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Essay of america civil war
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John Brown and The Revolt in Harper’s Ferry
John Brown is heavily regarded as one of the most prominent anti-slavery figures in American History. On October 21, 1959, he and 21 other men attempted to raid the Federal Arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Though the raid was unsuccessful in execution, it succeeded in causing the motivation to act against slavery, amongst abolitionists and northerners, alike. John Brown is revered as a man that believed that oppression was horrific and should be acted against, violently. John Brown is sometimes referred to as “the father of abolition”.
John Brown was born in 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. His family was religiously zealous. Due to this, His father (in particular) was outwardly against slavery
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and therefore, moves them to an area in Ohio that was Anti-slavery. John Brown continued to move around the United States. Ultimately, John Brown fathered twenty children. Being destitute, Brown had to work many various jobs, including a Land supervisor and a farmer. In the latter part of his life, Brown had to file for bankruptcy with a total of 20 lawsuits against him. Despite Brown’s poor financial standings, he still allocated funds to anti-slavery organizations, movements and literature. As a farmer, he distributed much of his land to runaway and fugitive slaves. They also took the youth of a slave family into their home. A lesser known fact about John Brown is that he was an active aid in the Underground Railroad. In 1847, John Brown met Frederick Douglass in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Douglass wrote that he was confounded by the fervor that Brown had against Slavery and The sympathy that he had toward the bound people. Brown first shared his plan to free slaves at the meeting with Douglass. However, Douglass refuted, noting the flaws in Brown’s Plans. In 1851, John Brown constructed an organization known as “The league of Gileadites”. They were a group of abolitionists that helped to free slaves and protected them from slave patrols.
Up until 1855, Brown’s efforts in the anti-slavery movements had gone without recognition. Brown moved with his sons to an area in Kansas. Shortly after, Brown began to lead a militant antislavery militia. They attacked the town of Lawrence. In response to an attack, Brown killed five settlers from a proslavery town, despite the fact that they owned no slaves.
Later, John Brown and his family moved to Virginia to continue to wage war against slavery’s institution and its supporters. He began to collect funds to create a small army to aid in the raids. On October 16, 1859, Brown and 21 men (5 black and 16 white) begin to attack the Federal Arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He planned to use the weapons from the arsenal to arm slaves and abolitionists to attack other bases and plantations. The revolt failed rather quickly. Within 2 days, his men were killed or captured. Brown was wounded and captured. On December 2nd, 1859, John Brown was
hanged.
Brown had his mind made up to travel on the pathway to Harpers Ferry right when he was born and believed he is the only one that has to lead this battle. His parents were passionate Calvinists who taught their children to view life as an endless fight contrary to evil. The battle of John Brown was on a more personal level where he remembered a memory when he was five years old and his mother whipped him for stealing a vast amount of brass pins. In addition, the battle was somewhat on a political point as well because Brown and his family considered that the sincere had to be spectators against the bad people in America. They assumed that the biggest evil during their time has to be none other than the establishment of slavery. Therefore, the father of John Brown replaced their family residence in northeast Ohio into a stop on the Underground Railroad and made his son into a dedicated abolitionist. Brown’s developing participation in the movement in the 1830s and ’40s made him set his commitment as well as the rising nationwide fight over slavery’s position in a country supposedly devoted to equal opportunity. During this era, abolition...
Many Northern abolitionists, including Frederick Jackson, were ashamed of Brown. Most Northern abolitionists were pacifists and tried to emancipate slaves using newspapers, rallies, cartoons, and literature. Moderates on both sides also disliked Brown and his actions. Men like Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to preserve the Union at all costs, felt like Brown’s drastic actions would serve only to be yet another reason for Southerners to secede. As history shows us, Lincoln was right. Harpers Ferry convinced many Southerners that they could not live in peace nor safety as long as Northern abolitionists kept questioning their “peculiar institution” and pulling stunts like these, so they wanted to secede, almost like how certain people in the North had tried to leave society to create their own “utopias”. It appears that the only people who liked what Brown did were indeed the Transcendentalist writers in the Northeast who sought to leave society. As Davidson and Lytle point out, many historians think of the raid on Harpers Ferry as one of the most significant triggers to the Civil War.
John Brown should be remembered as a villain and a hero because he took armed possession of the federal arsenal and launch a massive slave insurrection to free the nation’s 4 million slaves.
Violence inflicted upon other people cannot be justified unless it is in defense of one’s own life or the defense of a group of lives, such as a town where war has been waged upon it. In the case of John Brown, his raids were neither in self defense nor for the preservation of life for a people. Though it is a fact that many slaves were treated harshly and abused, there are many that were treated with kindness and respect, even given an education. The slaves, though oppressed, were not all in danger of losing their lives. John Brown’s use of violence is nothing more than bullying and intimidation, in attempt to persuade slave owners and their supporters to change their views.
I began the research for this paper looking to write about Frederick Douglass’ drive to start his abolitionist paper The North Star. What I then found in my research was the writings of a man I had never before heard of, Martin R. Delaney. Delaney and Douglass were co-editors of the paper for its first four years, therefore partners in the abolitionist battle. Yet I found that despite this partnership these men actually held many differing opinions that ultimately drove them apart.
