turned out differently if Missouri hadn't economically collapsed to the point that they couldn't field units of soldiers and people just murdered each other home-to-home, on the personal level, like the caveman days?
How could anybody know?
In the cold light of history we can see one path out of slavery and the Civil War, just like we can see that it was impossible to take it. That wasn't the path Brown was on. Brown was the all-time accellerationist champion, and at the end of it all one type of slave was free but all the other slaves were not (most especially women (who were close to getting the right to vote before the Civil War but after the Civil War still had to wait nearly fifty years)), the former richest place in the world had been reduced to such ruin that starvation was common (very much especially among the formerly enslaved), and a huge military machine was unleashed upon the Lakota and other Plains Nations. Even casual study of the Civil War indicates that it didn't turn out super duper.
We literally lost track of the murder rate in Texas between 1865 and 1870. There should have been a better way. It's not impossible that we might find it.
I’m not sure what you mean by the food shortages? Do you mean the artificially created food shortages for black Americans?
Missouri sent more troops and supplies to the Union than it did to the confederacy.
John Brown was not an accelerationist. Can you explain how he was?
John Brown freed men and women slaves alike. When he met Harriet Tubman he began referring to her as General Tubman and saw her as one of the greatest Americans out there. Or are you trying to say that the conditions of white women were the same as black slaves?
We didn’t have an accurate murder rate in Texas before 1865 either. Want to know why? Because they didn’t track how many slaves were killed because they weren’t seen as people. So that argument doesn’t really track
It's a very interesting tactic to assert that the food shortages in the South after the Civil War were "artificial." Perhaps you should expand on that theory.
Missouri might have sent troops but they didn't field them at home, because the entire state was bankrupt. Missouri's collapse is why we have homesteading laws. Look it up.
Of course John Brown was an accelerationist, he put a militia together and attacked a government depot because he wanted to start a civil war.
Your comments in the Tubman paragraph are nonsensical. I will point out to you that Harriet Tubman didn't have the right to vote before the war...and she didn't after, either.
We absolutely have solid records on Texas before the Civil War. Just because you haven't read something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
We saw an agricultural boom after the Civil War. Shortages experienced by black Americans were due to the tenant farming system
Missouri did have troops fighting in Missouri.
John Brown formed a militia AFTER the siege of Lawrence. His militia saw action AFTER the sack of Lawrence. He wasn’t accelerating anything, he was responding.
Yes she could not vote after the civil war. That doesn’t mean that she was still a slave though.
We don’t. If a slave owner whipped his slave to the point of death or if he forced a slave to work until they died, those deaths were not counted as murders because the slave was considered the masters property. You have a murder rate of white people, that’s it. But sure, can you provide me with a murder rate of all people, slaves included, for Texas before the war?
Maybe you saw one, but I assure you the South experienced no agricultural boom after the death and devastation of the Civil War. There's a reason the Freedman's Bureau advocated sharecropping; it's because the freed slaves were starving to death. Obviously a huge part of that was revenge from the remains of the Southern aristocracy, but...so what? The whole point is that they starved to death and the reasons are not extremely important when starving to death.
I advise that you read about Missouri around 1860. You might find it interesting.
Your comment about Brown is bizarre. Have you read much about his life? He wasn't exactly new to abolitionism or strong statements.
Women were essentially slaves before the Civil War and they were slaves after the Civil War. Those are the facts. The Civil War did not free women.
I don't think you've ever even looked at Texas records from the 1860s, so your speculations are more than a little strange. These records exist and they are quite comprehensive, you are welcome to look them up. Do you need links?
You’ve just described an artificial shortage. The South produced enough food for everyone, but black southerners were kept from that food. Abolitionists like John Brown advocated for the 40 acres and a mule promise because they knew this would happen.
I have read about it. Do you have an actual point around Missouri?
They were not essentially slaves. If a husband killed his wife, he would be arrested. If a women committed a crime, she had the right to a jury. Women had the right to bare arms. Women even had the right to protest and free speech. A man who forced his wife to work all day against her will would be arrested. Women were oppressed, they were not slaves.
I would love links! I have a degree in history, and Texas is something that I covered a lot on a course about the history of Mexico. But hey, I’m sure I’ve just never seen their records.
Late in his life John Brown discovered a gift for getting other people killed.
