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On December 2, 1859, Abolitionist John Brown was hanged for murder, treason, and conspiring slaves to revolt at Charles Town, Virginia. From the article:
"John Brown
Facts about John Brown, an Abolitionist
John Brown Facts
Born
May 9, 1800, Torrington, Connecticut
Died
December 2, 1859, Charles Town, Virginia
Accomplishments
Activist in the abolitionist movement
Raid On Harpers Ferry
John Brown summary: John Brown was a radical abolitionist whose fervent hatred of slavery led him to seize the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. It is widely believed his intention was to arm slaves for a rebellion, though he denied that. Hanged for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, Brown quickly became a martyr among those seeking to end slavery in America.
John Brown’s Youth
John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, but spent much of his youth in Ohio. His parents instilled in him a strong belief in the Bible and a strong hatred of slavery, and his father taught him the family trade of tanning animal skins. He was foreman in the family’s tannery before moving to Massachusetts, in hopes of becoming a minister. After he married Dianthe Lusk, they moved to Pennsylvania, where he established a tannery of his own. The couple wed in 1820; before Dianthe’s death in 1831, she bore him seven children. Less than a year after her passing, he married a 16-year-old named Mary Anne Day. That union produced 13 more offspring.
Brown was not a particularly good businessman, and what skills he had declined as his thinking became more metaphysical. He bought and sold several tanneries, engaged in land speculation, raised sheep, and established a brokerage for wool producers, but his financial situation deteriorated. His thoughts turned more and more to people he considered oppressed; had he lived in a later era, he might have become a socialist.
Abolitionist John Brown In The Underground Railroad
Often seeking the company of blacks, he even lived in a freedman’s community in North Elba, New York, for two years. He became a conductor in the Underground Railroad and organized a self-protection league for freemen of color and fugitive slaves.
By the time he was 50 years old, Brown was convinced God had selected him as the champion to lead slaves into freedom, and if that required the use of force, well, that was God’s will, too. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave citizens of those two territories the right to choose for themselves whether the territories would permit or prohibit slavery, Brown, like many abolitionists, moved to Kansas, taking five of his sons with him. Fervent members of the abolition movement were determined that when the territory was ready to enter the Union as a state, it would do so as a free state. On the other side, many defenders of slavery were also pouring into Kansas, in order to secure it for the pro-slavery faction.
On May 21, 1856, Missouri “border ruffians” attacked the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, pillaging and burning. Two days later, Charles Sumner, a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, was severely beaten with a cane on the Senate floor by Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina because of verbal attacks the virulently anti-slavery Sumner had made on another South Carolinian.
John Brown’s Cause Turns To Violence
Rumors spread that the border ruffians intended to attack the anti-slavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas; Brown and his family were among the abolitionists in this sharply divided area. On the night of May 24, Brown, with four of his sons and two other men, rode to the homes of three pro-slavery settlers near Dutch Henry’s crossing on Pottawatomie Creek; Brown intended to “Sweep the Pottawatomie of all pro-slavery men living on it.” They dragged James Doyle and two of his sons, William and Drury, from their farmhouse. When the trio tried to escape, James Doyle was shot down and his sons hacked to death with short sabers. Doyle’s wife, daughter and 14-year-old son John were spared. At the home of Allen Wilkinson, the avengers ignored the pleas of his sick wife and two children and took Wilkinson away as a prisoner. He was soon dispatched with one of the swords.
At the third home they visited, Brown’s band killed William Sherman with their swords and threw his body into a creek. Other men and a woman found at Sherman’s home were not harmed. Through it all, Brown had decided, god-like, who would die and who would be spared, though according to his followers he did not actively participate in the executions. Whenever he was questioned about the events of that night, he was evasive.
The events at Lawrence and Pottawatomie caused the territory to erupt in guerrilla warfare, giving it the name “Bleeding Kansas.” Brown’s name became known to the nation, a Christian warrior to many who opposed slavery and a demented murderer to many other people.
John Brown’s Raid On Harper’s Ferry
On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led 21 followers—five black men and 16 white ones, including two of Brown’s sons—on a raid to seize the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), where the Shenandoah River joins the North Branch of the Potomac. More than one version exists of what his plans were for the weapons he hoped to make off with. Some say he intended to create a state of free blacks in the mountains of western Virginia and Maryland. Others say he hoped to create an army of former slaves and freemen to march through Dixie, forcing slave owners to free their slaves. Brown himself may not have been entirely clear on what the next step would be, but he had convinced a number of Northern abolitionists to provide financial support for his actions, here and elsewhere.
Brown’s raiders captured a number of prisoners, including George Washington’s great-grand-nephew, Lewis Washington. Local militia trapped Brown and his men inside the arsenal’s firehouse. During the short siege, three citizens of Harpers Ferry, including Mayor Fontaine Beckham. were killed. The first person to die in John Brown’s raid, however, had been, ironically, a black railroad baggage handler named Hayward Shepherd, who confronted the raiders on the night they attacked the town. On October 18, a company of U.S. Marines, under the command of Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee, broke into the building. Ten raiders were killed outright and seven others, including a wounded Brown, were captured.
Brown Sentenced To Death
He was tried and convicted for murder, conspiracy to incite a slave uprising, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was hanged at Charles Town, the county seat near Harpers Ferry, on December 2. Among those watching the execution, “with unlimited, undeniable contempt” for Brown, was the future assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth.
Brown had denied any plan “to excite or incite the slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.” He never intended to commit murder or treason or to destroy property, he claimed—though earlier that year he had purchased several hundred pikes and some firearms.
“Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done,” he said.
The “unjust enactments” included the Constitution, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
John Brown’s Legacy
Initial reports of the raid on Harpers Ferry in Southern newspapers tended to view it as an isolated incident, the work of a mad fanatic and his followers. But when information began to surface that Brown had discussed his plans—to what extent is not known—with Northern abolitionists and had received moral and financial assistance, Southern attitudes turned sour. Many in the abolition movement painted Brown as a martyr, convincing many Southerners that abolitionists wished to commit genocide on white slave owners. Among abolitionists, Brown served as an inspiration to strive ever harder to abolish “the peculiar institution.”
North and South drew even farther apart from each other. John Brown and his Harpers Ferry raid are often referred to as the match that lit the fuse on the powder keg of secession and civil war. Even today, debate continues on how Brown should be remembered: as a martyr to freedom, as a well-intended but misguided individual, or as a terrorist who hoped for revolution and, perhaps, murder on a grand scale."
"John Brown
Facts about John Brown, an Abolitionist
John Brown Facts
Born
May 9, 1800, Torrington, Connecticut
Died
December 2, 1859, Charles Town, Virginia
Accomplishments
Activist in the abolitionist movement
Raid On Harpers Ferry
John Brown summary: John Brown was a radical abolitionist whose fervent hatred of slavery led him to seize the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. It is widely believed his intention was to arm slaves for a rebellion, though he denied that. Hanged for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, Brown quickly became a martyr among those seeking to end slavery in America.
John Brown’s Youth
John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, but spent much of his youth in Ohio. His parents instilled in him a strong belief in the Bible and a strong hatred of slavery, and his father taught him the family trade of tanning animal skins. He was foreman in the family’s tannery before moving to Massachusetts, in hopes of becoming a minister. After he married Dianthe Lusk, they moved to Pennsylvania, where he established a tannery of his own. The couple wed in 1820; before Dianthe’s death in 1831, she bore him seven children. Less than a year after her passing, he married a 16-year-old named Mary Anne Day. That union produced 13 more offspring.
Brown was not a particularly good businessman, and what skills he had declined as his thinking became more metaphysical. He bought and sold several tanneries, engaged in land speculation, raised sheep, and established a brokerage for wool producers, but his financial situation deteriorated. His thoughts turned more and more to people he considered oppressed; had he lived in a later era, he might have become a socialist.
Abolitionist John Brown In The Underground Railroad
Often seeking the company of blacks, he even lived in a freedman’s community in North Elba, New York, for two years. He became a conductor in the Underground Railroad and organized a self-protection league for freemen of color and fugitive slaves.
By the time he was 50 years old, Brown was convinced God had selected him as the champion to lead slaves into freedom, and if that required the use of force, well, that was God’s will, too. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave citizens of those two territories the right to choose for themselves whether the territories would permit or prohibit slavery, Brown, like many abolitionists, moved to Kansas, taking five of his sons with him. Fervent members of the abolition movement were determined that when the territory was ready to enter the Union as a state, it would do so as a free state. On the other side, many defenders of slavery were also pouring into Kansas, in order to secure it for the pro-slavery faction.
On May 21, 1856, Missouri “border ruffians” attacked the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, pillaging and burning. Two days later, Charles Sumner, a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, was severely beaten with a cane on the Senate floor by Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina because of verbal attacks the virulently anti-slavery Sumner had made on another South Carolinian.
John Brown’s Cause Turns To Violence
Rumors spread that the border ruffians intended to attack the anti-slavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas; Brown and his family were among the abolitionists in this sharply divided area. On the night of May 24, Brown, with four of his sons and two other men, rode to the homes of three pro-slavery settlers near Dutch Henry’s crossing on Pottawatomie Creek; Brown intended to “Sweep the Pottawatomie of all pro-slavery men living on it.” They dragged James Doyle and two of his sons, William and Drury, from their farmhouse. When the trio tried to escape, James Doyle was shot down and his sons hacked to death with short sabers. Doyle’s wife, daughter and 14-year-old son John were spared. At the home of Allen Wilkinson, the avengers ignored the pleas of his sick wife and two children and took Wilkinson away as a prisoner. He was soon dispatched with one of the swords.
At the third home they visited, Brown’s band killed William Sherman with their swords and threw his body into a creek. Other men and a woman found at Sherman’s home were not harmed. Through it all, Brown had decided, god-like, who would die and who would be spared, though according to his followers he did not actively participate in the executions. Whenever he was questioned about the events of that night, he was evasive.
The events at Lawrence and Pottawatomie caused the territory to erupt in guerrilla warfare, giving it the name “Bleeding Kansas.” Brown’s name became known to the nation, a Christian warrior to many who opposed slavery and a demented murderer to many other people.
John Brown’s Raid On Harper’s Ferry
On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led 21 followers—five black men and 16 white ones, including two of Brown’s sons—on a raid to seize the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), where the Shenandoah River joins the North Branch of the Potomac. More than one version exists of what his plans were for the weapons he hoped to make off with. Some say he intended to create a state of free blacks in the mountains of western Virginia and Maryland. Others say he hoped to create an army of former slaves and freemen to march through Dixie, forcing slave owners to free their slaves. Brown himself may not have been entirely clear on what the next step would be, but he had convinced a number of Northern abolitionists to provide financial support for his actions, here and elsewhere.
