- [Narrator] Franklin County, Kansas Territory,
May 24th, 1856.
In the dead of night,
the militia men enter the house with guns,
and order three men, James Doyle,
and his adult sons, William and Drury, to come with them.
They reluctantly comply while Doyle's wife
and the boys' mother watches, sobbing.
The armed men lead the Doyle's into the dark
and begin to question them.
Had they participated
in the sacking of the abolitionist town of Lawrence?
You see, three days ago,
an armed paramilitary force had descended on Lawrence,
flying banners reading Southern Rights,
and varying racist phrases.
They had smashed the presses
of its two abolitionist newspapers
and burned down the free state hotel.
As they were being questioned, the Doyles noticed something.
These interrogators were not from the law.
Rather, they are the radical abolitionist John Brown,
and two of his sons, and this is not an arrest.
Of course, we don't know exactly how they responded,
but at a signal from Brown,
broad swords flash in the moonlight,
and when the screaming dies down, Brown finishes James Doyle
with a pistol shot, and he and his boys depart.
They have a busy night ahead of them.
There are three more slavers on his list tonight.
(suspenseful piano music)
Thanks so much to Trade Coffee
for keeping us history-loving beans well-caffeinated.
John Brown is one of the most controversial figures
in American history.
A radical abolitionist,
he preached that a nonviolent solution
to slavery was not possible,
that all races were equal under God and the law,
and that the only form of emancipation
was immediate and total.
If that required a violent uprising, then so be it.
Now, while we, as modern people,
admire his goals of racial equality,
and an immediate end to slavery in the 1850s,
these were extreme views, even amongst abolitionists,
and Brown's use of violence horrified
the largely pacifist anti-slavery movement
at the time at first.
He was referred to as insane, as a zealot,
and debates continued to this day over whether he was a hero
or what we would today call a terrorist.
His willingness to act on his principles
to spill white blood to liberate Black people
would make him simultaneously one of the most admired
and hated men in America,
especially after he seized a federal arsenal
in an attempt to kickstart
and arm a massive slave rebellion.
In fact, he's often listed personally
as lighting the fuse of the Civil War.
And if that's true, we know when the match was struck.
Ohio, 1812, John Brown has just met a slave owner
for the first time, and he likes him.
It's a marshal who runs the town
where John has just delivered his father's cattle,
and at a dinner party, the marshal cannot stop talking
about how great he thinks John is.
He's amazed that John, only 12,
drove his father's cattle here alone.
He recounts John's adventures and life of hardship,
moving from Connecticut to Frontier, Ohio,
and losing his mother at age eight.
And as the party talks,
they're served by the marshal's slave,
a boy about John's age.
Earlier that evening, the two had played as friends.
Now John is a strict Calvinist,
raised in the abolitionist hotbed of Hudson, Ohio.
He'd been taught slavery is evil,
and he'd seen the escaped slaves his father, a conductor
on the Underground Railroad, hid on their farm.
But this marshal, he doesn't seem evil. He's so nice.
But as the guests leave,
the same man who treated John so kindly walks
to the fireplace, picks up an iron shovel,
and begins beating his friend over the head
with it for not serving the food fast enough.
That was John Brown's first brush with slavery,
not the kind portrayed in abolitionist pamphlets,
and speeches, mind you, but real slavery,
where you could see the bruises and smell the blood.
It horrified him.
Truly, he thought, this was a sin against God.
And Brown thought about God a lot.
He did so while wandering the woods
during his off hours after working in his father's tannery.
He memorized the Bible cover to cover,
and could recite any verse perfectly on command.
However, his dreams
of becoming a minister were dashed at the age of 16,
when he went east to do preparatory theological studies,
but found himself unequal to it.
His schooling was poor, and an eye condition made him unable
to keep up with the reading.
He instead returned to Hudson to start a new tannery,
complete with a room for hiding escaped slaves.
It was a success, though Brown gained a reputation as a bit
of an eccentric who would not weigh
and sell hides unless they were fully dried,
even if the customer wanted them.
Psht, no customer of mine is paying for water.