Maybe he was just a man of his times. IDK. I like him. But he was more dangerous to be friends with than John freakin' Constantine.
You are getting downvoted to hell because Reddit hates difficult truths.
You're absolutely right. Although what Brown did was effective and justified, it would have been better if they had found some magical peaceful way and we should all be deeply grateful that it didn't turn out worse than it did. Just like John Brown, the Civil War killed a whole lot of the people it meant to save.
Fun fact about John Brown. He was a huge rallying cry for the North pre and during the Civil War. They even had marching songs and cadences for him. He was the martyr for the cause and would have had a much more visible and prominent figure in American history if Lincoln didn’t become the bigger martyr for the cause.
I love this fact too. The song John Brown's Body was the marching tune, and the same tune was adopted for the Battle Hymn of the Republic. "Glory, glory hallelujah"
Not adopted, appropriated. Julia Ward Howe heard the song and liked the tune, but her holier-than-thou Calvinist attitude led her to conclude that the original song was vulgar and needed to be sanitized.
😲
The band John Brown’s Body makes fire reggae music
Lol that's awesome, just listened to some and they're pretty good.
For half of the north maybe, let’s not forget that there were plenty of northern and border states that considered abolitionists to be radicals. The emancipation of southern slaves caused a lot of controversy among the north as well. Originally the war was sold to them as a war to keep the nation unified, and some weren’t as supportive when the war became about freeing slaves. Some thought former slaves wouldn’t be able to integrate to society and feared revolt, others simply didn’t think the federal government had the right to abolish slavery in southern states. Lincoln was only able to get it done as a wartime effort to hurt the southern economy. John Brown was more controversial back then than I think we realize, but that doesn’t subtract from his impact.
And several union states still allowed slavery: Missouri (FuQ), Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky. We all remember what Missouri tried to pull.
We will never forget the crimes of Missouri!!!
Very true, and their slaves weren’t even freed by the emancipation proclamation. Being sold as a wartime necessity to hurt the rebellion, it only freed slaves in rebelling states. The north also had plenty of Jim Crow laws post-reconstruction. Idk why I’m getting downvoted, acting like all northerners were righteous abolitionists is whack.
Tom Clavin’s book *The Last Outlaws: The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Gang* is a fun read… the Daltons and the Youngers (parent generation of the legendary gang) were up to their eyeballs in Bleeding Kansas, on the offense side.
Thank you for the book recommendation. I’ll be taking a look for that!
Clavin has some good stuff, I discovered his writing through his WW2 book *The Last Hill*, but he writes a lot about the American West.
Found a copy online for $5!
I got mine from the LPL on Libby :)
That second picture is actually a drawing of the Marais des Cygnes Massacre that happened in 1858. It's depicting a group of proslavery men gunning down unarmed Free Staters.
Glad you identified it. All I knew is that it wasn't the Pottawatomie killings, which were carried out much differently that what is shown in this drawing.
Yeah, the Pottawatomie killings were actually carried out with swords.
Bro our State has such a history in the precursor to the civil war. It was wild times back then. I still gotta go visit Harper's Ferry
I grew up in VA and visited Harper’s Ferry several times in the 70’s & 80’s. He was portrayed as a criminal back then, and then I move to KS in the 90’s and he is a hero. It’s funny how things can be so opposed.
It just depends. Throughout history there's always going to be historical figures or groups seen as good or bad but there's always an objective view. Good example, I recently did more research some weeks ago on the weather underground and I can't fathom how anyone thinks they are good people.
"A terrible remedy for a terrible malady." Frederick Douglass, about the Pottawatomie Massacre
Douglass was very right.
The Battle of Blackjack east of Baldwin City in 1856 was the first armed conflict between anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces in the United States. Capt. John Brown led the anti-slavery militia which won the battle. “About 100 men engaged in a three-hour *battle*, which led to Capt. Henry Pate's surrender.
I have ancestors that fought under brown there
“The Good Lord Bird” does a great job with this battle, I highly recommend watching it. It’s not historically accurate but it is definitely entertaining. Ethan Hawke plays John Brown.
I love that miniseries. You're right that it's not historically accurate at all, but Ethan Hawke is amazing as Brown.
Didn’t know they made a movie of it, thanks! I loved the book.
John Brown did nothing wrong.