Brown’s raiders captured a number of prisoners, including George Washington’s great-grand-nephew, Lewis Washington. Local militia trapped Brown and his men inside the arsenal’s firehouse. During the short siege, three citizens of Harpers Ferry, including Mayor Fontaine Beckham. were killed. The first person to die in John Brown’s raid, however, had been, ironically, a black railroad baggage handler named Hayward Shepherd, who confronted the raiders on the night they attacked the town. On October 18, a company of U.S. Marines, under the command of Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee, broke into the building. Ten raiders were killed outright and seven others, including a wounded Brown, were captured.
Brown Sentenced To Death
He was tried and convicted for murder, conspiracy to incite a slave uprising, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was hanged at Charles Town, the county seat near Harpers Ferry, on December 2. Among those watching the execution, “with unlimited, undeniable contempt” for Brown, was the future assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth.
Brown had denied any plan “to excite or incite the slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.” He never intended to commit murder or treason or to destroy property, he claimed—though earlier that year he had purchased several hundred pikes and some firearms.
“Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done,” he said.
The “unjust enactments” included the Constitution, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
John Brown’s Legacy
Initial reports of the raid on Harpers Ferry in Southern newspapers tended to view it as an isolated incident, the work of a mad fanatic and his followers. But when information began to surface that Brown had discussed his plans—to what extent is not known—with Northern abolitionists and had received moral and financial assistance, Southern attitudes turned sour. Many in the abolition movement painted Brown as a martyr, convincing many Southerners that abolitionists wished to commit genocide on white slave owners. Among abolitionists, Brown served as an inspiration to strive ever harder to abolish “the peculiar institution.”
North and South drew even farther apart from each other. John Brown and his Harpers Ferry raid are often referred to as the match that lit the fuse on the powder keg of secession and civil war. Even today, debate continues on how Brown should be remembered: as a martyr to freedom, as a well-intended but misguided individual, or as a terrorist who hoped for revolution and, perhaps, murder on a grand scale."
John Brown
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John Brown's LAST SPEECH before his death
Recited by David Strathairn John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on December 2, 1859
Abolitionist John Brown was hanged for murder, treason, and conspiring slaves to revolt at Charles Town, Virginia.
John Brown born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Conn., was the son of an abolitionist tanner, according to the Kansas Historical Society. Hung to death on December 2, 1859 at Charles Town, Virginia.
John Brown's LAST SPEECH before his death
John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aeE8fuDhhU
Image
1. John Brown on his way to the gallows, December 2, 1859, The Last Moments of John Brown (1883), Painting by Thomas Hovenden, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
2. At the gallows, Brown told a guard, 'Don't keep me waiting...Be quick. 'Those would be his last words, though his deeds still reverberate today. (Library of Congress)
3. A sketch of the day John Brown was hanged. (Virginia Military Institute.)
4. John Brown under guard in Harpers Ferry in 1859 after his failed raid
Biographies:
1. blackpast.org/african-american-history/brown-john-1800-1859
2. battlefields.org/learn/biographies/john-brown
1. background from {[https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/brown-john-1800-1859/]}
John Brown was a controversial figure who played a major role in leading the United States to civil war. He was a devout Christian and lifelong abolitionist who tried to eradicate slavery from the United States through increasingly radical means. Unlike most abolitionists, Brown was not a pacifist and he came to believe that violence was necessary to dislodge slavery. He engaged in violent battles with pro-slavery citizens in Kansas and Missouri, and led a raid on the federal munitions depot at Harper’s Ferry. Although the raid failed spectacularly, it helped precipitate the Civil War and turned Brown into a martyr for the abolitionist cause.
John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut on May 9, 1800 into a deeply religious family. The family was led by a staunchly anti-slavery father, Owen Brown, who was an agent for the Underground Railroad. Brown grew up in a frontier Ohio town in which whites were the minority and where his father taught him that all people should be treated equally. When John was 12, he witnessed the beating of a slave boy. This violence would have a profound impact on him and would help lead him to his fanatical opposition to slavery.
Brown had seven children with his first wife, who he married at the age of 20. After she died in 1832, he remarried and fathered 13 more children. He moved his family to several northern states and attempted to earn a living by working as a tanner, land speculator, and co-owner of a wool merchant company. None of these enterprises succeeded and he declared bankruptcy in his forties. Abolitionism would become his overriding concern. Even though he was of modest means, he helped fund the publication of David Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion” speech and he gave land to fugitive slaves.
In 1849 Brown moved to the black community of North Elba, New York because the residents there were struggling to prosper and felt isolated. In 1851 he established the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave hunters.
After Congress passed the Kansas and Nebraska Act in 1854, five of Brown’s sons left for Kansas, and he would join them the next year. He and his sons were heavily involved in “Bleeding Kansas,” defending the city of Lawrence, Kansas against pro-slavery raiders from Missouri. Brown then led a raid into the pro-slavery town of Pottawatomie Creek, Missouri, during which five pro-slavery men were killed.
Brown moved back East and began planning and fundraising for a slave insurrection that he would lead. On October 16, 1859, he and 21 men raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on the theory that slaves would rise up against their masters when word spread of Brown’s actions. Although Brown gained control of the arsenal, the slave rebellion failed to materialize. Brown’s rebellion was swiftly crushed when U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee and 100 Marines surrounded him. Brown was captured, quickly tried, and convicted of treason. He was hanged on December 2, 1859.
