John Brown’s Body
This week in 1859, John Brown and his small band of abolitionists took the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
Howard Zinn explained his importance: “John Brown, more than any other white American, devoted his life, and finally sacrificed it, on behalf of freedom for the slave. His plan, impossible and courageous, was to seize the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia with a band of black and white abolitionists and set off a revolt of slaves throughout the South. The plan failed.
Some of his men, including two of his own sons, were killed. John Brown was wounded, captured, sentenced to death by hanging by the state of Virginia, and with the enthusiastic approval of the government of the United States. When he was put to death, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, he will make the gallows holy as the cross. “
Here’s Josh Brolin reading Brown’s courtroom speech from Zinn’s excellent Voices of a People’s History of the United States
Make sure you sing John Brown’s Body at least once today.