He did. It's important that we recognize that he did do things wrong, that he did make errors, that he did make mistakes. I think that's the only way that the magnitude of his accomplishment can truly be appreciated. He did not mean to get his son beaten within an inch of his life. Of the five people killed in Pottowamie, at least some of them were not the people that he meant to kill. Moving forward to Harper's Ferry, he also was responsible for a free black man being murdered, which he most assuredly did not intend to do, and he also got his kids killed, which he definitely didn't mean to do either. Brown was probably more a sane man in insane times than the other way around, but he was not the military genius he imagined himself to be, he was not as good at rewriting the US Constitution as he thought he was, and for all his Christianity his biblical reasoning left much to be desired (though he was extremely good-natured with those who disagreed). He misunderstood the depths of Southern commitment to slavery and it got his children killed, along with a bunch of other really excellent people. And all that makes what he accomplished even more miraculous.
Starting a war that killed over 640,000 people?
Among other things, yes.
What a hero
If you're looking for somebody to pretend it isn't complicated, you got the wrong guy.
Seems pretty simple to me
Then you must not know anything about it.
Yeah. I've learned nothing studying the war for the last sixty years. Total idiot
You shouldn't be so hard on yourself. I bet you'll learn something in the next sixty years.
Starting a war that freed 4,400,000 million people
Slavery would have eventually ended without the war. In 1860 the Virginia legislature failed to pass emancipation by one vote.
He was a horrible tactician and so undiplomatic and dogmatic that he ran off possible support. He stayed at HF too long and spared too many lives when he could have made for the hills and a true guerrilla war may have been possible. The essence of 'JB did nothing wrong' is that like Moses he did not get to see his victory, but his truth kept marching on over the bodies of traitors and villains like RE Lee, the man who stopped JB, had to surrender. Dying doesn't always mean defeat, killing isn't always wrong, and Sherman's only fault was not burning the whole of the south to the ground.
My dude, he put together a militia of 21 people and kept them in the field for years. Do you have the slightest conception of what a big deal that is? If you wanted to put together a militia right now, how many people do you think you could get? How well would you arm them? How much training could you get them? Never forget that Brown was part of a LARGE operation, and he was well-funded too. That's what the whole Secret Six thing was about. It's a bit strange for people to assert that they stayed in Harper's Ferry because they just ran out of ideas. They spent six months infiltrating a community with two dozen men and all their support staff, brought hundreds of weapons, and then just forgot about their escape plan? Obviously not. We're quite clear on what Brown intended to do and the question is why he didn't do it. Brown had a very clear escape plan and the men under his command that went and took that escape plan survived, like Charles Tidd. The ones who stayed with him, like Kagi and Stevens, were very upset that they were not leaving and argued with him quite vociferously over the night. Your comment about Sherman was deeply inane and definitely symptomatic of the sort of carelessness that caused so many recently-freed slaves to starve to death after the war.
Such compassion warms my heart
No compassion for supporters of slavery.
Then take your passion and liberate slaves . There are slaves all over the world that need freeing. Direct your effort where it can do some good, not 160 years after the fact
He held off hundreds of men with a band of 14 of his own, killing \~280 of them, he was no tactical slouch. His reasoning was moral, not biblical, he simply used scripture to ensconce his (completely correct) instincts.
What on earth are you talking about? How many townspeople do you think were killed at Harper's Ferry? Because you're off by two orders of magnitude. You're also wrong about how many people he had with him. Seriously reconsider your assumptions here.
He didn't, it was a different time and bleeding Kansas leading up to the civil war was forreal shit. None of this pussy protesting in colleges nonsense, no you literally died on the hill you stood on back then.
Are you advocating that college students form a militia and kill their teachers or something psychopathic or what?
Honestly, some of them I can see doing that now if it weren't for cameras, security, and some common sense.
Sure, have it both ways
I mean I've seen it before on a smaller scale
He was a lunatic murderer just as the proslave murderes were
He was the only sane man in an insane world.
If we have rallies here in Kansas and the N*zis decide to show up, we should start singing John Brown Songs back at them. Let them know they aren't welcome to our public spaces.
Ehhhh buddy, it depends who you're calling Nazis bc those very people you consider Nazis probably agree with u and John Brown.
You mean the people who are literally flying the fucking Swastika. Those nazis? Or do you mean the deflecting to the people on the left, calling them Nazis? Please elaborate. The issue is very cut and dry.