His execution was marked by the tolling of bells at many northern churches, and Brown’s actions were looked upon increasingly favorably in the North as the nation headed towards civil war. A song, “John Brown’s Body,” was written about him and was popular in the North during the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe would use the same tune when she wrote the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
2. Background from {[https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/john-brown]}
John Brown
TITLE Radical Abolitionist
DATE OF BIRTH - DEATH
1800- December 2, 1859
Born in Torrington, Connecticut, John Brown belonged to a devout family with extreme anti-slavery views. He married twice and fathered twenty children. The expanding family moved with Brown throughout his travels, residing in Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York.
Brown failed at several business ventures before declaring bankruptcy in 1842. Still, he was able to support the abolitionist cause by becoming a conductor on the Underground Railroad and by establishing the League of Gileadites, an organization established to help runaway slaves escape to Canada. In 1849, Brown moved to the free black farming community of North Elba, New York.
At the age of 55, Brown moved with his sons to Kansas Territory. In response to the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown led a small band of men to Pottawatomie Creek on May 24, 1856. The men dragged five unarmed men and boys, believed to be slavery proponents, from their homes and brutally murdered them. Afterwards, Brown raided Missouri – freeing eleven slaves and killing the slave owner.
Following the events in Kansas, Brown spent two and a half years traveling throughout New England, raising money to bring his anti-slavery war to the South. In 1859, John Brown, under the alias Isaac Smith, rented the Kennedy Farmhouse, four miles north of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). At the farm Brown trained his 21 man army and planned their capture of the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Part of the plan included providing slaves in the area with weapons of pikes and rifles. Brown believed that these armed slaves would then join his army and free even more slaves as they fanned southward along the Appalachian Mountains. If the plan worked it would strike terror in the hearts of slave owners.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his men raided the Federal Arsenal. Unfortunately for Brown, nothing went as planned. Slaves living in the area did not join the raid, local militia and the United States Marines, under Robert E. Lee, put down the raid, and most of John Brown’s men were either killed or captured, including two of his sons. Ironically, the first man killed during the raid was Hayward Shepherd, a free black man working with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Despite being seriously wounded, Brown was tried quickly and found guilty of murder, inciting slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia.
Upon hearing his sentence, Brown said,
“…if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I submit; so let it be done!”
Brown told the court that he had hoped to carry out his plans “without the snapping of a gun on either side.” But Brown’s vision of ending slavery was marred by the deaths of innocent civilians – both in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry. The nation was divided over his actions. Many abolitionists called him a hero. Slaveholders called him a base villain. People on both sides of the fence denounced Brown’s use of violence.
John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. Before he died, Brown issued these final, seemingly prophetic words in a note he handed to his jailer:
“Charlestown, Va, 2nd, December, 1859
I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”
Within one year, the first Southern state would secede from the Union.
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Abolitionist John Brown was hanged for murder, treason, and conspiring slaves to revolt at Charles Town, Virginia.
John Brown born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Conn., was the son of an abolitionist tanner, according to the Kansas Historical Society. Hung to death on December 2, 1859 at Charles Town, Virginia.
John Brown's LAST SPEECH before his death
John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His plan to arm slaves with the weapons he and his men seized from the arsenal was thwarted, however, by local farmers, militiamen, and Marines led by Robert E. Lee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aeE8fuDhhU
Image
1. John Brown on his way to the gallows, December 2, 1859, The Last Moments of John Brown (1883), Painting by Thomas Hovenden, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
2. At the gallows, Brown told a guard, 'Don't keep me waiting...Be quick. 'Those would be his last words, though his deeds still reverberate today. (Library of Congress)
3. A sketch of the day John Brown was hanged. (Virginia Military Institute.)
4. John Brown under guard in Harpers Ferry in 1859 after his failed raid
Biographies:
1. blackpast.org/african-american-history/brown-john-1800-1859
2. battlefields.org/learn/biographies/john-brown
1. background from {[https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/brown-john-1800-1859/]}
John Brown was a controversial figure who played a major role in leading the United States to civil war. He was a devout Christian and lifelong abolitionist who tried to eradicate slavery from the United States through increasingly radical means. Unlike most abolitionists, Brown was not a pacifist and he came to believe that violence was necessary to dislodge slavery. He engaged in violent battles with pro-slavery citizens in Kansas and Missouri, and led a raid on the federal munitions depot at Harper’s Ferry. Although the raid failed spectacularly, it helped precipitate the Civil War and turned Brown into a martyr for the abolitionist cause.
John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut on May 9, 1800 into a deeply religious family. The family was led by a staunchly anti-slavery father, Owen Brown, who was an agent for the Underground Railroad. Brown grew up in a frontier Ohio town in which whites were the minority and where his father taught him that all people should be treated equally. When John was 12, he witnessed the beating of a slave boy. This violence would have a profound impact on him and would help lead him to his fanatical opposition to slavery.
Brown had seven children with his first wife, who he married at the age of 20. After she died in 1832, he remarried and fathered 13 more children. He moved his family to several northern states and attempted to earn a living by working as a tanner, land speculator, and co-owner of a wool merchant company. None of these enterprises succeeded and he declared bankruptcy in his forties. Abolitionism would become his overriding concern. Even though he was of modest means, he helped fund the publication of David Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion” speech and he gave land to fugitive slaves.
