Reynolds demonstrates that Brown's most violent acts - his slaughter of unarmed citizens in Kansas, his liberation of slaves in Missouri, and his dramatic raid, in October 1859, on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia - were inspired by the slave revolts, guerilla warfare, and revolutionary Christianity of the day. He shows us how Brown seized the nation's attention, creating sudden unity in the North, where the Transcendentalists led the way in sanctifying Brown, and infuriating the South, where proslavery fire-eaters exploited the Harpers Ferry raid to whip up a secessionist frenzy. Reynolds recounts how Brown permeated politics and popular culture during the Civil War and beyond. He reveals the true depth of Brown's achievement: not only did Brown spark the war that ended slavery, but he planted the seeds of the civil rights movement by making a pioneering demand for complete social and political equality for America's ethnic minorities.
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Background Information
John Brown was an abolitionist who believed that violence against slavery was justified, as he showed in the assault at Harpers Ferry in 1860. Abolitionism was the movement, centered in the North, that abolition of slavery even in those states that had practiced it since the founding of the country. Harper's Ferry, at the junction of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, was the scene of John Brown's raid in 1860. Transcendentalism was a religious philosophy, centered in Massachusetts, that attracted many of the leading intellectuals prior to the Civil War.