Behind the Bastards - John Brown: Terrorist, Hero or Terrorist Hero?

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

Happy Bastards Holiday Episode! Robert is joined in studio by Anderson's mom and executive producer, Sophie Lichterman to discuss John Brown.FOOTNOTES: John Brown: America’s First Terrorist? John Brown Trial (1859) The Trial Of John Brown John Brown’s Day of Reckoning John Brown's Last Speech Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. But we have another Behind the Bastards Christmas special, which is a bit of a tradition here. This is now the second time we've done it, so now it's officially a tradition. Where we break with our tradition of telling stories about the worst people in all of history, and instead highlight a hero. Last year, I told everybody the story of Raoul Wallenberg, a man who risked his life and spent the entirety of his considerable privilege saving lives from the Nazis.

And this year, we're going to talk about another hero of mine, John F. Brown. And today, my guest is my producer, Sophie! Air horn, air horn, air horn. Hello, Sophie. Hi, Robert. How are you doing? I'm well. How's your holiday going?

It's holiday, you know. Yeah? Do you enjoy this time of year? Are you a big Christmas-er? No. No. I mean, I don't dislike this time of year, but I'm not, like, yay. What's your favorite holiday? Easter. Well, that's the wrong answer. Daniel just gave me the funniest look, but it is actually true that Easter is my favorite holiday. Such a shit holiday, other than the Cadbury cream eggs, which are objectively great.

The candy's the best for Easter. It is the best for Easter, and that's a serious injustice, because the pies are best for Christmas. That's true. So, Sophie. So, Fee. So, Fee. Hmm. So, Fee.

Here we are. What do you know about John Brown? For The Second's podcast. I know nothing. You know nothing. You don't know any. The name doesn't ring any bells to you. Let's just, let's just, no.

Really? Okay. Let's do this. Yeah. He's probably somebody people heard about in high school for, like, a paragraph or two. He's usually, like, right before the Civil War starts. You'll get a couple paragraphs. You're, like, one of those little insert boxes about John Brown and the raid on Harper's Ferry. Right.

And he's an interesting guy, because like Wallenberg, he gave his life fighting against the greatest evil of his age. But Wallenberg was kind of, like, almost a saint, like, in terms of his personal character and conduct. And John Brown was a terrorist. And also looked like an angry elf. Well, he grew up in the, like, early 1800s when life was terrible. So, like, he probably looked that way by the time he was fucking 20. But yeah, he looks rough. Wow.

Like, the only pictures that exist of him, his skin looks like tanned leather. Like, he looks like he's been getting punched in the face by sandpaper for a living for 57 years. Yes. He's hard life. So, while I was researching this episode, I came across an article by the Smithsonian Magazine. It includes a quote from Dennis Fry, the National Park Service's chief historian for Harper's Ferry, where John Brown conducted his famous raid to try to liberate the slaves of the American South. And Fry said this about John.

Americans do not deliberate about John Brown. They feel him. He is still alive today in the American soul. He represents something for each of us, but none of us is in agreement about what he means. And that's really interesting to me, because John Brown's legacy has been cited by bombers of abortion clinics, and most recently by Willem Van Spronsen, who assaulted an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington, and died attempting to destroy their buses to stop them from being able to deport people. So, John Brown is the kind of guy who speaks to a lot of people.

I was going to say a wide range of audience. Yeah, literally the widest range possible if you're looking at folks who are influenced by this guy. So, this is a more complicated story, I think morally, than the story of Wallenberg, but I do think John Brown was still a hero. So, we'll see how you feel at the end of this tale. John Brown was born on May 9th, 1800, to Owen Brown and Ruth Mills in the town of Torrington, Connecticut. Well, there you go. He might be the descendant of John Brown.

Yeah. John was the fourth of eight children between his father and his father's first wife. John's namesake was Captain John Brown, a farmer and revolutionary war hero who'd briefly fought against the British in 1776 before dying of dysentery in a New York barn. I guess that qualifies as a hero. When Captain Brown died, he left behind a pregnant widow and 10 children, including Owen Brown, who wrote that after his father's death, we lost our crops and then our cattle, and so became poor. So, John Brown does not come from money, unlike Wallenberg.

He's from a family that's been poor since his dad was little. Now, the Browns were strict Calvinists. Interesting. And in brief Calvinism, yeah, do you know what Calvinism is? Yeah. Yeah. How would you describe Calvinism, Sophie? It's like super strict Christianity?

Yeah. Baroque Barber phrasing. It's intense. It's intense. It's like they really, really believed in the Lord. Yeah. Yeah. And in a lot of ways, the predecessors of a lot of today's evangelicals, because they

believe that you can't do good things to save your soul from hell. Like, it's totally God's choice. And so, a lot of them believe that where you go end up after death is predicted or is decided before your birth. So, they were pretty hardcore fundamentalists. I don't like that. Yeah. It's not great.

It's not my particular choice of religion, but it was a pretty common one at that point in time and in the part of America where Brown grew up. That was a bad time. It's like, hey. Yeah. It was a bad time. I wouldn't have wanted to grew up there. Hey, be a good person.

But also, you're going to hell. But also, yeah, it doesn't matter what you do. Yeah. That's very depressing. Yeah. When you read religious tracks from people back then, the kind of God they worship seems more like a terrorist to me, and not the good kind of terrorist, which we're talking about today.

Not this kind of a terrorist, like a... Yeah. Yeah. Well, some of what we know about John's early life comes from a note he wrote a 12-year-old who was the son of one of the men who financed his crusade against slavery. So he wrote this summary of his life for the kid of one of the people who was backing this guerrilla war that he wound up fighting as an adult. I mean, that's my source.

Yeah. Yeah. That's my source of choice. Yeah. I write notes to a lot of 12-year-olds just in case I wind up waging a guerrilla war. It does. It sounds creepier than it was. Great.

Yeah. It's not really creepy, but it does sound creepy when you sum it up that way. And in that note, here's how Brown described his childhood, and he wrote this in the third person because he's a weirdo. I cannot tell you of anything in the first four years of John's life worth mentioning. Saved that at an early age, he was tempted by three large brass pins belonging to a girl who lived in the family and stole them. In this, he was detected by his mother, and after having a full day to think of the wrong,

received from her a thorough whipping. So what John Brown thinks is important to tell a little kid about his childhood. He's like, hey, kid, back in my day, he's that guy. I saw some pins. Yeah. He's literally that guy. It's so weird. He's, punishment is important to him.

He's like, listen, listen, you think you had it bad? Whipping. All I'm going to say, whipping. Oh, I bet that kid got whipped, too. Oh, 100%. I think they were whipping kids all throughout the 1800s. But wasn't like that normal? Yes.