In 1849 Brown moved to the black community of North Elba, New York because the residents there were struggling to prosper and felt isolated. In 1851 he established the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave hunters.
After Congress passed the Kansas and Nebraska Act in 1854, five of Brown’s sons left for Kansas, and he would join them the next year. He and his sons were heavily involved in “Bleeding Kansas,” defending the city of Lawrence, Kansas against pro-slavery raiders from Missouri. Brown then led a raid into the pro-slavery town of Pottawatomie Creek, Missouri, during which five pro-slavery men were killed.
Brown moved back East and began planning and fundraising for a slave insurrection that he would lead. On October 16, 1859, he and 21 men raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on the theory that slaves would rise up against their masters when word spread of Brown’s actions. Although Brown gained control of the arsenal, the slave rebellion failed to materialize. Brown’s rebellion was swiftly crushed when U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee and 100 Marines surrounded him. Brown was captured, quickly tried, and convicted of treason. He was hanged on December 2, 1859.
His execution was marked by the tolling of bells at many northern churches, and Brown’s actions were looked upon increasingly favorably in the North as the nation headed towards civil war. A song, “John Brown’s Body,” was written about him and was popular in the North during the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe would use the same tune when she wrote the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
2. Background from {[https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/john-brown]}
John Brown
TITLE Radical Abolitionist
DATE OF BIRTH - DEATH
1800- December 2, 1859
Born in Torrington, Connecticut, John Brown belonged to a devout family with extreme anti-slavery views. He married twice and fathered twenty children. The expanding family moved with Brown throughout his travels, residing in Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York.
Brown failed at several business ventures before declaring bankruptcy in 1842. Still, he was able to support the abolitionist cause by becoming a conductor on the Underground Railroad and by establishing the League of Gileadites, an organization established to help runaway slaves escape to Canada. In 1849, Brown moved to the free black farming community of North Elba, New York.
At the age of 55, Brown moved with his sons to Kansas Territory. In response to the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown led a small band of men to Pottawatomie Creek on May 24, 1856. The men dragged five unarmed men and boys, believed to be slavery proponents, from their homes and brutally murdered them. Afterwards, Brown raided Missouri – freeing eleven slaves and killing the slave owner.
Following the events in Kansas, Brown spent two and a half years traveling throughout New England, raising money to bring his anti-slavery war to the South. In 1859, John Brown, under the alias Isaac Smith, rented the Kennedy Farmhouse, four miles north of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). At the farm Brown trained his 21 man army and planned their capture of the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Part of the plan included providing slaves in the area with weapons of pikes and rifles. Brown believed that these armed slaves would then join his army and free even more slaves as they fanned southward along the Appalachian Mountains. If the plan worked it would strike terror in the hearts of slave owners.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his men raided the Federal Arsenal. Unfortunately for Brown, nothing went as planned. Slaves living in the area did not join the raid, local militia and the United States Marines, under Robert E. Lee, put down the raid, and most of John Brown’s men were either killed or captured, including two of his sons. Ironically, the first man killed during the raid was Hayward Shepherd, a free black man working with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Despite being seriously wounded, Brown was tried quickly and found guilty of murder, inciting slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia.
Upon hearing his sentence, Brown said,
“…if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I submit; so let it be done!”
Brown told the court that he had hoped to carry out his plans “without the snapping of a gun on either side.” But Brown’s vision of ending slavery was marred by the deaths of innocent civilians – both in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry. The nation was divided over his actions. Many abolitionists called him a hero. Slaveholders called him a base villain. People on both sides of the fence denounced Brown’s use of violence.
John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. Before he died, Brown issued these final, seemingly prophetic words in a note he handed to his jailer:
“Charlestown, Va, 2nd, December, 1859
I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”
Within one year, the first Southern state would secede from the Union.
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The hanging of the abolitionist John Brown, Virginia, 1859
Clip from "Santa Fe Trail" (1940; 110 min) Santa Fe Trail is a 1940 American western film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havi...
The hanging of the abolitionist John Brown, Virginia, 1859
Santa Fe Trail is a 1940 American western film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Raymond Massey and Ronald Reagan. Written by Robert Buckner, the film is about the abolitionist John Brown and his fanatical attacks on slavery as a prelude to the American Civil War. Subthemes include J.E.B. Stuart and George Armstrong Custer as they duel for the hand of Kit Carson Holliday.
The film was one of the top-grossing films of the year, and the seventh Flynn–de Havilland collaboration.
https://youtu.be/GKfWNsIZNE4
Image:
1. John Brown in his Coffin.--'His mouth was partly open and his eyes somewhat protruded from their sockets.' From New York Illustrated News, December 17, 1859.
Background from {[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/02/unflinching-the-day-john-brown-was-hanged-for-his-raid-on-harpers-ferry/]}
‘Unflinching’: The day John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry
A print of the last moments in the life of abolitionist John Brown, portrayed leaving jail on the morning of his execution in Charles Town, Va. Under heavy guard, he pauses to kiss a child. (Library of Congress.)
By DeNeen L. Brown
Dec. 2, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. EST
John Brown rode from the jail to the gallows on top of his own coffin, which was hauled in a “criminal’s wagon” drawn by two white horses.
It was just before 11 a.m. on Dec. 2, 1859, in Charles Town, Va., now part of West Virginia. Brown, the fierce abolitionist who had led an armed insurrection against slavery, was ready to die.
