John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry
1) On October 1859, John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry affected American culture in a way no other event in the Antebellum period did. The raid divided the country into two sections: the North and South; it was one of a great significant events happened in the United States. John Brown was a white abolitionist. He was executed on December 2nd, 1859 without fair trial and sentenced to hang. Brown became a legend during the period. He was a God fearing, but violent man and slaveholders saw him as fanatic, a murderer, and lunatic. To abolitionist like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he is a courageous, noble, and a hero. Brown is an abolitionist with goal and purpose for fighting for what was right; however, he is a radical and dangerous extremist.
2) Brown’s religious belief is difference from the mainstream American religious beliefs at the time. Since he was
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He was filled with the heavy anti-slavery sentiment when he saw the slaveholder beat a slave about his age when he was little. Brown later wrote that the beating transformed him into “a most determined abolitionist” and it leads him to “declared an eternal war” with slavery. (Earle, p.4) When Brown heard of Elijah P. Lovejoy murder in a prayer meeting in Hudson, he decided to devote the remainder of his life to the eradication of slavery. Other abolitionists only pray and sewing group. Brown’s “radical ideas about racial equality” set him aside from mainstream abolitionist. (Earle, p.8) Brown shocks other abolitionist when he invited African Americans to sit with him in the family pew. Additionally, Brown believes that he could speak for the African American (slave). He claims “to know what was good for black people better than black people themselves.” (Earle, p.10) Hence, Brown starts to liberated small groups in Missouri and help them escape to Canada. Later on, was creating a greater plan of
From before the country’s conception to the war that divided it and the fallout that abolished it, slavery has been heavily engrained in the American society. From poor white yeoman farmers, to Northern abolitionist, to Southern gentry, and apathetic northerners slavery transformed the way people viewed both their life and liberty. To truly understand the impact that slavery has had on American society one has to look no further than those who have experienced them firsthand. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and advocate for the abolitionist, is on such person. Douglass was a living contradiction to American society during his time. He was an African-American man, self-taught, knowledgeable, well-spoken, and a robust writer. Douglass displayed a level of skill that few of his people at the time could acquire. With his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself, Douglass captivated the people of his time with his firsthand accounts into the horror and brutality that is the institution of slavery.
Families torn apart, humans sold on auction blocks, using humans for animal labor. These tragedies along with the words of the Quaker poet John Whiittier are just the beginning when trying to explain the motivation for abolitionists helping to free slaves.
Brown had his mind made up to travel on the pathway to Harpers Ferry right when he was born and believed he is the only one that has to lead this battle. His parents were passionate Calvinists who taught their children to view life as an endless fight contrary to evil. The battle of John Brown was on a more personal level where he remembered a memory when he was five years old and his mother whipped him for stealing a vast amount of brass pins. In addition, the battle was somewhat on a political point as well because Brown and his family considered that the sincere had to be spectators against the bad people in America. They assumed that the biggest evil during their time has to be none other than the establishment of slavery. Therefore, the father of John Brown replaced their family residence in northeast Ohio into a stop on the Underground Railroad and made his son into a dedicated abolitionist. Brown’s developing participation in the movement in the 1830s and ’40s made him set his commitment as well as the rising nationwide fight over slavery’s position in a country supposedly devoted to equal opportunity. During this era, abolition...
In Douglass’ book, he narrates his earliest accounts of being a slave. At a young age, he acknowledges that it was a masters’ prerequisite to “keep their slaves thus ignorant”, reporting he had no true account of his age, and was groomed to believe, “a want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood” (25). This mindset was inbreeded in slaves to use ignorance as control and power. As a child, Douglass is separated from his mother. Thus, he comprehends this is implemented in slavery to disengage any mental, physical, and emotional bond within families and to benefit slave owners concern of uprooting slaves for trade. He illustrates the “norm” action and response of a slave to the master. To describe the typical dialogue, he states, “To all these complaints, no matter how unjust, the slave must answer never a word”, and in response “a slave must stand, listen, and tremble” (38). In the course of his narrative, he describes several excruciating acts of abuse on slaves. His first memory of this exploitation, the lashing of his Aunt Hester, he depicts as, “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery” (29). Also, he gives accounts of owners’ self-deception tactics, injustices, and in effect, shaping characteristics of prejudice, jealousy, and dishonesty of slaves towards slaves. Likewise, connecting to the reader, slave...
Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry affected American culture more than can ever be understood. Tension between the North and South was building in the 1850's. Slavery among many other things was dividing the country into two sections. Brown was executed on December 2, 1859 for his murderous out-lash on society. Was his mind so twisted and demented that he would commit cold-blooded murder? The answer is no. John Brown was a man with a goal and a purpose. When he said that abolition could not be achieved without blood he was right. It is one of histories great ironies; John Brown's struggle preceded the Civil War by only 17 months. Thousands of people were killed in the Civil War, yet John Brown is still looked on as a criminal. He was not a criminal but a hero, fighting for what was right. He was a man ahead of his time.