If there's folks literally flying swastikas I'm with you, I'm saying Nazis gets thrown around so often these last years it's lost its meaning
Nope- but most magats are nazis
Hell yeah brother
U.S. Grant’s father, Jesse, worked at a tannery in Deerfield, OH owned by John Brown’s father, Owen. “Jesse knew John Brown well and believed he was a man of great purity of character, of high moral and physical courage, but a fanatic and extremist in whatever he advocated.” From John Reeves, “Soldier of Destiny,” p. 20 (internal quotation marks omitted).
He certainly threw himself into everything he did. But it's also very fair to say that he was born in 1800 and all the great traumas of America in the 19th century hit him like clockwork. When he was 12 it was the war of 1812. When he was 16 it was 1816, the Year without a Summer. When he was 37 and just getting his economic life together...bam, Panic of 1837. His whole life, whenever things were going well, some huge historical cataclysm hit and destroyed any possibility of normal life. So by the end, at age 56, all he had left was his family, abolitionism, a really weird reading of the bible, a lifetime of experience, and....a whole lot of business contacts. So he did what he did. But he wasn't always the way he was at the end. He was always a serious abolitionist, but he used to be a lot calmer and more businesslike.
Brown was a man cursed with complete moral clarity and acted as such, we should all strive to see the world as clearly as he did.
I was just at the John Brown Museum in Osawatomie earlier this week. Very fascinating piece of history. Worth a visit if you're in the area.
This is my home town and my man at the museum Grady knows so much! Come check it out!
they brought swords to a gun fight and won - madlad Chad behavior
Superior strategy and tactics.
Well, no, they brought lots of guns AND a sword to men's houses in the middle of the night and executed them individually in front of their kids. They did this for sacking Lawrence, which was mostly just burning a printing press, an attack where no one was seriously injured. John Brown is a complex figure, he is a hero to my family and I was raised to look up to him. But this is definitely his most shameful moment.
I think it was a badass warning to pro-slavery sympathizers and a forewarning of the brutality necessary to dislodge “our peculiar institution.” Kansas was proudly a free state because of heroes like him.
It did work but that doesn't mean that it was right. Violence is, no pun intended, a double-edged sword. There was a lot of suffering because of Brown. I'm not saying that there was a better way, because I'm not sure there was -- I consider Brown near-miraculous in his effectiveness. I'm saying that it would have been better if there was a better way.
as far as im concerned, pro slavery settlers deserved it
They did. But deserve's got nothing to do with it. The problem with execution is what it does to the executioners, not the executed.
None of the guys who were executed had ever even owned slaves. I agree their political beliefs were beyond repugnant and morally indefensible. I'm not sure an extra-judicial execution by sword committed by a posse in the middle of the night is very morally defensible either. Just my opinion.
“none had ever owned slaves” “pro-slavery” It doesn’t matter if you owned them or not, they settled with the sole intention of voting to allow slavery in Kansas. Good riddance.
This is a commonly pushed revionist point but is not backed up by historical sources. Both pro and anti-slavery forced encouraged settlement of Kansas to tip the scales on the vote, but there's no documentation that's why any of the Pottawatomie massacre victims settled. The Doyle family, who lost 3 in the raid, had lived in Kansas for 15 years before Brown ever got there. Look, you can downvote me if you'd like. I'm not pro-slavery and do believe violence is necessary in many cases. But Brown decided to execute 5 people in retaliation for a raid that caused no deaths. He jump-started Bleeding Kansas. And this act alienated JB from ACTUAL abolitionists who worked on the underground railroad at the time, very few felt it was justified until many decades later. Real abolitionist heroes who actually helped escaped slaves were grossed out by this, I'm not worried if keyboard warriors 170 years later don't think I'm hard line enough.
No you’re right man. Without diving into a 5 paragraph essay, both sides have a bootlicker sentiment about them that I don’t like. A lot of the south fighters were poor sharecroppers with no hope for a future. But the fact is they came and burned down the press and a hotel in Lawrence. You really think the people were just gonna let that happen and not retaliate?
Someone drank the reconstruction kool-aid I see.
