John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry by Jonathan Earle - First Edition, 2008 from Macmillan Student Store

John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry

First  Edition©2008 Jonathan Earle

About

Taking a centered approach to a polarizing person in history, John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry presents Brown as a man whose deeply held abolitionist beliefs gradually evolved to a point where he saw violence as inevitable. Through a set of featured documents, some containing Brown's own words, the evolution of his abolitionist strategies are presented along with the symbolism his actions took on in the press, the government, and the wider culture.

E-book

Read online (or offline) with all the highlighting and notetaking tools you need to be successful in this course.

Learn More

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

List of Maps and Illustrations

PART ONE. INTRODUCTION: Abolitionist, Warrior, Martyr, Prophet

Brown’s Early Life

John Brown and the Rise of Abolitionism

A Radical Abolitionist

Making Kansas Bleed

The Plan

The Raid

The Trial

Reckoning with John Brown

The Harpers Ferry Raid: Dramatis Personae

PART TWO. THE DOCUMENTS

1. The Making of a Radical Abolitionist

1. John Brown, Words of Advice to the United States League of Gileadites, January 15, 1851

2. Kansas Territorial Legislature, An Act to Punish Offenses against Slave Property, 1855

3. John Brown, Letter to Wife and Children from Kansas Territory, December 16, 1855

4. Mahala Doyle and Louisa Jane Wilkinson, Accounts of the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856

5. John Brown, An Idea of Things in Kansas, 1857


6. John Brown, John Brown’s Parallels: Letter to the Editor of the New York Tribune, 1859

2. The Raid and Trial

7. John Brown, Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States, May 8, 1858

8. Osborne Anderson, A Voice from Harpers Ferry, 1861

9. John Brown, Interview with Senator James Mason, Representative Clement Vallandigham and Others, October 18, 1859

10. Excerpts from the Trial of John Brown,1859

Opening Remarks of John Brown to the Virginia Court, October 27, 1859

John Brown’s Response to Claims of His Insanity, October 28, 1859

Last Address of John Brown to the Virginia Court, November 2, 1859

3. The Making of a Martyr

11. John Brown, Selected Prison Letters, October 21–December 2, 1859

4. Responses to John Brown’s Raid

12. Northern and Southern Newspapers React to the Raid and Trial, 1859

New Hampshire Patriot, The Harpers Ferry Affair, October 26, 1859

Petersburg (Virginia) Express, The Harpers Ferry Conspiracy, October 25, 1859

Albany, New York, Evening Journal, From the Philadelphia Press, November 30,

1859

13. Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown, October 30, 1859

14. Governor Henry Wise, Message to the Virginia Legislature, December 5, 1859

15. U.S. Senate Select Committee on the Harpers Ferry Invasion, The Mason Report, June 15, 1860

16. William W. Patton, John Brown’s Body, 1862


Appendixes

A Chronology of John Brown and Events of the Civil War Era (1800–1865)

Questions for Consideration

Selected Bibliography

Index

Jonathan Earle

Jonathan Earle (PhD, Princeton University) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas. In 2005, the History News Network named Earle a Top Young Historian . His book Jacksonian Anti-Slavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 won the James A. Broussard Best First Book Award from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is currently working on a history of the 1860 Presidential election for Oxford University Press.  Earle has also authored many scholarly articles and book chapters on abolitionism, the history of the early republic, and John Brown. He has received fellowships from the NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies.