150 years ago

John Brown was hanged 150 years ago, Dec. 2, 1859. We still haven't come to terms with him.

My grandmother revered John Brown, and what she laid down was law for my father … she had a Rogers statUe commemorating Brown. When I got into 4th grade, we moved to Ohio and the teachers in my new school all talked about how awful John Brown was, he was a criminal ..

After 9/11 John Brown looks a little scary. Here was a man who could tell right from wrong and was willing to shed blood for the right. He was religious as all getout He wasn't that far from Al Qaeda, in a lot of ways except they are wrong and he was right. At the time, though, you could argue slavery pro or con, as if black people were not human, as if human counted for nothing. Nowadays we can see John Brown was right. So was it right what he did? And, faced with an evil like slavery, what is the right thing do to?

You want to read a good book, look for David S. Reynolds, “John Brown, Abolitionist”

I guess where this has relevance on a site devoted to guns, is John Brown's high regard for the Sharps carbine – what they called Beecher's Bibles in “bloody Kansas” 1856-58. The whole world was on fire, and firearms were evolving by leaps and bounds. Kansas was like Spain in the '1930s, a trial for the coming conflict.

Brown had been in jamaica and had talked with the “Maroons,” escaped slaves who formed communities in the mountains and fought the lowlanders, white and black, to a draw for 200 years. His plan was to liberate the high country of he Appalachian Mountains and set up a free republic for fugitive and rebel slaves.

The raid on Harper's Ferry Arsenal was to secure rifles and ammunition for his rebel army. He also ordered up thousands of pike heads. His idea was that he would drill an army with 10 pikemen for every rifleman. There were several thousand rifled muskets at Harper's, plus lots of ammo.

I think it was a pretty good arrangement in the likely case that the U.S. Army would send in cavalry. Pikemen aren't much use against infantry, but they are death on cav. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, “it might just work.”

In any case John Brown let overwhelming force catch up to him while he was fooling around at Harper's Ferry. The rest is history.

If you go to the Lincoln memorial in DC, there are two rooms, one on each side of the central chamber with the statue. On the right is the room with the Gettysburg Address. The room on the left has the full text of his second inaugural. Words of fire, like Jeremiah in the Bible. It was like John Brown speaking from the grave. Look it up, it will raise the hair on your neck ... "until every drop of blood drawn by the lash is repaid with one drawn by the sword." Lincoln was from a land beyond politics. But it all came though John Brown.

150 years ago Wednesday

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