Yeah. For sure. Right? Yeah. The abuse, obviously, we can say that what happened to John Brown as a kid was abuse by our standards. For sure. For sure.

But at the time, it was pretty much just how kids grew up. Yeah. You give them some whippings. They were harder times, Robert. Yeah. And it was also a time in which the most common reaction to gut-wrenching poverty was to pack up everything you owned and just move vaguely west. And in Brown's case, this took his family to Ohio, which at that point was called-

It's very funny. It sounds like half my relatives are like, you know what? It's what I did. Yeah. I mean, yeah. It sounds like my parents. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

It's kind of the defining emotion of this country. Oh, I'm not happy here. What if I had Westmore? You're like, all right, I'm now in San Diego. What do I do? It's like- I guess the sea? Yeah.

If you're miserable in San Diego, you just got to walk into the ocean. Yeah. Don't walk into the ocean. Don't do that. Well, maybe. Don't do that unless you're walking, but you're still neat. You can still- Yeah.

Yeah. We don't control drowning. Continue. Yeah. So, Brown's family moved to Ohio when he was a wee lad, which at that point was not called Ohio. It was called the Western Reserve by Connecticut cushions. I don't know what you call people from Connecticut, and I refuse to learn.

Oh. Oh, and- Yeah. No. Screw them. Well, they should have lived in a state that- Should have gone west. With a better name.

Yeah. Yeah. Like fucking, Iowa's right there, Rhode Island, all fine names. Yeah. Now, Owen Brown considered this move west to be an active religious devotion, as well as practicality, part of a glorious attempt to extend the benefits of Christendom further into what he saw as an untamed continent. John Brown, however, loved the wild nature of the Western Reserve.

He wrote with excitement that it was a, quote, wilderness filled with wild beasts and Indians. Now, unlike many of his contemporaries, Brown and his family were on friendly terms with the natives. One of John's friends was a Native American boy who gave him a yellow marble as a gift. John was heartbroken when he lost it. According to the book Midnight Rising by Tony Horowitz, quote, he also displayed an unusual tolerance towards the native inhabitants of Ohio. Some persons seemed disposed to quarrel with the Indians, but I never was, he wrote, nor

did he proselytize or damn natives as heathens as Puritans of old would have done. Instead, he traded meal for fish and game. He also built a log shelter to protect local Indians from an Indian tribe. Young John used to hang about Indians as much as he could, the beginnings of a lifelong sympathy for natives that stood in stark contrast to the prevailing hostility of white Americans. So we're seeing a guy here who's capable of at least transcending from an early age, capable of transcending the biases of his time to an extent, right? Right.

And also loves to mention sources of young boys. Well he was a young boy. Okay. So we're going to give him a pass on that. He was like five, six years old. Yeah, he was a little kid. He was not a young man at this point. I do like that it was a yellow marble.

Yeah, it was a yellow marble. Very important. That's the best color of marble, I assume. Yeah, obviously. I don't know much about marbles. Well yellow is my favorite color, that's why I'm saying it and I'm a narcissist, so continue. Weird Sophie. Sorry.

During this period, John Brown started what will become a lifelong practice of living in difficult conditions and surviving off of his wits. He spent basically his whole childhood camping and hunting for meat. His father dressed him in the hides of animals that his family had killed, and John grew up living off of animals, but also holding great affection for them. As a young boy, he found a baby bobtail squirrel, which he raised and hand tamed. When his beloved pet died, he mourned it for years. Oh my God, I love him.

He's a very sensitive boy. Yeah, he's got some sweetness to him. At age eight, John's mother died in childbirth. His father remarried almost immediately, and John considered his stepmother a very esteemable woman, but he never got over the loss of his mom, and he would mourn her for the rest of his life. In total, John's father Owen married three women the last time when he was in his 60s, and he had 16 children totally with him, which is a number that John would best.

The Browns make a lot of people. I mean, damn, John. Yeah. Now, as a boy, John is what you would call spirited. I mean, you would have to be, don't be one of 16. You got to stick out. Yeah. You got to stick out.

Yeah, and he seems to have. He lied to his parents a lot, and he was punished for it regularly. He played very hard and was notable for playing in a violent manner. He probably hurt a lot of his friends. He seems to have been one of those people who was just unreasonably full of energy from a very young age, and that he was that way his entire life. He always had way too much fucking energy. Reading about John Brown's life is fucking exhausting.

John wrote that he was, quote, ambitious to perform the full labor of a man when he was already a young child, and he started working full-time at age 12 when he drove his father's herd of cattle 100 miles on his own. He's just immediately doing more work than most grown men today. How many cattle are in a herd? I don't know, but it was probably a few dozen at least. Was that like a thing that people are going to be like, how do you not know that? Well, no.

There's no set number for a herd. It's just a group of cows. I like cows. By the time this kid is, oh, I hate cows. Why? Oh, they're just stupid fat horses. That's what I think. The average herd size in the US is just over 200.

I think, but that's now the whole thing. Canadian dairy herds average 80. That's probably closer to the kind of herd that they would have expected. I don't think that would have been a pretty large herd back then, but I don't know. Farms with more than 100 cows make up just 3% less than a percent of the total dairy farm population. This is so interesting. Sorry.

I continue. Farm I grew up on had about 100 head of cattle. But you don't like cows? Yeah. Well, that's part of why I don't like cows. I lived close to them for years. What do they mean? In all fairness to the cows, I was worse to the cows than the cows were to me.

Because I was a little boy, and it was fun to herd them with a broomstick and... All right, Harry Potter. All right, Harry Potter. Well, no, you just hit them in the ass and they run around. I would love to see Anderson with a herd of cow. Oh, dogs love it. Oh, man. They love barking at the cows.

I mean, she has herding instincts. I mean, she's low to the ground, but she is technically a cattle dog. Yeah. She would thrive. She would have fun with that. Anderson, do you hear this? Yeah. She would love that.

Do it. So, by the time John Brown is like a teenager, and by that I mean like 13 or 14, he's probably done more hard physical labor than most of the grown men in the US today have done in their whole lives. And most stories you'll read about John will emphasize that he was almost supernaturally tough and had an endless tolerance for hard work and physical pain. This was matched with a fanatic religious sort of distaste for comfort. He would later write with pride that he had never attempted to dance, never learned any

card games, and nursed a profound dislike for vain and frivolous conversations. He's like, I never learned to dance. Oh, my God. He footloosed himself. He footloosed himself real hard. Dude. Oh, man. That's hard to hear.

He needs Kevin Bacon. He did need Kevin Bacon. One Kevin Bacon could have really- Kevin Bacon. And that makes me think- Wow. If you'd had Kevin Bacon and John Brown starring side by side in the first Trimmers, would have been a fun movie.