They brought in a woman to bake bread,
and John, though shy,
would go on to marry her daughter, Dianthe.
They would have seven children together.
Now we have to take a moment to talk
about what Brown was like as a father, because for him,
battling slavery would become a family affair.
Brown ruled over his family like an Old Testament patriarch.
He could be gentle and affectionate,
singing his children to sleep,
and nursing them when they were ill.
But even minor infractions
in the Brown household were corrected with a switch,
despite Brown clearly not enjoying it.
In fact, once when his eldest son, John, Jr.,
had accumulated 25 lashes,
Brown saw an opportunity for religious education.
After giving the teenage boy eight,
he handed Junior the switch,
and told him that he would take the other 17,
a lesson he hoped in both Jesus taking on the sins
of the world, and that Junior hurt his father
when he disobeyed.
When he was 25, Brown sold his tannery,
and relocated the family to Pennsylvania.
This was partially because Brown never felt content
unless he was building something,
but also because the escaped slaves he hid
at his farm would be safer.
Despite his youth, Brown became a major figure
in the community there, founding another tannery,
surveying, becoming a postmaster,
and helping 2,500 people escape
to Canada over the next decade, until misfortune struck.
First, his four year old son died,
followed by Dianthe dying in childbirth,
delivering a stillborn daughter.
Brown, himself ill and in deep grief,
sent his five children to a neighbor,
as he spent hours each day lying face down
on their graves and weeping.
He remarried the next year
to the 17-year-old Mary Ann, daughter of his housekeeper,
with whom he'd have 13 more children,
yet Brown's businesses never recovered from his lost year.
He moved his family back to Ohio
and bought land near a developing canal.
Sure, he'd be able to sell it for an enormous profit.
However, the Panic of 1837 wiped him out,
and his large number
of children ensured he'd never be financially sound again.
This was yet another confusing period for Brown.
He knocked around, working where he could find it,
and he fretted that.
Despite his work on the Underground Railroad,
he simply wasn't doing enough to battle slavery.
He was ejected from his church
for inviting a Black family to sit in his pew,
and mused over starting a school for African-American youth,
and Brown's dark decade was mirrored nationally
in the wider abolitionist movement.
During the time of Brown's father,
it had been assumed that with the importation
of slaves banned in 1807, the institution would die out.
Instead, it was growing more powerful,
politically and economically.
Slave owners had responded to the tightened supply
with livestock-like breeding programs,
doubling the enslaved population.
from two million to four million.
Efforts to stop slavery's expansion failed as well.
Pro-slavery legislators negotiated
the Missouri compromise of 1820,
creating a situation where
for every Northern free state added to the Union,
a Southern slave state would be added as well.
Slavery advocates also increasingly relied upon violence.
In 1835, a proslavery mob
in Boston crashed a lecture by William Lloyd Garrison,
founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The 1500 rioters pulled Garrison
through the street by a robe,
and only the mayor's intervention prevented his lynching.
Another blow came
in 1837 when an armed mob besieged minister
and abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah P. Lovejoy
in the warehouse that he'd used to hide his printing press.
Lovejoy was shot five times and had to be buried
in an unmarked grave to prevent desecration.
Memorial services were held across the nation,
and in Springfield, Massachusetts, a strange thing happened.
At the end of the service, as the last hymn reverberated,
a man stepped from the back of the church
and raised his right hand.
He was new in town, a wool specialist, I think,
but he'd already made an impression.
"Here by God" the man said,
"in the presence of these witnesses, from this time,
I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery."
It was John Brown, and he had found his mission,
a mission he was in exactly the right place to pursue,
since he had moved to Springfield
in order to make the connections
that would help him strike a death blow to slavery,
connections that would put him in contact
with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the Secret Six,
the abolitionist financiers
who discreetly funded his guerrilla war.
The path to bloody Kansas was laid,
and John Brown would follow it.
Seriously, there's so much more for us to cover.
We're gonna need a pick me up.
Ooh, so you know what that means, Zoe?
(doorbell rings)
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(dramatic music)