John Brown

Brown, John

(1800–59) abolitionist; born in Torrington, Conn. Son of an itinerant tradesman, he grew up in Hudson, Ohio, and received little formal schooling. His mother died insane when he was eight years old; several of her nearest relations were also seriously disturbed. He became a tanner, one of his father's trades, then successively a land surveyor, shepherd, and farmer. He married in 1820 and again in 1831 after the death of his first wife, fathering 20 children altogether. He migrated from place to place in the 1830s and 1840s, failing in several businesses and engaging in unprofitable land speculations. He had been an abolitionist from his youth, but he was in his fifties before he began to plot emancipation by main force. By 1855 he and six of his sons and a son-in-law had moved to Osawatomie, Kansas, to participate in the struggle to keep it a non-slave state. After proslavery forces attacked and burned the town of Lawrence, Kansas, Brown led a small force, including four of his sons, to nearby Pottawatomie Creek where on the night of May 24, 1856, they killed five proslavery men; he took full responsibility for the killings. Returning to the East, now dangerously obsessed with abolition through violence, he gained the patronage of northern activists such as Gerrit Smith, who supplied him with money, arms, and moral support. Dreaming of setting up a free state for liberated slaves in the Virginia mountains, he planned a raid on the Harpers Ferry, Va., armory. He and his men seized the armory on October 16, 1859, but were captured when a detachment of U.S. Marines under Col. Robert E. Lee stormed the building. Tried for treason and hanged on December 2, he became the stuff of legend, a martyr to Northern supporters such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a dangerous fanatic to most Southerners.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

Brown, John

(1800–1859) abolitionist; attempted to liberate slaves. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 64]

See: Deliverance

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Brown, John

(1800–1859) abolitionist leader; died for antislavery cause. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 111]

See: Martyrdom

Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Brown, John

 

Born May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut; died Dec. 2, 1859, in Charles Town, Virginia. Fighter for the emancipation of the Negro slaves in the USA. One of the leaders of the left wing of the abolitionist movement. Author of antislavery pamphlets.

Brown participated in the activity of the so-called underground railroad. In 1855-56 he organized an armed struggle against slaveholders in Kansas. He worked out a plan for the establishment of a free republic in the Allegheny Mountains as a base for the struggle against slavery, and he composed a draft for its democratic “provisional constitution.” Carrying out his plan, Brown captured the government arsenal in Harpers Ferry (in the slaveholding state of Virginia) on Oct. 16, 1859, with a band of 18 people (including five Negroes). The band was surrounded by troops and almost completely annihilated. Two of Brown’s sons were killed, and he was himself seriously wounded. In accordance with a court sentence Brown was hanged in Charles Town. Brown’s uprising, which immediately preceded the Civil War of 1861-65, was an open challenge to slavery. His name became a symbol for revolutionary action and the struggle for the rights of the Negro people.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 30, p. 4.
Chernyshevskii, N. G. Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 6. Moscow, 1949. Pages 448-54.
Du Bois, W. Dzhon Braun. (Translated from English.) Moscow, 1960.
Dement’ev, I. P. “N. G. Chernyshevskii i konstitutsiia Dzhona Brauna.” Voprosy istorii, 1959, no. 12.
Zakharova, M. N. Narodnoe dvizhenie v SShA protiv rabstva: 1831-1860. Moscow, 1965.

I. P. DEMENT’EV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.