That's so sad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean- Oh, buddy. Yeah. His religion's a bummer.

So John later would write that his eternal war with slavery also started when he was 12, when he came upon a young black slave boy being beaten with shovels for some minor crime. He wrote in his letter to that little kid, this brought John to reflect on the wretched hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children. Now, I'm sure he saw stuff like that and may not have happened when he was 12. He was writing a letter to a 12-year-old, maybe he jitted a bit, but it does seem accurate to say based on what we know about him.

Why is he writing a letter to a 12-year-old? Do we know? Yeah. Yeah. One of his, like, as an older man, we'll get to this, he's funding like a guerrilla insurgency to try to free the slaves of the South, and he gets a bunch of rich backers. And while he's like dining with one of them, this kid asks about his life and asks him to write a letter.

Oh, so it's a Hallmark movie. Kind of, I mean, it's more like this guy is illegally funding a terrorist and the guy's kid wants to know more about the John Brown's life, so John Brown writes him a note so we can buy more guns. Got it. So it's a lifetime movie. Yeah, a lifetime movie. Okay, cool.

Yeah. So, Brown studied to be a pastor, but wound up not choosing that life, and it's likely that he would have been bored to tears by the work, but he remained a devoted Calvinist his entire life, following in his father's footsteps. Really? Yeah. He's still like really woke as a Calvinist, like when his church, he learned that black people weren't allowed to sit at the front of the church, they had to sit in the back.

He made a big point in the middle of service of getting up with his family, marching to the back, walking up to one of the black families and offering them his seat at the front of the church and then sitting in the back with his family. So like, he's committed from the jump to racial equality, not just to abolition, but to like total racial equality, which fucking nobody is at this period. Like most abolitionists are still pretty fucking racist, but not John Brown. Yeah. At 20, following his dad's advice, John Brown married Dianth Lusk, Dianth Lusk, yeah, weird

name. Dianth? Yeah, Dianth, D-I-A-N-T-H-E, Dianth Lusk, weird name, right? I don't hate it though. No, it's a nice name. Dianth? Dianth. I like it.

He describes her in his letters as remarkably plain, but industrious and economical. He's like, she wasn't a bad bitch, but... Yeah, she's ugly, but... I'm like, she has a great personality. This is trash and does not pass the Bechdel test continue. Yeah, well, you're asking for too much if you want someone to be racially and gender woke in fucking 1830. Yeah, definitely cannot both.

No way. Yeah, their first child was born a year after they married. Dianth Jr. No. Dianth Jr. No. No, it was Owen. Come on.

No, no, no, I'm getting that name wrong. I write it down somewhere later. Great. Yeah, John and his father, Owen, do not sound like they would have been fun people to hang out with, but they were on the right side of the slavery debate. He has an Owen? Yeah. He has a John Brown Jr.

Yeah. Oh, he has a salmon? His son's name? He has a salmon. He has a kid named Sam. Holy shit. Yeah, he had some weird names. Wait, he has a fuck 10 of children too.

Yeah, he has 20. What? And more than half of them survived to adulthood. Some of them die fighting with him. Oh, he has an Ellen. My mom's name is Ellen. Hi, mom. She listens to our show.

And there you go. So John and his dad were on the right side of the slavery debate from the beginning. Owen had been a fierce abolitionist in an era when that really wasn't the thing. He was also a pacifist, and for a time John Brown was a pacifist too. So they fought slavery without fighting the people who kept slaves, largely by helping escaped slaves with shelter and food on their way across the underground railroad. So while John is a kid, he and his family are like helping to hide escaped slaves as they make their way up to Canada.

So this is like a part of his life from like the teenage years on. When John was 21, he moved his young family to Pennsylvania and bought 200 acres of land. He built a house and a tannery on it. Now the tannery had a hidden room, which Brown used to hide escaped slaves from the South. From the mid 1820s to 1835, the Brown family hosted an estimated 2,500 escaped slaves playing a critical role in their journey to freedom. So he's a committed abolitionist and like putting his money where his mouth is his entire life.

Now, while he was helping to work the underground railroad, John was also helping to found a new settlement in rural Pennsylvania. He's built a school and he built a church and he was the area's first postmaster. One of his neighbors described him as an inspired paternal ruler, controlling and providing for the circle of which he was the head. I have a question. Yeah. How is he funding all this?

I mean, it doesn't take that much money. Like he works and he's like, you could buy like 200 acres was like a few bucks back then like because they're trying to, most of this area after the whole genocide of the Native Americans thing, there's an unspeakable amount of empty territory that the government wants people farming. So there's all these deals where you can get most of the land for free or basically for free. You can get a loan where there's no interest because they're, they're just trying to get

people farming and using it. Okay. Cool. I just want to make sure it was realistic and it wasn't like an episode of Friends. No, no, no. Now, as you might imagine, there were a lot of people who didn't get along with John Brown. His wife's brother was only able to visit the family on Sundays. And so John hated him because visiting on Sunday was a sin against God.

John was so strict about keeping the Sabbath that his church banned all worldly conversation on that day. So you couldn't talk about anything but religion on, on Sunday. Making cheese and hanging out with your friends was also forbidden on Sunday. What? Work. Yeah. It's a lame ass religion.

Workers on John's tannery were required to attend his church and hold daily worship sessions with their families. One of John's apprentices described him as friendly as long as the conversation did not turn towards anything he considered profane or vulgar. Brown's younger brother described him as a king against whom there is no rising up. What? So, wait, say that one more time. Say that one more time.

A king against whom there is no rising up. So it's basically like my way or the highway? Yeah. He is absolutely convinced that he's right. And he will not like, he's personable unless you disagree with him and he is not, not open to being disagreed with about the things he believes. Interesting. Yeah.

He's that kind of guy. So again, a religious fundamentalist, kind of a dick about it, but also like a really dedicated family man dedicated to his community and an anti-slavery crusader. So yeah, he's an interesting fella and when we come back from ads, we will talk about how he raised his kids. I love ads. It'll be fun. I love ads too, Sophie.

Products and services, you know. I love ads. Products. A good service. I don't have a fun, it's usually more fun when like I say something horrible about like a bunch of kids getting murdered and then I say, you know what, won't murder all your kids. Oh.

Should we try one? These products and services. Should we try a transition? I mean, I am about to talk about how what he did to his children by the standards of the modern era was abuse. Now I'm sad that he named one of them after my mom. Child abuse by the standards of our modern era. What isn't child abuse is the products that support this show.

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of time, but even by the standards of the mid and early 1800s, John Brown was considered a very strict parent. And I'm going to quote again from the book Midnight Rising, his firstborn John Jr. was required to keep a ledger listing his sins and detailing the punishment due each unfaithfulness at work earned three lashes disobeying mother brought eight. The secondborn Jason had a vivid dream about petting a baby raccoon that was as kind as a kitten and described the encounter as if it had really happened. He was three or four at the time and his father thrashed him for telling a wicked lie.

Five year old Ruth muddled her shoes while gathering pussy willows and then fibbed about how she'd gotten wet. Her father switched me with the willow that had caused my sin, she recalled. He's such a shithead. Oh my God. Yeah, he's really a, yeah, that's some dick shit. Yeah. That's fucking rough, man.

I feel like Jason's kid, a vivid dream about petting a baby raccoon, maybe like, no, don't try that. Yeah. Well, yeah. Jason, Jason feels like a really weird name for that era. Oh yeah. No, there's a lot of Jason's. That's like a Bible name, right?

I don't know. Jason feels like a guy that hangs out at like a hip coffee shop and says he's working on his screenplay. Yeah. Yeah, that's Jason, but he goes by Jay. You're right. You're right. You're right.

Okay. My apologies. Jason, continue having vivid dreams about petting baby raccoons. So you agree he should have been beaten for that. That's good to know. Sophie is pro-abusing children who dream about raccoons. I mean, he's went to talk, I mean, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, it's settled.

It's settled. No, but John is going to talk. Wasn't his best friend a squirrel? Well, yeah, but that was a real squirrel, not a dream raccoon. I mean, that we know of, I mean, nobody is friends with a squirrel. Nobody. Yeah, I've been friends with a squirrel. No you weren't.

Yes, I was. At my last place in LA, we hand tamed a squirrel and would feed it nuts, we could even pet it briefly. Anderson's sworn enemy is a squirrel. We have a sworn enemy named, that's a squirrel named Edward that we deal with every morning at my apartment complex. I named him. I don't, I never named our friend squirrel, but I loved her and I hope she's okay.

I hope Edward moves away, continue. Brown apprehended two men he had countered on the road who were stealing apples and smashed a neighbor's whiskey jug after taking just a few sips and deciding the liquor had dangerous powers. Despite his severity, Brown was beloved by his children who also recalled his many acts of tenderness. He sang hymns to them at bedtime, recited maxims from ASOP and Benjamin Franklin and cared for his little folks when they were ill and was gentle with animals.

He warmed frozen lambs in the family wash tub. As long as they're real animals, like what, this is very weird. He's a weird guy, he's a complicated person, like clearly is capable of being a giant dick as a parent to his kids and is also capable of being a really loving father. He's a strange guy. He's a flawed man, but all men are. And he's a child of a brutal time, you know. People wound up rougher back then, which is an excuse bad shit, but it was a tough time

to come up. You try working from age 12 and losing your mom, like, you're not going to be a softy. So Diane's wife died in childbirth just like his mother. Yeah. All the Browns have wives that die in childbirth, which again, not super uncommon given the number of kids they're having. Yeah. John took this very hard, obviously, and he and his five children moved in with another

family briefly while they dealt with their grief. When they returned home, John hired a housekeeper. Sometimes her 16-year-old sister, Mary, came along to help. John Brown proposed to Mary by letter several months after meeting her, and they got married in July of 1833. How old is John at this point? He is 31. Nope.

Sorry. He is 33. Yeah. I mean, not that uncommon back then, but still creepy. Not that uncommon, but still creepy. Yeah. After his wife's death, he marries a woman half his age and four years older than his oldest child.

Sounds like he sounds very Hollywood at this point. Well, I think it's more, like, honestly, I think with him, like, it's not even like a lust thing. It's a, I want to have a lot more kids. And so the younger she is, the tougher she'll be, like, the better her odds of surviving. And yeah, they would stay married the rest of John's life, and she bore him 13 children. Yeah. They're a fuck.

Yeah. And it was not an easy marriage for her. John Brown was a horrible husband. No shit, she was pregnant all the time and had to deal with his grumpy, hating of imagination ass. I think actually she would have loved to have dealt with his grumpy ass more because he was fucking gone most of the time, which we're about to talk about. Yeah.

But for the early years of their marriage, the biggest problem- Then how was she pregnant all the time? Well, he came back long enough to get her, knock her up again. Oh, okay. Damn. For the first years of their marriage, John was constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. He spent money as quickly as he made it, and often a lot quicker than he could make it. On what?

In the story of his life farming, having kids, like businesses- That's true. He would start businesses and they'd fail. So he had a bunch of failed businesses. He was terrible at everything to do with money. He was a good worker and had a great work ethic, but was just awful at making money or spending his money wisely. And while John struggled to get ahead economically, the United States lurched closer and closer

to violence over the issue of slavery. In the year of his birth, 1800, nearly one-fifth of the five million people in the U.S. were enslaved. Ever since the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, the South had grown increasingly wealthy and influential in American politics. By the 1850s, all 12 of the United States' richest counties were in the South. On its own, the South was the fourth largest economy on Earth. For some perspective, the South in the 1800s was wealthier than California is today.

So all of the money's in the fucking South, and they have most of the political influence. This is like 1850s and stuff, they just get richer and richer. The whole industrial revolution worldwide was driven in large part by the production of cotton by slaves in the American South. Even down to the countries that had banned slavery like England, cotton was critical for the building of boats and ships and a lot of different factory equipment, and it was all made possible by enslaved black people. So the whole industrial revolution is undergirded by black slavery, even in the countries that

didn't have slaves legal at that point, which is important to note. Yeah. Now, the sheer mass of money in the South and thus behind slavery made it impossible for most people in the 1830s to imagine an end to the institution. In 1831, as John Brown entered his 30s, the abolition movement was growing but still firmly fringe in the context of national politics. This started to change that August, when an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner gathered up a small band of his fellow slaves and launched an insurrection.

Armed with hatchets, knives, and muskets, they executed roughly 60 white Virginians and gathered a small number of slaves to their banner. Like John Brown, Nat Turner had also been born in 1800. Also like John, he came to view himself as something of a prophet and believed that he had been chosen by God to bring about the end of slavery. Turner's band did not just kill slaveholders, they executed women, school children, and even a baby in a cradle. So Nat Turner's raid is a complicated thing to talk about morally.

I was like, okay, okay, what, no, no, no, no, no. They are just killing, they're killing all of the white people they come across. In terms of parsing that out in a moral context, I found an interesting CBS article that interviewed Bruce Turner, who is a great, great, great-grandchild of Nat Turner, and Rick Francis, who's a descendant of one of the slaveholding families that Turner massacred. I'm going to quote from that now. Both Turner and Francis are avid students of history who have researched their own families as well as the historical record of the rebellion.