Abolitionism quickly gained popularity since 1821 when William Lloyd Garrison assisted in writing an anti-slavery newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, with Benjamin Lundy. In 1831, abolitionism continued to grow in popularity when William Lloyd Garrison started The Liberator. Although there remained not a need for slaves in the North, slavery remained very big in the South for growing “cash crops.” The majority of the abolitionists who inhabited the North organized speeches, meetings, and newspapers to spread their cause. Initially, only small revolts and fights occurred. However, major events along the way led to the Harpers Ferry Raid. For example, with Kansas choosing whether or not to become a free or slave state. That became the biggest event up until John Brown’s Raid. John Brown had always despised slavery, and this enhanced his chance as an organized revolt. The effect of his raid on Harpers Ferry affected what the South thought about abolitionists and the power that they held.
Many Northern abolitionists, including Frederick Jackson, were ashamed of Brown. Most Northern abolitionists were pacifists and tried to emancipate slaves using newspapers, rallies, cartoons, and literature. Moderates on both sides also disliked Brown and his actions. Men like Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to preserve the Union at all costs, felt like Brown’s drastic actions would serve only to be yet another reason for Southerners to secede. As history shows us, Lincoln was right. Harpers Ferry convinced many Southerners that they could not live in peace nor safety as long as Northern abolitionists kept questioning their “peculiar institution” and pulling stunts like these, so they wanted to secede, almost like how certain people in the North had tried to leave society to create their own “utopias”. It appears that the only people who liked what Brown did were indeed the Transcendentalist writers in the Northeast who sought to leave society. As Davidson and Lytle point out, many historians think of the raid on Harpers Ferry as one of the most significant triggers to the Civil War.
...e torture and pain of slavery, he had an excellent reason to fight for the abolitionist movement. He became successful in his fight against slavery. His works documented the rise of a slave to a free man, to a respected speaker, to a famous writer and politician.
It was America mid 1850’s and slavery was a sensitive topic between the north and the south. It seemed slaves had no hope of ever changing America’s ways until a white man by the name of John Brown decided to stand up and fight for the abolishment of slavery, which has been said to be one of the major events leading up to the American Civil War. Browns actions were defended by himself claiming they were “consisting of God’s commandments” (Finkelman 2011). I will explain Brown’s deontological ethical perspective while preforming the actions for the abolishment of slavery.
Some of the persisting goals of antislavery activism were legal emancipation, aid to runaway slaves through vigilance groups and the Underground Railroad, civil rights for freed blacks in the north, and education, suffrage, and economic advancement for African-Americans. Perhaps the most unifying ideal of the anti-slavery movement was that the racial basis for American slavery could be undermined by promoting Christian values, education and economic progress among free blacks to show that they were capable of succeeding as individuals in an integrated American society. Richard Allen, leader of the A.M.E. church, stated the case for black progress as an answer to the justifications of slaveholders: “if we are lazy and idol, the enemies of freedom plead it as a cause why we ought not to be free.” In addition to the connection between abolition and economic and social progress, most abolitionists worked for the assurance of civil rights and legal protection for free blacks, who lived in an anomalous condition of “freedom” without citizenship and with constant threat of discrimination, violence, and abduction to be sold into slavery.
In this narrative which was published in 1845, entails the early life of Douglass all the way up to his escape from slavery. Eventually, living in New York coming to the realizations that being a refugee and hiding from the law was not an easy task or way of living, seeking and agreeing to the help of abolitionists, Douglass traveled to Massachusetts in attempt to reconstruct his ways of living and being a free man. In the works of reconstructing his life and pursuing many different and rational ideas that would lead him to escape the idea of slavery, Douglass presented himself at an anti-slavery meeting in which gained himself two companions who were abolitionists. John A. Collins and William Lloyd Garrison were his new abolitionist friends whom helped Douglass get a job in lecturing which eventually led to him becoming a popular speaker months later.
Along with all the rural arts Brown was skilled at, one of his most conspicuous talents was profuse and painful failure. He made many attempts at work and every one turned into a disappointment. In 1837, Brown made his first public statement on human bondage and from then on continued to speak out against slavery. For three years, he traveled East beseeching abolitionists for guns and money.
John Brown was an American abolitionist, born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio. He felt passionately and violently that he must personally fight to end slavery. This greatly increased tension between North and South. Northern mourned him as a martyr and southern believed he got what he deserved and they were appalled by the north's support of Brown. In 1856, in retaliation for the sack of Lawrence, he led the murder of five proslavery men on the banks of the Pottawatomie River. He stated that he was an instrument in the hand of God. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee. Within 36 hours of the attack, most of Brown's men had been killed or captured. Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859. He became a martyr for many because of the dignity and sincerity that he displayed during his popular trial. Before he was hanged he gave a speech which was his final address to the court that convicted him. And he was thankful to Bob Butler for letting him send that text in electronic form. "This court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to the instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, I did not wrong but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingles my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done." (http://members.
John Brown should be remembered as a villain and a hero because he took armed possession of the federal arsenal and launch a massive slave insurrection to free the nation’s 4 million slaves.
Douglass's life as a reformer ranged from his abolitionist activities in the early 1840s to his attacks on Jim Crow and lynching in the 1890s. For 16 years he edited an influential black newspaper and achieved international fame as an orator and writer of great persuasive power. In thousands of speeches and editorials he levied an irresistible indictment against slavery and racism, provided an indomitable voice of hope for his people, embraced antislavery politics, and preached his own brand of American ideals. In the 1850s he broke with the strictly moralist brand of abolitionism led by William Lloyd Garrison; he supported the early women's rights movement; and he gave direct assistance to John Brown's conspiracy that led to the raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859.