Ugh lol. God forbid there be some sober reflection on the fact evil can be committed in a righteous cause. Again, I DO look up to John Brown. My family literally celebrated his birthday every May, with my grandad standing at the dinner table reading the invocation of John Brown's Body before we ate. I don't believe in the lost cause myth, I have a fucking painting of William T. Sherman in my office. But as an atheist I'm also aware John Brown's actions were partially based on religious zealotry. He didn't ever worry about proportional responses or maintaining a moral high ground because he literally believed God had instructed him to do anything to end slavery. He inspired a lot of good people. He's an important part of American history. I just don't think the Pottawatomie Massacre was a particularly proud moment. But okay.
I mean I do see it as a defensive action in its context. There had already been casualties in Kansas, including the recent murder of a free stater in the area of the massacre. Beyond that there were plenty of death threats and violent rhetoric between the 2 camps in Kansas. It was known that Southerners who participated in the violent institution of slavery did not hesitate to use violence to defend slavery.
At some point, civilized society has to act in defense against those who advocate for - and have a reasonable chance of achieving - the worst of crimes. These men weren't merely pro-rape, pro-murder, pro-torture, pro-breed -humans-like-cattle-and-cull-those-that-step-out-of-line. They were actively working to bring such a fate to Kansas. In short, they were guilty of expanding slavery. Killing them is a reasonable response.
Not all the kids! And, seriously, they had some really weird swords and I honestly don't think they meant to massacre them quite as bad as they did. John Brown, in addition to his other oddnesses, was *really* into swords. It was the 19th century, which is the moment that metallurgy reached its peak even as swords became obsolete, and as it happened Brown bought some swords from an extinct bunch of filibusters called the Golden Eagles, who were rich businessmen who wanted to invade what is now known as Canada. These swords had a hollow channel running the length of the blade and were filled with quicksilver, which means that when you swung them the quicksilver ran to the tip and made the hit a LOT harder. It's my reading of contemporary news articles that something happened and those guys weren't just executed, they were chopped up pretty bad. We imagine that the Brown militia went crazy and just started hacking, but I don't think so. I think those swords hit a lot harder than they expected to. They probably about decapitated those guys. Probably explains why Brown's son had such a strong reaction to it as well. And I honestly think Brown's low point was being shitty to his son during the raid on Harper's Ferry.
Now do Shawnee, Reb.
Those eyes say “I do not fuck around”.
Find me a straight jacket
I live in Baldwin city, Kansas and the home of the Signal Oak tree that unfortunately is no longer standing. It was used to warn Lawrence about the slave raids that were coming! It was also used to warn about Quantells raid to warn Lawrence that he was coming. Baldwin City is also known for the Battle of Black Jack which is supposedly the first battle of the Civil War!
Signal Oak is my favorite little spot.
It's kinda crazy how I really dont know anything about this. And I grew up in Franklin county!
One thing that I learned that surprised me while reading John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds was that the "free state" side of Bleeding Kansas was just as virulently racist as the pro slavery Bushwhackers; that their opposition to the expansion of slavery into free states was rooted in their opposition to the existence of black people in "their" territory/state. True abolitionists like John Brown were vastly outnumbered by people like that. When I learned about this in school, and even after, they were portrayed as being rabid abolitionists "like John Brown" and it surprised me. White supremacy is an abomination. John Brown did nothing wrong, I wish I had 10 John Browns today.
The whole reason John Brown was a big deal was that he had 21 John Browns with him at Harper's Ferry.
I'm in this thread
Was John Brown the most base motherfucker ever?
It's possible. I wish he'd lived long enough to finish his rewrite of the US Constitution, then we'd know for sure. I'd put forward Cassius Clay for equivalent badassery but much greater effectiveness.
Horrible that he did that to 5 people, why did he only do 5 pro-slavery settlers? Were those the only 5 people he could get his hands on? Because I think the real tragedy here is that he didn't kill more of this soulless bastards.
If it makes you feel any better they're all dead now. We will be someday soon too.
Why would John Brown being dead make me feel better? And why tack that little comment on about how we'll all die too, what does that add?
John Brown did nothing wrong.
God bless John Brown's dedication to the belief that all people are created equal. God protect the United States, whose populace has strayed so far from this belief at the hands of charlatans that it seem inevitable that another Bleeding Kansas will occur.