Anderson Cooper put the question to them both, is Nat Turner a hero? Yes, he is, says Bruce Turner, because he saw an opportunity to try to correct something that was an extremely bad evil. He believes Nat Turner was a freedom fighter who started a movement that helped end the institution of slavery. Prior to the insurrection, slave owners actually believed that the slaves were happy in their condition, he says. Nat Turner changed that.

Rick Francis is no defender of the horrible institution practiced by his forebearers, but he does not see Nat Turner as a heroic figure. Francis questions whether a desire to end slavery is what motivated Turner to kill. He also points out that Nat Turner and his followers killed many women and children. They were a means to an end, says Bruce Turner. Women were slave owners. Children were slave owners. And the baby in the cradle, question mark?

Yeah, I mean, I think what Nat Turner would say if you could bring him back and pose that question to him is, that baby would have grown up to be a slave owner. Almost none of the children of slave-owning families grew up to repudiate those beliefs. It was very uncommon, and Turner's argument, I think, would have been something along the lines of, they were all part of this institution, and they didn't spare our children, so why should we spare theirs, you know? Is this like on a 60 minutes thing or something with Anderson Cooper? Yeah, I think so.

I just found it in an article, but I think it was part of Anderson Cooper's show, yeah. Shout out Anderson Cooper, the father of my dog. Yeah, it's a complicated story, the tale of Nat Turner. I mean, how you feel about how justified it was is a matter of your own personal morality. I feel like you can't really judge it, like, not really thinking about it. No, I would argue that. You can't judge, I don't think you can judge the actions of an enslaved person taking action against the people who kept him in bondage, no matter how terrible they seem based on

the morality you get to have in a much less fucked up era. But I'm not gonna slam my opinions on Nat Turner on the audience. We have a lot of John Brown to get through. So Nat's uprising did not work out. While he eventually gathered about 40 slaves, they failed to make it to the town of Jerusalem and its armory, which is where they were headed to try to get guns. White militiamen succeeded in scattering Turner's men and executing or killing most of them. Turner's insurrection inspired a vicious white reprisal, and gangs of armed whites murdered

hundreds upon hundreds of black people and impaled their severed heads on road signs as a warning to others. Turner's body was decapitated, quartered, and skinned. His skull and brain were sent off to be studied, because people were like, why would a slave not want to be a slave? The fat from Turner's body was rendered into wagon wheel grease, and his skin was tanned and sent off to the families of the people killed in his raid as a souvenir. Jesus Christ.

This is a fucking brutal time. Like, you really gotta remember that whenever you try to think through these people's actions and decisions and morality is like, it was fucking rough. And like, how do we, like, did somebody write all this down? Like, this is creepy. Yeah, yeah. They weren't, they weren't ashamed of it. And like, if you're the fucking, if you're the white oppressors who want, who are doing,

who are massacring these people and chopping up Nate's body, like, you want all of the black people who might come across the story to know what happens when they stand up, like, that's part of how you oppress people. Yeah. This would have been a great time for an ad transition. I would have been like, you know what doesn't oppress people? The products, but you're early, bro. We're early.

I know. I just, it would have been good. Nope. So prior to Nat Turner's uprising, most abolitionists supported a slow piecemeal emancipation of enslaved blacks and sought to basically ship them to Africa or the Caribbean. The nation of Liberia was born from this basic idea. And this is like what Abraham Lincoln and others like him kind of would have advocated in the period.

Prior to Nat Turner, this is about the best you could hope for from woke white people, that they'd be like, slavery's wrong, but we don't want them here. Now after Nat Turner, abolitionists were increasingly likely to urge an immediate end to the institution of slavery. And the figurehead of this new wing of the abolitionist movement was a guy named William Lloyd Garrison, who was the editor of a newspaper called The Liberator in Boston. Now the Liberator started publication eight months before Turner's revolt and Garrison's prose could a new and utterly uncompromising tone that fit in well with the era ignited

by Nat Turner. Garrison had nothing but contempt for the centrists of his day and their advocacy of gradual reform. He wrote, tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard. So after Turner, some stronger voices start to speak up in favor of abolitionism. I will be heard, I like that. Yeah.

And not like, oh, we'll do it piece by piece and like we'll slowly, they're like, no, this shit has to end, it's fucked. Not like, okay, we'll transfer you to another department, none of that bullshit. Yeah. Fuck this shit. Yeah. Garrison is a fuck this shit kind of guy. I like Garrison.

But he is a pacifist. He's also a pacifist. He's not a violent. Am I not gonna like Garrison? Should I not say that? No, no, no, no, no. I don't agree with everything Garrison thought about how to end slavery, but you can't fault him on a moral level.

He just didn't believe in violence. And it turns out violence was the only way to end slavery, but you can't fault him for not wanting the nation to be convulsed by a bloody war. Yeah. So for a time, John Brown approached his abolitionism through the lens of pacifism too. After Nat Turner's rebellion, the debate over slavery turned more violent. Pro-slavery Southerners saw what had happened in Virginia with Nat Turner as the culmination

of their worst nightmares. The sheer number of slaves who in some areas outnumbered whites terrified them. They believed that any talk of abolitionism deserved an immediate and violent response. In 1837, a pro-slavery mob murdered Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist editor of what was effectively an anti-slavery zine. They tossed his printing press into the Mississippi. Lovejoy had futile armed himself in self-defense, which William Lloyd Garrison disapproved of, but which John Brown seems to have taken as something of an inspiration.

At a meeting of Brown's church, convened to protest Lovejoy's murder, John Brown swore a declaration, here before God in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. So he takes Lovejoy's murder as a rallying call, and he buys a gun shortly after this point. So far, no weapons? Up to this point, his dad had been a pacifist, his dad was a pacifist, he was a pacifist. He had been a child during the War of 1812, and he had a really negative idea of soldiers

because he'd seen what they did in the areas where they bivouacked and stuff. So he was very anti-violence. This starts to change after Lovejoy's murder. He starts to think, maybe violence is the only way we're going to get rid of slavery. Now Brown did not follow this declaration by joining any of the abolitionist groups in his area. Instead, he decided to turn his large family into what amounted to an abolitionist insurgent cell.

John's surviving children later that recall the night he sat down with his wife and his three oldest sons. He asked us who of us were willing to make common cause with him, and doing all in our power to break the laws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of his teeth. Are you Mary, John, Jason, and Owen? John's wife and children all prayed with him and swore an oath to fight for slavery's defeat. Over the years, John would bring the rest of his enormous brood into this anti-slavery

pact. Boys and girls included. His relationship with his sons is fascinating to me, and I think this paragraph from Midnight Rising makes it clear why. Quote, None of Brown's sons adopted their father's orthodox faith, and several openly challenged it, an apostasy that vexed him tremendously. But all seven of his unregenerate boys, who survived childhood, would take up arms against slavery.

They held firmly to the idea that father was right, Sammon recalled, where he had led we were glad to follow, and every one of us had the courage of his convictions. Brown's brothers in-laws and other kin would also lend support to his anti-slavery crusade. There was a Brown family conspiracy, his eldest son said, to break the power of slavery. That's kind of badass. So John's kids, yeah, none of his kids follow him in his religion. They're like, you're kind of nuts on this, but like, the old dude's right about slavery. That shit's fucked.

They're like, listen, you know, I can't fuck with you on that. But I'll get behind you on that. So they're like- But the slavery shit. The slavery shit. I mean, I mean, like, they're kind of right. Yeah. And it's kind of like, you get the feeling from John in doing this with his family, that

he kind of recognizes, once he commits himself to this cause, that like, I'm going to wind up breaking the law. I'm going to wind up being a terrorist. I'm going to commit a shitload of crimes. And so I can't trust joining a group full of people that I don't know. Like it's got to just be me and my family, like otherwise somebody's going to rat me out. Yeah, he's got nepotism.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's nepotism for terrorism. Maybe it's just the smart way to do it. But he does commit to using his family in this way. It's like hiring somebody you know and not, you know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It's like, well, we won't make more comparisons to drug dealing, but it's like what you do when you deal drugs. Now for the first years of this crusade to end slavery, the Brown family efforts were mostly limited to helping hide the slaves. And for most people, this would have been more than enough. And in my opinion, anyone who helped to operate the Underground Railroad in that time, even in a minor capacity, did something heroic.

Yeah. But just that was not enough for John Brown. He was clearly frustrated for years by his inability to strike any sort of direct blow against slavery. This was exacerbated by his constant and repeated failures at business. He wound up at the edge of bankruptcy several times and moved his family all around the New West in search of better prospects. Brown tried fur trading, cattle driving, surveying, and even breeding race horses.

But by 1840, he was so broke that he could not even afford postage for his letters. And he declared bankruptcy. Man. Yeah. Now his attempts to find new work led him away from his family for months at a time. And the letters he was able to send home to his wife showed a distinct depression had gripped him. He had to find unworthily yours above his name and referred to his wife as the sharer

of my poverty, trials, discredit, and sore afflictions. In 1941, the year after he declared bankruptcy, John's family was torn apart by a horrific bout of dysentery, which killed four of his children, including his nine-year-old daughter, Sarah, and his six-year-old son, Charles. So this is a rough fucking life this guy lives. Yeah. Now, for most of the early 1840s, John spent his time trying desperately to pull his family out of the financial hole he dug them into.

It wasn't until 1847 that he had meaningful contact with members of the abolition movement. That year, he moved to the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, where he convinced a moneyed investor to fund a wool trading business. Brown was bad at the job, as he was bad at everything to do with money, and it failed miserably. But his time at Springfield brought him into contact with a huge number of freed blacks. While he was there, he met Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and renowned speaker and writer.

He had dinner in Brown's exceedingly humble home, and during that dinner, John walked Frederick through the plans that he'd spent years cooking up. He unrolled a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run from Pennsylvania and into the southeast. He pointed out that these mountains were filled with caves and natural fortresses. They were, John thought, the perfect place for an insurgent army to hide. He told Douglass he believed the mountains had been put there by God for the emancipation of the Negro race. Over his dinner table, John Brown outlined an ambitious plan to use the Alleghenys as

a base for a guerrilla army that would raid plantations, free their slaves, and send them north to swell the ranks of his army. Now Douglass thought this plan was stirring, but probably outside the realm of possibility, so he thought it was a good idea, but he didn't think it was going to work. But he still found himself deeply taken and in admiration of John Brown. He described him as built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships. While in Springfield, Brown gained a reputation for being the exceedingly rare sort of white man who not only agitated for abolition, but actually treated black people as his equals

in his personal life. John Stofer, a Harvard historian who studies the history of race in America, says, he stood apart from every other white in the historical record for his ability to burst free from the power of racism. Blacks were among his closest friends, and in some respects he felt more comfortable around blacks than he did around whites. So you'd call him a woke dude. He was kind of infamous among his fellow white people for dining with black families regularly

and addressing the adults as Mr. and Mrs., and it's a sign of how racist America was at that time. They're like, he calls them Mr.? My God, like that's what we're dealing with in the broader culture at this point. I hate white people, white people suck, white people suck. Yeah, you don't wind up super proud of American history when you really get into the weeds of race. You're like, oh my God.

But not John Brown. So that's good. Frederick Douglass himself said that Brown, though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man and is deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery. So you'd call him a good ally, is the point I'm trying to make. In 1848, Garrett Smith, a wealthy abolitionist and another good ally, bought a huge chunk of land in Northern New York and gave it away to a large group of freed slaves.

He asked Brown to move there in order to help the new community get on its feet. John agreed, in part because he thought that the colony in the Adirondacks might be able to act as a subterranean pathway that would effectively expand the underground railroad's capacity by several orders of magnitude. He also thought it might act as the start of a chain of fortresses for the army of abolitionists and free blacks he planned to build to raid the plantations of the south. Now John Brown's plans here are not as impossible as they sound. He knew that even with a large guerrilla army he could not hope to free all four million

enslaved blacks, but he could cause a panic and collapse the economies and slaveholding states as a result of that panic. But unfortunately, John Brown's economic realities forced him to push this plan on hold while he traveled to Europe to sell a huge pile of wool for his failing business. He left his long-suffering wife and children alone in the relatively primitive conditions of their New York farm. Now, we have no evidence that John Brown was physically abusive to his wife, and in fact from the evidence we have it seems very unlikely that he was, but it would be fair to say that

theirs was not a healthy relationship, and I'm going to quote again from Midnight Rising. Her frequently absent husband acknowledged the hardship she endured in an unusually tender letter in 1847, noting his follies, the very considerable difference in our age, and the fact that I sometimes chide you severely. The toll was evident to Richard Dana when he visited the Browns at a Rondack home. He described Mary then just 35 as rather an invalid. So he's a horrible husband. Yeah.

Now, in his defense, it's a hard time to raise a family, but he's not good at being around. Sometimes I chide you severely, was that the quote? Yeah, yeah, he probably yells at her or something for not being thrifty enough. Yeah. He scolds everybody. He's a scolding kind of guy. It seems like a yeller. I don't know.

I think he was probably kind of the quiet sort of scolder, but I don't know about that. That's just the feeling I get from him, that he was the kind of like quietly furious at you and that was the worst thing, but I don't know. Now Brown's tour of Europe ended as per usual an economic disaster. He and his family were left even poorer than before. Brown returned to the farm in New York and for a time worked at helping free blacks build the place for themselves. Why is he so bad at making money?

He's just terrible at it. Why? I don't know. I mean, it was probably, it was hard. It was hard. It's hard to make money. He's like, you can't do anything. He's the dude that tries every career and is like, it's just not for me.

Yeah, he's just bad at it. He's bad at the business aspect. He's a good worker, but he keeps trying to run businesses and he sucks at it every time. He seems like he has work ethic. I don't know. He's a great worker. Everyone says that, but he's just shit at the capitalism part of it, like selling things he's bad at.

And he keeps trying to do it. Do you want to know what you're not bad at? Oh shit, selling things? Oh my God. Oh, Sophie, nice. That was a good one. Thank you. Nailed it.

Nailed the ad transition. Thank you. Very proud. Yes, so do something John Brown couldn't do and buy products over the internet. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, outside of New York, where John Brown labored to help build a colony for freed blacks,

the ideological war over slavery had reached a fever pitch in 1850 with the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law. This law was a craven act of political compromise by American moderates to the demands of the slave holding states. It brutally punished anyone caught aiding a slave and mandated that all citizens help capture escaped slaves. In 1854, another act of Congress pushed northern abolitionists even further. From the Smithsonian Magazine, quote, under pressure from the South and its democratic

allies in the North, Congress opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery under a concept called popular sovereignty. The more northerly Nebraska was in little danger of becoming a slave state. Kansas, however, was up for grabs. Pro-slavery advocates, the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with revolvers, bowie knives, rifle, and cannon, while they are not only thoroughly organized but under pay from slaveholders. John Brown Jr. wrote to his father, poured into Kansas from Missouri.

Anti-slavery settlers begged for guns and reinforcements, among the thousands of abolitionists who left their farms, workshops, or schools to respond to the call, where John Brown and five of his sons. Brown himself arrived in Kansas on October 1855, driving a wagon loaded with rifles he had picked up in Ohio and Illinois, determined, he said, to help defeat Satan and his legions. Hell yeah. So, this is the first time John's gonna have a chance to confront slavery violently. And defeat Satan and his legions.

Yeah, he sure does. Now bleeding Kansas, as the conflict came to be known, proved to be one of the bloodiest pre-Civil War chapters in America's battle over slavery. It's not like 200 people were killed, but possibly hundreds more. It was also the event that launched John Brown on the path that would guarantee him several paragraphs in American history textbooks for years to come. Shortly after Brown arrived in Kansas, the pro-slavery population of the state elected a legislature via a shameless electoral fraud.

This body voted into law extreme pro-slavery regulations, which among other things punished the expression of anti-slavery views with two years of hard labor. One pro-slavery editor at the time made the goals of the slaveholding Kansans clear. Quote, we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch, and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil. So these people are like, we want to extend slavery here, we're willing to fight for what we believe in, and we'll kill all you weak, like, shitty abolitionist freestater like assholes, like, we don't give a fuck, we'll murder you.

And the government kind of just lets this happen because it doesn't want to piss off the South, which is the most powerful voting block in the United States at the moment. Because 1800s America. Yeah. Kind of modern America. Yeah, I was going to say, because this is America. Yeah. Now, Brown's first armed action in Kansas occurred in defense of a group of abolitionist

Kansans who held their own Congress in opposition to the pro-slavery Kansan Congress. Brown's militia showed up with guns, revolvers, swords, powder, and caps to defend the vote against pro-slavery raiders from Missouri, who had shut down other similar events. No enemy appeared. But in May 1856, pro-slavery militiamin sacked the city of Lawrence, Kansas, a known abolitionist hotbed. They burned and looted and murdered their political opponents. At the same time, news reached Kansas that Charles Sumner, the most prominent abolitionist

in the Senate, had been beaten nearly to death on the floor of Congress by a South Carolina congressman armed with a cane. Oh, fuck. Yeah, yeah, it's a fucked up chapter of history. He's like beating him with a cane in front of people and nobody's doing anything? Yeah, I mean, eventually they pulled him apart, but it was like three years before Sumner could retake his seat. He was so badly injured.

Jesus Christ. It was horrible. Yeah. So John Brown was pissed off at this. He was furious about the massacre in Lawrence. He was furious about what had happened to Sumner, and he was pissed more than anything that no abolitionists, none of the moderates were doing a goddamn thing about these fucking pro-slavery assholes and all the violence that they were just allowed to do for some

reason. He was pissed. So over the course of several weeks, Brown formed his sons and a group of local volunteers into an anti-slavery militia. His goal was not merely to defend abolitionists from the violence of pro-slavery mobs. He wanted to take the fight to them. When one of his neighbors urged caution, Brown replied, caution, caution, sir, I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution.

It is nothing but the word of cowardice. Hell yeah. On May 24th, John Brown and a select group of his men, including several of his sons, went on a raid across a series of farms in Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. They dragged five pro-slavery advocates out of their homes in the dead of night and hacked them to death with swords. Now these are generally described as broadswords, but I've seen pictures of them and they seem to have been closer to Roman gladiases.

I'm sorry, what does that mean? It's like a short sword. It's a broad-bladed short sword. You're welcome, listeners, because nobody knew what that meant. And the five people that did, congrats. Now you get different attitudes on this based on who you hear it from, because this is a very brutal act. He drags these people out of their house, they're unarmed, and he murders them with fucking

swords. With fucking swords. Yeah. So depending on who you read, you'll come to different attitudes about what exactly this counts as. Smithsonian Magazine says this, by almost any definition, the Pottawatomie killings were a terrorist act intended to sow fear in slavery's defenders. Brown viewed slavery as a state of war against blacks, a system of torture, rape, oppression,

and murder, and saw himself as a soldier in the army of the Lord against slavery, says one scholar. Kansas was Brown's trial by fire, his initiation into violence, his preparation for real war. So not every historian agrees with calling the Pottawatomie massacre an act of terrorism. In a piece for the National Archives, a guy named Paul Finkelman makes this argument. Kansas, bleeding Kansas as it is known, was in the midst of a civil war. Between 1855 and 1860, about 200 men would be killed in Kansas. Not all were politically motivated, and historians disagree on what constitutes a political killing,

but even the most conservative scholar of this violence finds 56 killings that were tied to slavery and politics. I think this number is low, and that most of the 200 deaths were actually politically motivated and tied to slavery and bleeding Kansas. But the actual number of political killings is less important than the understanding that in Kansas there was a violent civil war being fought over slavery. Men on both sides were killed. Brown's actions are most famous because they were five killings and he strategically used

swords rather than guns which would have alerted neighbors. This is the nature of guerrilla warfare. It is brutal and bloody, but it is not terrorism. Oh, so he used the sword because they're quiet. Yeah, exactly. And guns were loud as shit back then. They're not quiet today. No, but I'm just louder.

