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.

John Brown is a man of many legacies, from hero, freedom fighter, and martyr, to liar, fanatic, and "the father of American terrorism." Some have said that it was his seizure of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry that rendered the Civil War inevitable. Deeply religious, Brown believed that God had chosen him to right the wrong of slavery. He was willing to kill and die for something modern Americans unanimously agree was a just cause. And yet he was a religious fanatic and a staunch believer in "righteous violence," an unapologetic committer of domestic terrorism. Marrin brings 19th-century issues into the modern arena with ease and grace in a book that is sure to spark discussion.