James N. Gilbert's View Of John Brown As A Terrorists

The topic of John Brown is controversial, because no one knows how to label him due to his violent actions, which involved the killings of multiple people. During the 1830s various antislavery activities were attempted, but to no avail did it work. Brown introduced a new method which involved the combination of violence with the idea of freeing slaves. Even with the people who preached for anti-slavery were not as unique as Brown. Unlike most said abolitionists at that time, Brown became friends with the blacks and slaves he came across and got to know them as a person. Although some view John Brown as a terrorist, he was both a political zealot and freedom fighter, by organizing events, such as movements in protesting the enslavement of the

Gilbert breaks down on the various definitions on what it means to be a terrorist and builds points into why and how John Brown was a terrorist. The word terrorist is broad, however Gilbert condenses it by expressing it as, “A phenomenal involving ‘the unlawful use of threat or violence against persons or property to further political or social objectives”. For example, slavery is viewed as a legal political system, because there was no law against slavery at the time. When Brown started advocating for the freedom of the slaves, it was quite unpopular, especially down in the South where most of the economy was depended on the work of the slaves. By Gilbert’s opinion, Brown would have been a terrorist, because of his belief, but terrorism is on a much larger scale. As a political zealot, he started a movement of a different approach towards antislavery and as a freedom fighter, he worked with those who carried similar beliefs in trying to help the slaves escape their harsh lifestyle. Despite other people who also believed that slavery should have been outlawed, they were not labeled as a terrorist. What differed from Brown’s political movements that seems to have lumped him in the category of a terrorist was that he, “personally directed and participated in the murder of five defenseless men”, but that does not necessarily make him a

John Hammond, like many other people believed that “slavery was inhumane” and that anyone who agreed to be a slave was “out of their mind”. This raises a question such an idea that the killings could be justifiable because they were occurring for the greater good. Other previous pacifist actions taken out by people to disapprove slavery was often dealt with violence. “In November 1837, a proslavery mob destroyed the presses of an antislavery newspaper near St. Louis and murdered its editor, Elijah P. Lovejoy,” thus slavery persisted without any change in society. Obviously, this enraged Brown who decided to lead his own antislavery group, and even though his group was known to kill others, he himself did not partake in the killings, he only organized the events. There were no random mass killings of people for Brown’s belief, which terrorism is usually associated with. In fact, Brown would have liked to avoid the killings, expressing that they had to protect themselves and had no choice. To illustrate that the killings were in self-defense, Brown noted to multiple times that when the other men did not have firearms they would try to peacefully slip away, yet, in the instance where the other party pulled out a weapon, that's when they pulled out