John Brown
John Brown (1800-59), US antislavery militant. A White man, Brown settled in a Negro community with his family in 1849. He organized armed raids on sup-porters of slavery, believing that he had a divine mission to kill them. He was eventually hanged for murder, conspiracy, and treason after an attack on the government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia (1859), in which 15 people were killed. After his death he was regarded as a martyr of the anti-slavery cause, being remembered in the song ‘John Brown’s Body’.
“John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes — it does not live — hereafter. Wendell Phillips, speaking at the funeral of John Brown”