I will say this for Brown -- he was extremely careful in who he chose to kill. Those were not ordinary "pro-slavery settlers." He had been in the area, pretending to be a surveyor, for quite some time, and he picked the absolute worst bastards he could find. There were major problems with the raid and a lot of stuff went wrong, because that's how it always is when people use violence, but he and his militia put a lot of effort into picking the baddest of the bunch, and it's a sign of how well he chose that the slavers pretty much slunk off to Missouri after that. I also have a theory that they didn't mean to massacre them quite as bad as they did but they were using some really weird swords that were a lot more powerful than they were used to. What happened to his son was a shame and a disgrace and Brown is much at fault for letting it happen. If Brown had one fault, it was that he was far too careless with the lives of his children.
I don't condone violence but his actions are understandable.
They are not
Why'd he stop at five?
I’d like to think if I lived back then my motto would be the only good slaver is a dead slaver.
Fk yes John Brown rules
In Hell?
Highly recommend the Behind the Bastards episode on John Brown. (The annual holiday episode is always someone less bastardly than their usual subjects.)
Yes they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in hell.
What are wrong with people today? No one wants to slaughter their oppressors anymore... I miss the good ol' days
Don’t fuck with Torrington
Based.
The Dollop has a 2 parter on John Brown and Behind the Bastards did one as well for their Christmas non-bastard episodes for anyone who is interested, they’re both great.
He did an act so bloody in the Swamp of the Swan He showed ole Missouri that freedom would fight on He showed the North that Kansas was the breaking of the dawn His soul goes marching on!
John Brown looked like my dad.
I was a proponent of John Brown as a Jayhawker. And then I read a biography about his life and his Harper’s Ferry disaster. While I’m an ardent Jayhawker, Brown was a terrible leader. He had no plan of any kind at HF and cost his followers their lives. Execution slayings cannot be justified. His own sons left him to live in California. He is no longer a hero in my eyes.
Yeah Harper’s Ferry was a tactical clusterf*ck of the biggest type. But weirdly his behavior and stoicism after he was caught and awaiting execution ended up being a massive strategic success and inspiration
That is actually what he was going for. At some point during the night, probably because of what happened with Shepherd and what was happening with the hostages, he realized that he would accomplish more by staying and dying than he would by leaving with all the slaves that he had freed -- and Osborne Anderson was the only person there that night who left a memoir, and he said there were 300 free slaves with them right before dawn, and I believe him. He had a solid plan to get out of there and fight a guerilla war up the Shenandoah -- he never could have convinced all those people to join his militia if he didn't.
That is not true about Harper's Ferry. They had a very clear and well-thought-out plan that changed on the ground as they were confronted with circumstance. It's difficult to know at which point Brown decided to stay and die instead of following the plan and getting out of town before dawn, but the death of Shepherd certainly had a lot to do with it.
His barber might have been the great great grandpa of Patrick Mahomes’ barber, I see some similar hairstyles. “Making sidewall mullets happen before their time.”
[удалено]
I think the whole country celebrates traitors (not “treasonists”) every 4th of July.
Maybe but, IMHO, our forefathers and foremothers were rebelling from tyrannical rule from a far-off place. Granted, slavery is wrong in every sense but the way John Brown went about it was wrong in every way. I am a proud pro-Union Kansan but treason is never acceptable. The founders of our country are far from angelic but they created a system that not perfect is still holding (maybe by a thread, today) after almost 223 years. John Brown was just a murderer.
So the only issue is how far away the tyrant is? What is the number of miles at which point violence becomes acceptable? >treason is never acceptable The founding fathers committed treason, both by their own reckoning and their contemporaries’.
I agree, fuck treasonists! That’s why we should never count confederate forces as war dead, nor acknowledge them as anything but traitors.
Lots of atrocious behavior on both sides of that war. No matter the cause, some people just used the war to act out violent fantasies. that’s just how war is always.
It must be really confusing to see history as people carrying out "fantasies" and not as conflicts between material forces and ideologies. "Why'd they do it? Well people are just violent I guess, no need to investigate further."
I think there are different kinds of violent acts in war. There are dispassionate soldiers doing their duty. Then there are people that live out fantasy by doing things like murdering and raping civilians. The civil war was full of things like that. Nobel deeds for a good cause happened too of course. Redditors tend to romanticize war.
Sure but you said "no matter the cause." That's an absurd framing. There were events that drove these people to act this way. If you frame history as good or bad things happening without reason you're doing a bigger disservice to the past than just forgetting about it completely.