He had written a note in his cell before leaving for the gallows: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
John Brown's prophecy
More than 1,000 troops lined the field to protect the gallows. There was fear that rebels might rush in at the last minute and try to rescue Brown before his execution. Virginia Gov. Henry Alexander Wise had ordered extra security. Fearing a spectacle, the public had been prohibited from viewing the hanging. Journalists from the North were turned back at Baltimore.
“By ten o’clock all was arranged,” wrote John T.L. Preston, one of the founders of the Virginia Military Institute, which sent hundreds of cadets to provide security at the hanging. “The general effect was most imposing, and, at the same time, picturesque.”
Brown had been found guilty of conspiracy, inciting servile insurrection and treason against the state, after leading at least 18 men in the raid of an armory at Harpers Ferry.
Brown was accused of planning to seize the weapons stored in the armory, give them to enslaved black men and spark an antislavery rebellion, according to accounts. But after a 36-hour standoff, according to the Library of Virginia, Brown and his men were killed or captured by militia members and U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee.
On Nov. 2, Brown was convicted of all charges. The jury deliberated only 45 minutes before sentencing him to death by hanging.
VMI Superintendent Frances H. Smith was commander of the execution, according to VMI archival documents.
“Fearing the possibility of another uprising by Brown’s supporters, the Governor of Virginia accepted the offer of VMI’s Superintendent, Francis H. Smith, to send a part of the Corps of Cadets to provide an additional military presence at the execution,” according to VMI records. Accompanying Smith to the execution were Preston and a professor of natural philosophy named Thomas Jackson, who would later become famous as Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Preston and Jackson were standing so close to the gallows, they could hear everything that John Brown said, according to Col. Keith Gibson, executive director of the VMI Museum and Archives in Lexington, Va. They became eyewitnesses to an execution that would change the course of the country’s history and help fuel the Civil War.
“Both John Preston and Jackson sat down that evening after the hanging and wrote letters home to their respective wives,” Gibson said. “They never expected those letters they were writing to their wives might someday be published in histories of the events as they have been.”
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood,” John Brown wrote in a note before he was hanged Dec. 2, 1859. (Library of Congress.)
Jackson opened his letter to his wife, Mary Anna Jackson, with a description of Brown’s last moments alive: “He behaved with unflinching firmness,” Jackson wrote. “The arrangements were well made under the direction of Col. Smith. Brown’s wife visited him last evening. The body is to be delivered to her.”
Brown, who had led antislavery attacks in Kansas, was dressed in “carpet slippers of predominating red, white socks, black pants, black frock coat, black vest & black slouch hat. Nothing around his neck beside his shirt collar,” Jackson wrote.
“Brown had his arms tied behind him, & ascended the scaffold with apparent cheerfulness,” Jackson continued. “After reaching the top of the platform, he shook hands with several who were standing around him. The sheriff placed the rope around his neck, then threw a white cap over his head & asked him if he wished a signal when all should be ready — to which he replied that it made no difference, provided he was not kept waiting too long.”
Brown, who was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Conn., was the son of an abolitionist tanner, according to the Kansas Historical Society. He stood more than 6 feet tall. Brown, who had a habit of stooping when he walked, had a sharp nose, dark gray eyes, and a long beard.
He had seven children with his first wife, Dianthe, who died in 1832, and 13 children with his second wife, Mary Ann, according to the Kansas Historical Society.
Brown was a fervently religious man who believed that “sin abounded,” according to the Kansas Historical Society, and needed to be eliminated. He was convinced that slavery was the country’s “greatest sin” and dedicated himself to eradicating it by any means necessary.
In 1837, after a white pro-slavery mob murdered abolitionist and journalist Elijah P. Lovejoy in the free state of Illinois, John Brown declared publicly: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”
Brown moved to Springfield, Mass., where he often listened to lectures by Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, then to North Elba, N. Y., where land grants were offered to African Americans.
As the political issue of whether new territories would become slave states or free states divided the country, Brown headed to Kansas, where his sons had settled and where violence had erupted between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces.
In May 1856, after settlers opposed to slavery in Lawrence, Kan., were attacked by pro-slavery fighters, Brown and his sons retaliated. They were accused of killing five men in the pro-slavery settlement of Pottawattomie Creek in Franklin County, Kan., according to the Kansas Historical Society. The incident was later called the “Pottawatomie Massacre.”
“Tragic Prelude,” a mural by John Steuart Curry, is displayed in the second floor rotunda, east wing of the Kansas Capitol building in Topeka. (Kansas Historical Society.)
In 1857, Brown began planning the raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, according to the Library of Virginia, hoping to set off a slave rebellion and create a new free state governed by a constitution he would write.
In Northern cities, he met with abolitionists, including Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman, and recruited followers.
In the weeks before the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown met Frederick Douglass, requesting that Douglass join the raid. “Come with me, Douglass,” Brown said, according to the book, “John Brown: We Came to Free the Slaves,” by Anne E. Schraff. “I will defend you with my life. … When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”
Douglass declined, advising that an attack against the federal government would turn public opinion against abolitionists.
The raid began on Oct. 16, 1859, as Brown led 18 men — 13 whites and five blacks — into Harpers Ferry, where they captured federal government buildings and cut telegraph wires. They killed four people and wounded nine.
“Expecting local slaves to join them, Brown and his men waited in the armory while the townspeople surrounded the building. The raiders and the civilians exchanged gunfire, and eight of Brown’s men were killed or captured,” according to the Library of Virginia. “Five of the conspirators, including Brown’s son Owen, escaped to safety in Canada and the North.”
