John Brown

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a militant abolitionist, a

"conductor" on the Underground Railroad, and the organizer of a

self-protection league for free blacks and fugitive slaves.


By the time he was fifty, Brown was entranced by visions of slave

uprisings, during which racists paid horribly for their sins, and he came

to regard himself as commissioned by God to make that vision a reality.

In August 1885 he followed five of his sons to Kansas to help make the

state a haven for anti-slavery settlers. The following year, his hostility

toward slave-staters exploded after they burned and pillaged the

free-state community of Lawrence. Having organized a militia unit

within his Osawatomie River colony, Brown led it on a mission of

revenge. On the evening of May twenty-third, 1856, he and six

followers, including four of his sons, visited the homes of pro-slavery

men along Pottawatomie Creek, dragged their unarmed inhabitants into

the night, and hacked them to death with long-edged ...

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