Today in history militant abolitionist John Brown is executed on charges of treason, murder and insurrection on December 2, 1859.
Today in history militant abolitionist John Brown is executed on charges of treason, murder and insurrection on December 2, 1859. Brown, born in Connecticut in 1800, first became militant during the mid-1850s, when as a leader of the Free State forces in Kansas he fought pro-slavery settlers in the sharply divided U.S. territory. Achieving only moderate success in his fight against slavery on the Kansas frontier, and committing atrocities in the process, Brown settled on a more ambitious plan in 1859. With a group of racially mixed followers, Brown set out to Harpers Ferry in present-day West Virginia, intending to seize the Federal arsenal of weapons and retreat to the Appalachian Mountains of Maryland and Virginia, where they would establish an abolitionist republic of liberated enslaved people and abolitionist whites. Their republic hoped to form a guerrilla army to fight slaveholders and ignite uprisings, and its population would grow exponentially with the influx of liberated...