Brown was wounded in the attack and taken to the jail at Charles Town.
Brown, who was 59, was not allowed to make a final statement as he stood on the gallows.
“His manner was without trepidation,” Preston wrote, “but his countenance was not free from concern, and it seemed to me to have a little cast of wildness. He stood upon the scaffold but a short time, giving brief adieus to those about him, when he was properly pinioned, the white cap drawn over his face, the noose adjusted and attached to the hook above, and he was moved blindfolded a few steps forward.”
In his letter to his wife, Stonewall Jackson described a delay in the order to hang Brown. He stood on the trap door a full 10 minutes, waiting.
Finally, the order was given, and the rope holding the trap door closed was sliced.
“Brown fell through about 25 inches, so as to bring his knees on a level with the position occupied by his feet before the rope was cut,” Jackson wrote. “With the fall his arms below the elbow flew up, hands clenched, & his arms gradually fell by spasmodic motions — there was very little motion of his person for several minutes, after which the wind blew his lifeless body to & fro.”
Brown’s body was placed in a coffin made of black walnut. Less than two years after Brown was buried in front of his New York farmhouse, the Civil War began, fulfilling his final prophesy that bloodshed would be required to settle the sin of slavery.
FYI SGM Gerald FifeMaj Wayne CristSGM Bill FrazerCSM (Join to see)SSG Jeffrey LeakeCSM Bruce Trego]SSG (Join to see)SPC Chris HallgrimsonMSG Glen MillerCWO3 Randy WestonSSG Samuel KermonSSG Robert Mark OdomCpl (Join to see)SSG Jimmy CernichSSG Robert Pratt SMSgt David A Asbury CPL Dave Hoover Maj Marty Hogan SMSgt David A Asbury PVT Mark Zehner
Santa Fe Trail is a 1940 American western film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Raymond Massey and Ronald Reagan. Written by Robert Buckner, the film is about the abolitionist John Brown and his fanatical attacks on slavery as a prelude to the American Civil War. Subthemes include J.E.B. Stuart and George Armstrong Custer as they duel for the hand of Kit Carson Holliday.
The film was one of the top-grossing films of the year, and the seventh Flynn–de Havilland collaboration.
https://youtu.be/GKfWNsIZNE4
Image:
1. John Brown in his Coffin.--'His mouth was partly open and his eyes somewhat protruded from their sockets.' From New York Illustrated News, December 17, 1859.
Background from {[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/02/unflinching-the-day-john-brown-was-hanged-for-his-raid-on-harpers-ferry/]}
‘Unflinching’: The day John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry
A print of the last moments in the life of abolitionist John Brown, portrayed leaving jail on the morning of his execution in Charles Town, Va. Under heavy guard, he pauses to kiss a child. (Library of Congress.)
By DeNeen L. Brown
Dec. 2, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. EST
John Brown rode from the jail to the gallows on top of his own coffin, which was hauled in a “criminal’s wagon” drawn by two white horses.
It was just before 11 a.m. on Dec. 2, 1859, in Charles Town, Va., now part of West Virginia. Brown, the fierce abolitionist who had led an armed insurrection against slavery, was ready to die.
He had written a note in his cell before leaving for the gallows: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
John Brown's prophecy
More than 1,000 troops lined the field to protect the gallows. There was fear that rebels might rush in at the last minute and try to rescue Brown before his execution. Virginia Gov. Henry Alexander Wise had ordered extra security. Fearing a spectacle, the public had been prohibited from viewing the hanging. Journalists from the North were turned back at Baltimore.
“By ten o’clock all was arranged,” wrote John T.L. Preston, one of the founders of the Virginia Military Institute, which sent hundreds of cadets to provide security at the hanging. “The general effect was most imposing, and, at the same time, picturesque.”
Brown had been found guilty of conspiracy, inciting servile insurrection and treason against the state, after leading at least 18 men in the raid of an armory at Harpers Ferry.
Brown was accused of planning to seize the weapons stored in the armory, give them to enslaved black men and spark an antislavery rebellion, according to accounts. But after a 36-hour standoff, according to the Library of Virginia, Brown and his men were killed or captured by militia members and U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee.
On Nov. 2, Brown was convicted of all charges. The jury deliberated only 45 minutes before sentencing him to death by hanging.
VMI Superintendent Frances H. Smith was commander of the execution, according to VMI archival documents.
“Fearing the possibility of another uprising by Brown’s supporters, the Governor of Virginia accepted the offer of VMI’s Superintendent, Francis H. Smith, to send a part of the Corps of Cadets to provide an additional military presence at the execution,” according to VMI records. Accompanying Smith to the execution were Preston and a professor of natural philosophy named Thomas Jackson, who would later become famous as Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Preston and Jackson were standing so close to the gallows, they could hear everything that John Brown said, according to Col. Keith Gibson, executive director of the VMI Museum and Archives in Lexington, Va. They became eyewitnesses to an execution that would change the course of the country’s history and help fuel the Civil War.
“Both John Preston and Jackson sat down that evening after the hanging and wrote letters home to their respective wives,” Gibson said. “They never expected those letters they were writing to their wives might someday be published in histories of the events as they have been.”
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood,” John Brown wrote in a note before he was hanged Dec. 2, 1859. (Library of Congress.)
