John Brown's Life During The Pre-Civil War

During John Brown’s adulthood life was the Pre-Civil War era. There was a lot of tension between the black and white races. Brown was raised as a Calvinist. He was deeply religious and was taught by his parents to be kind to all Negroes and to oppose enslavement. Throughout his life he began to despise the idea of slavery and sought to make a change. John insisted that slavery was a “great sin against God” and that it was his sworn Christian duty to help slaves escape from the South to Canada and freedom. He was highly influenced by anti-slavery writings, and his father, Owen Brown. John Brown had begun planning his attack in 1857, after moving back East from Kansas, where he had served as the self-appointed captain of the violent antislavery forces pouring into that territory. There, in an attempt to staunch the virulent proslavery immigration sparked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Brown had led a band of six men, including four of his sons, in an 1856 raid against a pioneer settlement of Southerners along Pottawatomie Creek. At Brown's command, the raiders brutally murdered five settlers. Other depredations followed in the spreading fight over the slavery issue: More than 200 people had been killed in "Bloody Kansas" by the end of the year, and Brown fled with a price on his head. Though a fugitive, he traveled openly around the Northeast,

Surely, he thought, thousands of slaves, freedmen and antislavery whites would rally to his cause, and Harpers Ferry could supply the guns and ammunition to arm them all. Once a large enough force had gathered, Brown planned to break out and terrorize his way south through Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama hoping more and more slaves would join his rebellion as they went. After months of preparation and waiting, on Sunday night, October 16, 1859, John Brown and eighteen young followers abandoned their Maryland hideaway determined to free the South’s four million slaves by force of