Memoirs Of The American Philosophical Society V17, 1942.

The Definitive Biography of John Brown “John Brown’s life was filled with drama, and Oates tells his story in a manner so engrossing that the book reads like a novel, despite the fact that it is extensively documented and researched.” —Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review Professor Oates “has given us the most objective and absorbing biography of John Brown ever written. The subtitle perfectly captures Brown’s own conception of his role in the antislavery crusade. Oates describes with subtlety and detail John Brown’s early career, his struggles with poverty, illness and death, the desperate straits the man was put to in support of his large family of twenty children. He tells us that Brown came to the armed phase of his abolitionist career at the end of many business ventures and as many failures, unsuccessful speculations, lawsuits, and bankruptcies, even misappropriation of funds.” —Willie Lee Rose, New York Review of Books In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. His goal was to secure weapons and start a slave rebellion. The raid was a failure, but it galvanized the nation and sparked the Civil War. Still one of the most controversial figures in American history, John Brown’s actions raise interesting questions about unsanctioned violence that can be justified for a greater good. For more than a hundred years after Brown’s hanging, biographies of him tended to be highly politicized—then came historian Stephen B. Oates’ biography of Brown. Since its publication, Professor Oates’ work has come to be recognized as the definitive biography of Brown, a balanced assessment that captures the man in all his complexity.

An authoritative new examination of John Brown and his deep impact on American history.Bancroft Prize-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.

John Brown's father on the day of his birth, May 9, 1800, wrote "John was born one hundred years after his great grandfather. Nothing else very uncommon." Many years later came the 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre, where his uncommon convictions led him and his band of abolitionists to kill five pro-slavery settlers in Franklin County, Kansas. Three years later, Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and his subsequent trial and execution helped push an already divided nation inexorably toward civil war. This is the story of John Brown, the age he embodied and the myth he became, and how the tragic gravity of his actions transformed America's past and future. Through biographical narrative, his life and legacy are discussed as a study in metaphor and power and the nature of historical memory.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011 A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale." Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours.