American Experience - John Brown's Holy War

American Experience - John Brown's Holy War

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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387326/


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"I have no doubt that our seeming disaster will ultimately result in the most glorious success. I have been whipped, but I am sure I can recover all the lost capital by only hanging a few moments by the neck."
-- John Brown

On December 2, 1859, a tall, gaunt, fifty-nine-year-old man was executed in Virginia before 1500 armed guards. Just a month earlier, few had heard of John Brown, a former sheepherder who had embarked on a violent crusade to end slavery. Now his name divided North from South. Was he a martyr or a madman, a fanatic or a hero? More than a century later, John Brown remains one of America's most controversial and misunderstood figures.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents John Brown's Holy War, produced and directed by Robert Kenner (Influenza 1918) and written by Ken Chowder. Narrated by Joe Morton, this ninety-minute special explores the reluctant revolutionary who helped trigger the Civil War.

Born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio, John Brown was the child of devout Calvinists who believed that life on earth was an ongoing trial, and that the true believer had to adhere to a strict code of right and wrongãor else answer to God. His formative years were also defined by an image: when he was twelve years old, Brown witnessed the brutal beating of a slave boy, a jarring event that would forever haunt him.

Two years later, the abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy was shot to death in Illinois by a proslavery mob. At a memorial service in Hudson, Brown rose from his seat and, raising his right hand, issued a vow: "Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery." But it would be years before Brown could honor his pledge. Eager to get his share of a development boom, he borrowed thousands to speculate on land -- only to see his schemes fall apart in the Panic of 1837. He tried breeding sheep, started another tannery, bought and sold cattle -- but failed each time. Lawsuits from creditors piled up against him; his farm tools, furniture, and sheep were auctioned off.

Then, in 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. With a nod to Southern power, the federal government gave settlers the right to decide whether their territories would be slave or free; outsiders on both sides of the slavery issue began moving in.

Brown became a guerrilla fighter, hiding in secret campsites with a small band of followers. When an interview with Brown was printed in eastern newspapers, he was hailed as a hero throughout the North. Historian Edward Renehan says, "Kansas is the birth of the messianic Brown, it's the birth of the Moses-like Brown, it's the birth of the murderer Brown."

Brown traveled ceaselessly for the next two yearsãbeseeching Northern abolitionists for guns and money. By the summer of 1859, Brown had decided to launch his crusade against slavery into the South by attacking the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He hoped to seize the arsenal's huge cache of guns and incite slaves to arm and rebel.

On the evening of October 16, 1859, Brown and twenty-one men -- fugitive slaves, college students, free blacks, and three of his own sons -- quietly entered Harpers Ferry. Outnumbered, the arsenal's single guard quickly surrendered. But then a passenger train started to approach and the baggage master ran to warn the passengers. He was shot and killed, the first victim of Brown's war against slavery: a free black man.

As the news from Harpers Ferry spread to Richmond, a company of Virginia militiamen stormed into town, firing along the way. Next to die was Dangerfield Newby, a former slave fighting to free his wife. The crowd mutilated his body. Then they captured two of Brown's men and killed another, tossing his body in the river and continuing to fire on it. Soon eight of Brown's men were dead or dying, five others were cut off, two had escaped across the river. Brown gathered those who were left in a small brick building to wait out the night.

By early morning of October 18, a company of U.S. Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee lined the yard. Although he was completely surrounded, Brown refused to surrender. Marines stormed the building and captured and held them while a lynch mob howled outside.

Just days after the raid, Brown's trial began. It would take a week. On November 2, the jury deliberated for forty-five minutes and reached their verdict: guilty of murder, treason, and inciting slave insurrection. The South rejoiced in Brown's execution. But hanging was not the end of John Brown; it was the beginning. Throughout the North, church bells tolled for him. In Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau proclaimed, "Some 1800 years ago, Christ was crucified. This morning, Captain Brown was hung. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light."