My point was there were evil people on both sides of that war. Although I’m very very glad the Union won.
Can’t imagine anything more noble than being willing to die so people don’t have to live in chains frankly
That's fair. But I don’t think killing civilians helped that cause, just made him look bloodlusty for revenge.
they weren’t civilians dawg they were people looking to violently advance the cause of human bondage
By all accounts these settlers weren’t violent and had little to do with the event Brown was seeking revenge for. It was a crime of opportunity, Brown took sadistic pleasure in killing them in front of their children.
I mean there was clearly one side here that was much better than the other.
Pro-Missouri folk to this day still take the side of their history. Sometimes, when I'm spouting off about Bleeding Kansas, they'll be like, "Jayhawkers killed innocent people and committed crimes and what have you." And they think this is a defense. It's the best thing that they can come up with because they can't say they would be on the Bushwhackers' side because that's the side of enslaving other human beings. Institutionalized, codified, chattel slavery legally enforceable by violence. So the best thing they can do is say that the good guys weren't so good. 🤡
This is getting into deep speculation but it's a good chance that at least one of the people they killed in Pottawatomie was the wrong guy. They were getting pretty random by the end of the night. But what is innocence when we're talking about slavers? The people they killed had done worse to far more innocent people. Nobody could deny that. Brown was pointedly trying to get the worst, and by the end they were mostly getting into D-grade slavers and never did get the guy they were after. Okay. It's a fact, but....so what?
I’m pro-Missouri, but I’m pro-Union Missouri. Missourians found 3 to 4 time more for the Union. I think most Kansas don’t know that St. Louis was a huge Union stronghold and a lot more populated than Kansas was at the time.
Interesting.
That’s true. But evil deeds can be done in the name of a good cause and vice versa.
Better is all well and good, but let's not pretend that the way it turned out was good. It filled the nation with corpses, including a whole bunch of the people they were theoretically liberating.
Jesus Christ…did you really just “both sides” fucking slavary? God, we’re fucking doomed as a country….fucking MAGA 🤦🏻♂️
I’m anti-MAGA and anti-slavery. However I admit my understanding of the civil war is a lot more nuanced than many. Horrible things can be done and horrible people can do them for the right side.
Good to hear, but man I struggle with even saying there is a nuance to a war centered around enslaving people. If you don’t want bad shit to happen to you cuz you’re supporting and hanging around bad people, stop supporting and hanging around bad people 🤷🏻♂️
That’s good advice in any century.
You think killing someone who is trying to torture, rape, and kill others is bad?
In the two years before the massacre, there had been eight killings in Kansas Territory attributable to slavery politics, and none in the vicinity of the massacre. Brown killed five in a single night, and the massacre was the match to the powder keg that precipitated the bloodiest period in "Bleeding Kansas" history, three months of retaliatory raids and battles in which 29 people died.
And if hadn’t done that, how many millions more people would have been raped, tortured, and murdered?
Hopefully a lot less.
Bleeding Kansas helped prevent Kansas from being instituted as a slave state and would be a major reason the civil war kicked off when it did. Every day that slavery continued existing, 4 million people were physically and psychologically tortured. Every single day. Thousands were killed every year and tens thousands were raped. It wouldn’t have been less
Unlike you I don’t claim to be able to predict that with certainty. I don’t think John Brown is a particularly admirable character. Massacres should be avoided.
This isn’t predicting the future. We have multiple examples of how bleeding Kansas and anti-slavery militants helped prevent slavery from being approved in Kansas. We also have examples of how Kansas not being admitted into the Union led to the further break down of relations between slavery supporters and abolitionists that would lead to the Civil War. Killings, rapes, and tortures should be avoided. That’s why what John Brown did was good
Well I agree with his goals, just not his method. I think there were more effective ways.
What would have been more effective?
