Militant abolitionist John Brown was hanged today (Dec. 2) in 1859

John Brown was the most controversial American in the Civil War era.  He advocated and practiced arm rebellion and was supported by the radical abolitionists in the North. He even earned the praise from Emerson and Thoreau, but the cautious Lincoln said he was a “misguided fanatic”.

Carl Sandburg wrote, “On the night of May 24, 1857, he took two men and his four obedient sons, Owen, Frederick, Salmon, and Oliver, each with a rifle, pistol and cutlass, and they went to three different cabins.  In the Doyle cabin, the wife and mother begged to be let alone, but out into the night they dragged her husband and two sons, found next morning on the grass 200 yards from the cabin, the father shot in the head and stabbed in the breast, one son with arms and fingers cut off and a hole in his throat, the other son with holes in side, head and jaw.  At Wilkinson’s cabin past midnight they forced him to open the door, heard his sick wife plead, but he was found next day dead.  At the third cabin they took William Sherman who was found next morning with his skull split open and left hand cut off.  The butchery was done mainly with two-edged cutlasses Brown had brought from Ohio.”

Reading above, one will agree with Lincoln.  John Brown’s Body was a popular Union marching song during the Civil War and later Julia Ward Howe converted it to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a Lincoln’s favorite.

John Brown’s last message (to a friend) before going to the gallows, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood”; sadly and prophetically true.  Many historians agree that John Brown played a major in hastening the outbreak of the Civil War.