John brown

Abolitionist John Brown leads 18 men in an attack on the Harpers Ferry armory. The raid to seize the weapons failed and Brown was captured, tried, and hung. At his trial, Brown said: “Now,…

An article written by Elisa De Togni on abolitionists’ reaction to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry

John Brown (1800-1859), a white American abolitionist, was hanged for treason, murder and insurrection after his failed attempt to take over the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry to gain arms for a …

Plenty of famous folks were born here, but West Virginia was the site of several famous deaths as well.

Bleeding Kansas

Tragic Prelude, John Steuart Curry's representation of Bleeding Kansas just before the Civil War. He painted this in the Capitol. Despite some unpopularity when he painted it 70 or 80 years ago, no one's painted over it.

John Brown daguerreotype c1846-47.

John Brown ... advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. Executed in 1859, but his speeches at the trial captured national attention. Brown has been called "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans" and "America's first domestic terrorist."

John Brown, militant American abolitionist and veteran of Bleeding Kansas whose raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 and subsequent execution made him an antislavery martyr and was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities that led to the American Civil War.