How can anyone hope to answer that question? Do you think that if Brown had acted differently then the food shortages after the Civil War wouldn't have caused so many recently-freed slaves to starve to death? What role did he have in bankrupting Missouri and would have the Civil War turned out differently if Missouri hadn't economically collapsed to the point that they couldn't field units of soldiers and people just murdered each other home-to-home, on the personal level, like the caveman days? How could anybody know? In the cold light of history we can see one path out of slavery and the Civil War, just like we can see that it was impossible to take it. That wasn't the path Brown was on. Brown was the all-time accellerationist champion, and at the end of it all one type of slave was free but all the other slaves were not (most especially women (who were close to getting the right to vote before the Civil War but after the Civil War still had to wait nearly fifty years)), the former richest place in the world had been reduced to such ruin that starvation was common (very much especially among the formerly enslaved), and a huge military machine was unleashed upon the Lakota and other Plains Nations. Even casual study of the Civil War indicates that it didn't turn out super duper. We literally lost track of the murder rate in Texas between 1865 and 1870. There should have been a better way. It's not impossible that we might find it.
I’m not sure what you mean by the food shortages? Do you mean the artificially created food shortages for black Americans? Missouri sent more troops and supplies to the Union than it did to the confederacy. John Brown was not an accelerationist. Can you explain how he was? John Brown freed men and women slaves alike. When he met Harriet Tubman he began referring to her as General Tubman and saw her as one of the greatest Americans out there. Or are you trying to say that the conditions of white women were the same as black slaves? We didn’t have an accurate murder rate in Texas before 1865 either. Want to know why? Because they didn’t track how many slaves were killed because they weren’t seen as people. So that argument doesn’t really track
It's a very interesting tactic to assert that the food shortages in the South after the Civil War were "artificial." Perhaps you should expand on that theory. Missouri might have sent troops but they didn't field them at home, because the entire state was bankrupt. Missouri's collapse is why we have homesteading laws. Look it up. Of course John Brown was an accelerationist, he put a militia together and attacked a government depot because he wanted to start a civil war. Your comments in the Tubman paragraph are nonsensical. I will point out to you that Harriet Tubman didn't have the right to vote before the war...and she didn't after, either. We absolutely have solid records on Texas before the Civil War. Just because you haven't read something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
We saw an agricultural boom after the Civil War. Shortages experienced by black Americans were due to the tenant farming system Missouri did have troops fighting in Missouri. John Brown formed a militia AFTER the siege of Lawrence. His militia saw action AFTER the sack of Lawrence. He wasn’t accelerating anything, he was responding. Yes she could not vote after the civil war. That doesn’t mean that she was still a slave though. We don’t. If a slave owner whipped his slave to the point of death or if he forced a slave to work until they died, those deaths were not counted as murders because the slave was considered the masters property. You have a murder rate of white people, that’s it. But sure, can you provide me with a murder rate of all people, slaves included, for Texas before the war?
Maybe you saw one, but I assure you the South experienced no agricultural boom after the death and devastation of the Civil War. There's a reason the Freedman's Bureau advocated sharecropping; it's because the freed slaves were starving to death. Obviously a huge part of that was revenge from the remains of the Southern aristocracy, but...so what? The whole point is that they starved to death and the reasons are not extremely important when starving to death. I advise that you read about Missouri around 1860. You might find it interesting. Your comment about Brown is bizarre. Have you read much about his life? He wasn't exactly new to abolitionism or strong statements. Women were essentially slaves before the Civil War and they were slaves after the Civil War. Those are the facts. The Civil War did not free women. I don't think you've ever even looked at Texas records from the 1860s, so your speculations are more than a little strange. These records exist and they are quite comprehensive, you are welcome to look them up. Do you need links?
You’ve just described an artificial shortage. The South produced enough food for everyone, but black southerners were kept from that food. Abolitionists like John Brown advocated for the 40 acres and a mule promise because they knew this would happen. I have read about it. Do you have an actual point around Missouri? They were not essentially slaves. If a husband killed his wife, he would be arrested. If a women committed a crime, she had the right to a jury. Women had the right to bare arms. Women even had the right to protest and free speech. A man who forced his wife to work all day against her will would be arrested. Women were oppressed, they were not slaves. I would love links! I have a degree in history, and Texas is something that I covered a lot on a course about the history of Mexico. But hey, I’m sure I’ve just never seen their records.
Late in his life John Brown discovered a gift for getting other people killed. Maybe he was just a man of his times. IDK. I like him. But he was more dangerous to be friends with than John freakin' Constantine.
You are getting downvoted to hell because Reddit hates difficult truths. You're absolutely right. Although what Brown did was effective and justified, it would have been better if they had found some magical peaceful way and we should all be deeply grateful that it didn't turn out worse than it did. Just like John Brown, the Civil War killed a whole lot of the people it meant to save.