John Brown was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Samuel Gridley Howe was an American physician, abolitionist, and advocate of education for the blind. He organized and was the first director of the Perkins Institution. In 1824 he had gone to Greece to serve in the revolution as a surgeon; he also commanded troops. He arranged for support for refugees and brought many Greek children back to Boston with him for their education.
Mary Ann Day Brown was the second wife of abolitionist John Brown, leader of a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which attempted to start a campaign of liberating enslaved people in the South. Married at age 17, Mary raised 5 stepchildren and an additional 13 children born during her marriage. She supported her husband's activities by managing the family farm while he was away, which he often was. Mary and her husband helped enslaved Africans escape slavery via the Underground Railroad. The couple lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and in the abolitionist settlement of North Elba, New York. After the execution of her husband, she became a California pioneer.
Gerrit Smith, also spelled Gerritt Smith, was an American social reformer, abolitionist, businessman, public intellectual, and philanthropist. Married to Ann Carroll Fitzhugh, Smith was a candidate for President of the United States in 1848, 1856, and 1860. He served a single term in the House of Representatives from 1853 to 1854.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who went by the name Wentworth, was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, politician, and soldier. He was active in abolitionism in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864. Following the war, he wrote about his experiences with African-American soldiers and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised peoples. He is also remembered as a mentor to poet Emily Dickinson.
George Luther Stearns was an American industrialist and merchant in Medford, Massachusetts, as well as an abolitionist and a noted recruiter of black soldiers for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
Virginia v. John Brown was a criminal trial held in Charles Town, Virginia, in October 1859. The abolitionist John Brown was quickly prosecuted for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection, all part of his raid on the United States federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was found guilty of all charges, sentenced to death, and was executed by hanging on December 2. He was the first person executed for treason in the United States.
It was in many respects a most remarkable trial. Capital cases have been exceedingly few in the history of our country where trial and conviction have followed so quickly upon the commission of the offense. Within a fortnight from the time when Brown had struck what he believed to be a righteous blow against what he felt to be the greatest sin of the age he was a condemned felon, with only thirty days between his life and the hangman's noose.
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord is a 1994 novel by George MacDonald Fraser. It is the tenth of the Flashman novels.
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was an American journalist, teacher, author, reformer, and abolitionist. Sanborn was a social scientist, and a memorialist of American transcendentalism who wrote early biographies of many of the movement's key figures. He founded the American Social Science Association, in 1865, "to treat wisely the great social problems of the day". He was a member of the so-called Secret Six, or "Committee of Six", which funded or helped obtain funding for John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry; in fact he introduced Brown to the others. A recent scholar describes him as "humorless."
The Battle of Osawatomie was an armed engagement that occurred on August 30, 1856, when 250–400 pro-slavery Border ruffians, led by John W. Reid, attacked the town of Osawatomie, Kansas, which had been settled largely by anti-slavery Free-Staters. Reid was intent on destroying the Free-State settlement and then moving on to Topeka and Lawrence to do more of the same. Abolitionist John Brown first learned of the raiders when they shot his son Frederick. With just 40 or so men, Brown tried to defend the town against the pro-slavery partisans, but ultimately was forced to withdraw; five Free-Staters were killed in the battle, and the town of Osawatomie was subsequently looted and burned by Reid's men. The battle was one of a series of violent clashes between abolitionists and pro-slavery partisans in Kansas and Missouri during the Bleeding Kansas era.
Lewis Sheridan Leary was an African-American harnessmaker from Oberlin, Ohio, who joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, where he was killed.
Shields Green, who also referred to himself as "'Emperor"', was, according to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave from Charleston, South Carolina, and a leader in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, in October 1859. He had lived for almost two years in the house of Douglass, in Rochester, New York, and Douglass introduced him there to Brown.
The Boston Vigilance Committee (1841–1861) was an abolitionist organization formed in Boston, Massachusetts, to protect escaped slaves from being kidnapped and returned to slavery in the South. The Committee aided hundreds of escapees, most of whom arrived as stowaways on coastal trading vessels and stayed a short time before moving on to Canada or England. Notably, members of the Committee provided legal and other aid to George Latimer, Ellen and William Craft, Shadrach Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns.
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was an effort by abolitionist John Brown, from October 16 to 18, 1859, to initiate a slave revolt in Southern states by taking over the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. It has been called the dress rehearsal for, or tragic prelude to, the American Civil War.
John Brown Jr. was the eldest son of the abolitionist John Brown. His mother was Brown's first wife, Dianthe Lusk Brown, who died when John Jr. was 11. He was born in Hudson, Ohio. In 1841 he tried teaching in a country school, but left it after one year, finding it frustrating and the children "snotty". In spring 1842 he enrolled at the Grand River Institute in Austinburg, Ohio. In July 1847 he married Wealthy Hotchkiss (1829–1911), who had also studied at the Grand River Institute. The couple settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, and had two children.
On Sunday night, October 16, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown led a band of 22 in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Watson Brown was a son of the abolitionist John Brown and his second wife Mary Day Brown, born in Franklin Mills, Ohio. He was married to Isabell "Belle" Thompson Brown, and they had a son Frederick W., who died of diphtheria at age 4, and is buried at what is now the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, New York.
Francis Jackson Meriam was an American abolitionist, born on November 17, 1837, in Framingham, Massachusetts, and died on November 28, 1865, in New York City. He was named for his grandfather, Francis Jackson, who had been president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Hinton describes him as "handsome, well-to-do, cultivated, and traveled". Instead of college, he lived in Paris for some time. In contrast, Sanborn described him as "enthusiastic and resolute, but with little judgment, and in feeble health; altogether, one would say, a very unfit person to take part actively in Brown’s enterprise." He was blind in one eye. He was the only one of John Brown's raiders who helped him financially.
