John Brown (abolitionist)

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John Brown, around 1846
Signature of John Brown

John Brown (born May 9, 1800 in Torrington , Connecticut , † December 2, 1859 in Charles Town, Virginia , now West Virginia ) was an American abolitionist who rebelled against slavery in the United States . He was executed after an unsuccessful violent attempt to induce slaves to revolt.

Life

John Brown was born into an old New England family and joined a Congregational Church when he was 16 . From 1834 he fought relentlessly against slavery . After Brown had failed every business venture in the east, he moved to Kansas in 1855 to live with six of his sons and son-in-law who had bought land there. Brown soon became a spokesman for the abolitionists.

Brown's residence in North Elba, New York, from 1849

When the civil war-like conditions in Kansas ( Bleeding Kansas ) came to a head in the spring of 1856 , Brown and his sons joined a militia company to fight on the side of the abolitionists. In response to the attack by advocates of slavery in Lawrence , Kansas, in which a slavery opponent was murdered, and the attack on Rep. Charles Sumner , Brown and four of his sons and three other men perpetrated on the night of May 24-25, 1856 the Pottawatomie massacre . The eight men abducted five non-Lawrence slavery settlers from their homes and murdered them by splitting their skulls with swords. Arrest warrants were issued against the murderers, but for various reasons they were not enforced.

Brown became the leader of a small armed anti-slavery force and engaged in shootings with forces of advocates of slavery on June 2, 1856 at Black Jack (in Douglas County , Kansas ) and on August 30, 1856 in Osawatomie (in Miami County , Kansas) . Brown was identified as the perpetrator soon after the murders, and arrest warrants were issued against him. For a long time, parts of the press in the Northern States and anti-slavery groups held that the allegations were false or tried to cast the victims in a bad light.

His most famous action took place three years later, on October 16, 1859 instead, when he and 18 men the in Harpers Ferry , then Virginia (now West Virginia), just south of the Mason-Dixon line location arsenal of the US Army raided. His plan was to spark an uprising of slaves and arm them in order to ultimately liberate the entire south with an ever-growing revolutionary army. In the event of the failure of this military plan, he wanted to draw media attention to the contradiction between the American constitution and the (southern state) insistence on slavery.

Brown's grave in North Elba, New York

The military plan, hopeless from the start, failed and was also poorly prepared; not a single slave joined them willingly. On the morning of October 17, militia units from Virginia and Maryland, along with residents of Harpers Ferry, advanced to Brown's positions. On the night of October 18, a company of US Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee reached the site. The Marines stormed the arsenal without using any firearms so as not to endanger the lives of hostages. A total of 14 men died, ten of Brown's supporters including two of his sons, three Harpers Ferry residents, and one Marine.

Brown himself was only wounded, arrested and - after extremely high -profile interviews - hanged almost two months later for murder, instigating a slave revolt and high treason on December 2, 1859 in Charles Town, then Virginia .

Despite the failure of his military action, his revolt raised awareness of the slavery problem in the United States, deepened the conflict between North and South, and was one of the events that led to the outbreak of civil war in the United States. During his trial, John Brown was already divided; so he became - with a steadily growing following - the great hero of the abolitionists in the northern states, while most southerners viewed him as a criminal and a murderer.

Victor Hugo tried from his exile in Guernsey to obtain a pardon for Brown and wrote an open letter on December 2, 1859 , in which he also warned of an impending civil war. Brown turned down offers of escape during his trial; he saw himself as a martyr in the fight against slavery, who through his example could best promote the approaching struggle for the liberation of slaves.

John Brown in the judgment of contemporaries and posterity

In an essay ( A Plea for Captain John Brown ) based on a speech first given in Concord , Massachusetts on October 30, 1859 , Henry David justifies Thoreau Brown as an admirable fighter for the abolition of slavery, in the name of humanity and rebelled against an injustice protected by the state in compliance with the constitution. After Brown's death, Thoreau highlighted his moral greatness on December 2, 1859 ( Remarks After the Death of John Brown ). In another essay written in 1860 ( The Last Days of John Brown ), Brown is celebrated by Thoreau as a hero and modern democrat.

William Lloyd Garrison wrote: “With his rifle shots, John Brown only announced what time it was. It is twelve noon. Thank God. " Herman Melville called Brown the" meteor of war. " Nathaniel Hawthorne said:" A man has never been hanged more rightly. "The historian Michael Hochgeschwender judges:" Brown was a terrorist, not a freedom fighter. "

During the Civil War, the march John Brown's Body, composed soon after his execution, quickly became the most popular battle song of the Union troops. The melody can still be found today in the American Battle Hymn of the Republic , the verse of which Julia Ward Howe wrote as a replacement for the original song, which was perceived as disrespectful.

John Brown in film and television

additional

literature

  • Oswald Garrison Villard, Sr .: John Brown, 1800-1859 . Boston 1910.
  • James C. Malin: Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six . Philadelphia 1942 (to John Brown in Kansas).
  • Louis Ruchames (Ed.): A John Brown Reader . London 1959, reissued as John Brown, Making of a Revolutionary , New York 1969.
  • Stephen B. Oates: To purge this land with blood: A Biography of John Brown . New York 1970.
  • Jules Abels: Man on Fire: John Brown and the Cause of Liberty . New York 1971.
  • David M. Potter , Don E. Fehrenbacher : The Impending Crisis: America before the Civil War 1848–1861 . Harper 1976.
  • James M. McPherson : Battle Cry of Freedom . Oxford University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-19-516895-X .
  • Robert E. McGlone: John Brown's War against Slavery. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, ISBN 978-1-107-61796-4 .
  • Ted A. Smith: Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto 2014, ISBN 978-0-8047-8850-2 .

Novels

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : John Brown  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: John Brown  - Quotes
Wikisource: The First Political Execution in the United States.  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom , pp. 152–15
  2. ^ Materials relating to John Brown
  3. ↑ James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom , p. 206
  4. ^ Evan Carton, Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America (2006), pp. 332-333.
  5. ↑ M. Hochgeschwender: The American Civil War. Munich 2010. p. 45.
  6. ↑ Various Versions of the John Brown Song - Spanning More Than a Century ( Memento of the original from September 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.trans-video.net
  7. ^ Tomb of John Brown in the Find a Grave database
personal data
SURNAME Brown, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American abolitionist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1800
PLACE OF BIRTH Torrington , Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH December 2, 1859
Place of death Charles Town , Virginia