Jackson opened his letter to his wife, Mary Anna Jackson, with a description of Brown’s last moments alive: “He behaved with unflinching firmness,” Jackson wrote. “The arrangements were well made under the direction of Col. Smith. Brown’s wife visited him last evening. The body is to be delivered to her.”
Brown, who had led antislavery attacks in Kansas, was dressed in “carpet slippers of predominating red, white socks, black pants, black frock coat, black vest & black slouch hat. Nothing around his neck beside his shirt collar,” Jackson wrote.
“Brown had his arms tied behind him, & ascended the scaffold with apparent cheerfulness,” Jackson continued. “After reaching the top of the platform, he shook hands with several who were standing around him. The sheriff placed the rope around his neck, then threw a white cap over his head & asked him if he wished a signal when all should be ready — to which he replied that it made no difference, provided he was not kept waiting too long.”
Brown, who was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Conn., was the son of an abolitionist tanner, according to the Kansas Historical Society. He stood more than 6 feet tall. Brown, who had a habit of stooping when he walked, had a sharp nose, dark gray eyes, and a long beard.
He had seven children with his first wife, Dianthe, who died in 1832, and 13 children with his second wife, Mary Ann, according to the Kansas Historical Society.
Brown was a fervently religious man who believed that “sin abounded,” according to the Kansas Historical Society, and needed to be eliminated. He was convinced that slavery was the country’s “greatest sin” and dedicated himself to eradicating it by any means necessary.
In 1837, after a white pro-slavery mob murdered abolitionist and journalist Elijah P. Lovejoy in the free state of Illinois, John Brown declared publicly: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”
Brown moved to Springfield, Mass., where he often listened to lectures by Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, then to North Elba, N. Y., where land grants were offered to African Americans.
As the political issue of whether new territories would become slave states or free states divided the country, Brown headed to Kansas, where his sons had settled and where violence had erupted between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces.
In May 1856, after settlers opposed to slavery in Lawrence, Kan., were attacked by pro-slavery fighters, Brown and his sons retaliated. They were accused of killing five men in the pro-slavery settlement of Pottawattomie Creek in Franklin County, Kan., according to the Kansas Historical Society. The incident was later called the “Pottawatomie Massacre.”
“Tragic Prelude,” a mural by John Steuart Curry, is displayed in the second floor rotunda, east wing of the Kansas Capitol building in Topeka. (Kansas Historical Society.)
In 1857, Brown began planning the raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, according to the Library of Virginia, hoping to set off a slave rebellion and create a new free state governed by a constitution he would write.
In Northern cities, he met with abolitionists, including Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman, and recruited followers.
In the weeks before the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown met Frederick Douglass, requesting that Douglass join the raid. “Come with me, Douglass,” Brown said, according to the book, “John Brown: We Came to Free the Slaves,” by Anne E. Schraff. “I will defend you with my life. … When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”
Douglass declined, advising that an attack against the federal government would turn public opinion against abolitionists.
The raid began on Oct. 16, 1859, as Brown led 18 men — 13 whites and five blacks — into Harpers Ferry, where they captured federal government buildings and cut telegraph wires. They killed four people and wounded nine.
“Expecting local slaves to join them, Brown and his men waited in the armory while the townspeople surrounded the building. The raiders and the civilians exchanged gunfire, and eight of Brown’s men were killed or captured,” according to the Library of Virginia. “Five of the conspirators, including Brown’s son Owen, escaped to safety in Canada and the North.”
Brown was wounded in the attack and taken to the jail at Charles Town.
Brown, who was 59, was not allowed to make a final statement as he stood on the gallows.
“His manner was without trepidation,” Preston wrote, “but his countenance was not free from concern, and it seemed to me to have a little cast of wildness. He stood upon the scaffold but a short time, giving brief adieus to those about him, when he was properly pinioned, the white cap drawn over his face, the noose adjusted and attached to the hook above, and he was moved blindfolded a few steps forward.”
In his letter to his wife, Stonewall Jackson described a delay in the order to hang Brown. He stood on the trap door a full 10 minutes, waiting.
Finally, the order was given, and the rope holding the trap door closed was sliced.
“Brown fell through about 25 inches, so as to bring his knees on a level with the position occupied by his feet before the rope was cut,” Jackson wrote. “With the fall his arms below the elbow flew up, hands clenched, & his arms gradually fell by spasmodic motions — there was very little motion of his person for several minutes, after which the wind blew his lifeless body to & fro.”
Brown’s body was placed in a coffin made of black walnut. Less than two years after Brown was buried in front of his New York farmhouse, the Civil War began, fulfilling his final prophesy that bloodshed would be required to settle the sin of slavery.
FYI SGM Gerald FifeMaj Wayne CristSGM Bill FrazerCSM (Join to see)SSG Jeffrey LeakeCSM Bruce Trego]SSG (Join to see)SPC Chris HallgrimsonMSG Glen MillerCWO3 Randy WestonSSG Samuel KermonSSG Robert Mark OdomCpl (Join to see)SSG Jimmy CernichSSG Robert Pratt SMSgt David A Asbury CPL Dave Hoover Maj Marty Hogan SMSgt David A Asbury PVT Mark Zehner
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Interesting history, much I knew but many new facts to digest. Zeal can lead a person into places and thoughts that are best left alone. I listen and see the religious fever, (yes the correct word) in Moslems, Christians, Jews as well as some obscure fanatical groups whose religious reliance overcome their logical thinking.
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