Research Catalog

Title

John Brown : the legend revisited / Merrill D. Peterson.

Author

Peterson, Merrill D.

Publication

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 195 p. : ill.; 22 cm.

Summary

A fervent abolitionist, his New England reserve tempered by a childhood on the Ohio frontier, John Brown advocated arming fugitive slaves to fight for their freedom, an idea that impressed Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In 1855, answering the call of his five sons to join them in the desperate struggle for freedom in the new territories, John Brown became a hero of "Bleeding Kansas." When he returned east, the fiery leader launched his ambitious campaign to rouse the slaves to freedom with a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Labeled a madman for his failed military adventure, and repudiated even by prominent antislavery leaders, Brown was tried in a Virginia court and sentenced to hang for treason and sundry other crimes. Brown's reputation has undergone a series of tectonic shifts since he met his death on the gallows just before the Civil War. Southerners viewed his exploits with apprehension, seeing Harpers Ferry as a harbinger of servile insurrection, while Brown's eloquence before the court won him sympathy in the North and confirmed his place there as a hero and martyr. Thoreau, the author of passive resistance, wrote of Brown as a man of conscience. Perhaps most important historically, Brown's exploits convinced Southerners that Lincoln's election meant secession and a call to arms. Peterson gives us Brown in his own day, but he also shows how the abolitionist warrior's image, celebrated in art, literature, and journalism, has shed some of the infamy conferred by "Bleeding Kansas" to become a symbol of American idealism and fervor to activists along the political spectrum. And so in the civil rights battles of the twentieth century, Brown became a hero to African Americans. --From publisher's description.

Subject

• Brown, John, 1800-1859
• 1800-1899
• Abolitionists > United States > Biography
• Antislavery movements > United States > History > 19th century

Genre/Form

• Biographies
• History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [173]-186) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The John Brown epoch -- Faces and places of the hero -- The Kansas imbroglio -- The great biography -- Kaleidoscope -- John Brown redivivus -- Coda.

ISBN

0813921325 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2002005173

OCLC

• 49618593
• SCSB-10420519

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library