John Brown was born on May 9, 1800 in the town of Torrington Connecticut. When he was five his family moved to Ohio and in 1834 they moved to Pennsylvania. John Brown was no stranger to slavery. His father ran a station in the Underground Railroad. He was taught to respect the slaves they harbored as equals and as good people. Brown learned to respect people different than him. In Pennsylvania, Brown worked with other slave sympathizers to educate the African-American community. He was even able to accept and learn from the Native American's that lived in the area of his home. Slavery was considered inhumane and cruel to Brown and his family.
There are authors who speak differently of John Brown, and this is proven in the following two monographs. The novel “Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown” by Louis A. DeCaro reveals Brown’s roots in Puritan abolitionism and theorizes that Brown’s reasoning for the raid was because of his religious preferences. The second novel is Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America by Evan Carton. Here, in this monograph, the author makes it very clear that John Brown fought for slaves because he truly cared for one to have equal rights. The previous historiographies differ in believing why John Brown proceeded in fighting for the slaves.
Abolitionism quickly gained popularity since 1821 when William Lloyd Garrison assisted in writing an anti-slavery newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, with Benjamin Lundy. In 1831, abolitionism continued to grow in popularity when William Lloyd Garrison started The Liberator. Although there remained not a need for slaves in the North, slavery remained very big in the South for growing “cash crops.” The majority of the abolitionists who inhabited the North organized speeches, meetings, and newspapers to spread their cause. Initially, only small revolts and fights occurred. However, major events along the way led to the Harpers Ferry Raid. For example, with Kansas choosing whether or not to become a free or slave state. That became the biggest event up until John Brown’s Raid. John Brown had always despised slavery, and this enhanced his chance as an organized revolt. The effect of his raid on Harpers Ferry affected what the South thought about abolitionists and the power that they held.
... the abolitionist movement is fueled by reading The Liberator, a newspaper that stirs his soul in fighting for the anti-slavery cause. While attending an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket on August 11, 1841, Douglass, with encouragement from Mr. William C. Coffin, speaks for the first time to a white audience about slavery.
During the late 1860s the Red River Settlement was rapidly changing and along with these changes came multiple causes and conflicts that would subsequently to a resistance called the Red River Rebellion. Many profound changes occurred in the Red River Settlement that had caused problems and hostility among the inhabitants to emerge such as:the arrival of Canadians to the settlement, the economic problems and the decline of the Hudson Bay Company. However, the Red River Rebellion was sparked by the Hudson Bay Company selling Rupert’s Land to the new Dominion of Canada without consulting with the inhabitants nor paying any regards to their interests.The colonists of the Red River Settlement, many of whom were Metis, feared for their culture and land rights under the dominion’s control. In order to ascertain that their rights would be protected, the Metis set up a provisional government under the leadership of Louis Riel to negotiate an agreement with the new Dominion of Canada that the Red River Settlement and the lands surrounding it, could enter Confederation as the province of Manitoba under their own terms.
The antebellum American antislavery movement began in the 1820s and was sustained over 4 decades by organizations, publications, and small acts of resistance that challenged the legally protected and powerful institution of slavery and the more insidious enemy of black equality, racism. Abolitionists were always a radical minority even in the free states of the North, and the movement was never comprised of a single group of people with unified motivations, goals, and methods. Rather, the movement was fraught with ambiguity over who its leaders would be, how they would go about fighting the institution of slavery, and what the future would be like for black Americans.
This excellent biography fluently tells the life story of Douglass; one of the 19th centuries's most famous writers and speakers on abolitionist and human rights causes. It traces his life from his birth as a slave in Maryland, through his self-education, escape to freedom, and subsequent lionization as a renowned orator in England and the United States. Fascinating, too, are accounts of the era's politics, such as the racist views held by some abolitionist leaders and the ways in which many policies made in post-Civil War times have worked to the detriment of today's civil rights movement. The chapter on Frederick Douglass and John Brown is, in itself, interesting enough to commend this powerful biography. The seldom-seen photographs, the careful chapter notes, documentation, and acknowledgements will encourage anybody to keep on learning about Frederick Douglass.
While doing that, Brown created a plan that one night, a small group would capture the federal armory and arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. There, the group would seize all the guns and escape. Slaves would then join the group, creating an army, and diminish slavery in the South. On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a procession into Harpers Ferry and the raid went perfectly as planned. By noon, however, the Virginia militia entered Harpers Ferry and closed the only escape route. At the end of the day, Brown only had five of the twenty-two men he began with available to continue fighting.
Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as “The Great Emancipator,” His legacy as the man who freed the slaves, and the savior of the Union is one that fails to be forgotten. He is thought of as a hero, and one of the few to tackle slavery, a problem that has existed in many parts of the world at one time or another. Although Lincoln is credited with ending slavery, his political motives for confronting this issue and his personal views do not make him worthy of all the recognition he receives; the driven abolitionists and daring slaves deserve a much greater portion of the credit.
;America's first war, its war for independence from Great Britain was a great accomplishment. This achievement could have been performed if not for the black soldiers in the armies. The first American to shed blood in the revolution that freed America from British rule was Crispus Attucks. Attucks along with four white men was killed in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Even though Attucks was a fugitive slave running from his master, he was still willing to fight against England along with other whites and give the ultimate sacrifice, his life, for freedom. This was not the only incident of Blacks giving it all during the War for Independence.