Yeah. So, you know, I tend to be on the side of like it was terrorism. I think it probably qualifies as that, but terrorism isn't necessarily invalid. It's an act like in a guerrilla war, it's a tactic. And at that point, John and his men were outnumbered, and they wanted to strike a blow, and they wanted to scare the shit out of these people who'd been acting with impunity, and I think they did it. Yeah.

Different people, different opinions. So the Pottawatomie massacre escalated the conflict in Kansas to a new level. Pro-slavery forces staged what affected to a full-scale invasion of the territory. There were battles, towns were sacked, and yeah, a lot of people were killed. John Brown gained a reputation during the fighting as a leader of cunning and skill, and earned the appellation Captain Brown. For months, he fought a grinding insurgent campaign that made him a household name in much of the North.

There were stories of like, he led this like spirited defense of this town that, you know, they eventually lost, but they inflicted a lot of casualties on the enemy and like made it really bloody for them. He successfully like outmaneuvered this big force of pro-slavery guys and took, like they surrendered to him, and he took a bowie knife from the guy in charge. So he's like, and there's stories about this, like journalists meet him when he's out in the field and like write about him and his band of guerrilla warriors and stuff, and he becomes very famous in the North.

And it's, you know, it's, again, it's a brutal guerrilla war. One of his sons during this point is captured and executed by pro-slavery forces. Two of his sons are wounded. So it's like, it's rough, but he walks out of bleeding Kansas, a national hero, really. Now when the violence in Kansas subsided, John Brown decided to use his newfound fame to draw up support and funding to open up a new front in the war against slavery. He wrote his son, Jason, a letter saying, I have only a short time to live, only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause.

Brown, now a wanted man, traveled the northern states, dressed in the gear of a guerrilla fighter, drumming up funds and support for his war on slavery. He showed off the bowie knife he'd taken from a pro-slavery militia leader and played up the daring dew involved in his flight from the law. From the book Midnight Rising, quote, brandishing the captured bowie knife strapped just above his boot or loading a revolver as he warned of federal marshals on his trail, Brown also introduced a frisian to the genteel parlors of New England. I should hate to spoil these carpets, he told one Boston hostess, but you know I cannot

be taken alive. So he plays up this reputation. He has some great like action hero quotes. Yeah, he really does. He's absolutely an action hero. He's got some cool guy quotes. He's absolutely an action hero. And yeah, he's pretty hardcore.

He's a badass. He's pretty badass. Yeah. Problematic, but badass. Problematic, but badass. Now, John spent much of the next two years, yeah, buying arms and raising funds to buy more arms as well as working mostly unsuccessfully to convince other white abolitionists and free blacks to sign up to fight in the army he was raising.

Gradually, he built up a network of six wealthy backers, all of whom were to differing degrees committed to the cause of ending slavery. These men known to history as the secret six made it possible for Brown to secure several hundred sharps rifles, a significant number of revolvers, and eventually 500 pikes. Now, a pike is basically a dagger at the end of a long spear and Brown planned to use these pikes to arm freed slaves. He couldn't give them rifles right off the bat because rifles at the time were really complicated.

If you didn't know how to use one, it took a lot of training to be functional with them and he wanted to be able to arm people immediately. So they had like long, like long like sticks with like a like a like a dagger at the end. Yeah. It's less like a point, like a spearhead and more like a literal knife. It's kind of it's kind of cool. Yeah. They called them Kansas toothpicks.

It was pretty cool. No machetes. You know, I mean, the buoy knives are basically machetes. They had a lot of buoy knives, but yeah. And so Brown thought number one, like the pikes were important so he could have something to arm freed slaves with immediately, you know, when he wouldn't have time to train them right away. But he also felt that immediately arming freed slaves was a critical step in their emancipation,

stating, give a slave a pike and you make him a man, deprive him of the means of resistance and you keep him down. So we thought this was very important on like a level of like building morale in this army he was seeking to make. Now obviously fleeing from the law and raising funds to form a guerrilla army did not leave much time for Brown to see his wife and family. He begged his wealthy supporters to donate money to help them make ends meet. He wrote one donor, I have no other income for their support and my wife being a good

economist and a real old fashioned business woman, she's gone through the two past winters in our open cold house, unfinished outside and not plastered. So it's miserable for Mary. God, Mary's life sucks. Yeah, Mary's life is fucking trash. Mary's life is so hard. She did not complain often, but she was clearly miserable as a result of her husband's chosen vocation.

In letters to her, Brown admitted that his work had left her in a kind of widowed state. Yeah, seriously. She's like a bandit. She's basically dead. Yeah. Yeah, she is a bandit. Yeah. Sorry, Mary.

That sucks, girl. And for the remaining years of his life, yeah, it was rare for him to spend more than a couple of days at a time with his family. In March of 1857, Mary sent John a letter informing him that their sons had committed themselves to learn and practice war no more. So she's like. She's like, sorry. Kind of angrily.

Yeah. They're done with this shit. They're like, she's stepping in and then I'm sure John was like, yeah, you're right. That's fine. No, he didn't do that. Did he? Well, kind of. I mean, he replied that it was not at my solicitation that they engaged in it at the first.

So he says like, it wasn't my decision that they did it. And they don't all come to fight with him after this. And he also seems to have like felt bad after that letter. Several days later, he sent his two-year-old daughter, Ellen, a Bible and inscribed in it in remembrance of her father, whose care and attention she was deprived in her infancy. Oh, that's really, really, really, really, really sad. Yeah. It's sad.

It's sad. My mom's name is Ellen, so I feel that harder. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's one of those things, like, what do you, what do you, like, if this was like, if he, if he was abandoning his family like this to make it in Hollywood, I'd be like, dick move, bro. But like, it is slavery. Like it's the worst thing this country did.

Well, tied for worst with the genocide. Like, kind of worth abandoning your family over, I hate to say it, like, it is slavery. Yeah. Like, yeah, like, shit, you know, like, but you know, it, it sucks for Ellen, it sucks for Mary. Six of John Brown's sons had fought in Kansas, as I said, one was killed, two wounded, and the others were pretty traumatized by the experience. But not all of them had in fact committed to study war no more.

Owen Brown traveled with his father in 1858, as he sought final support for his impending invasion of the South. Now, by this point, Brown's plan for an insurgent war on the South had evolved. Rather than taking time to establish a guerrilla army and a string of forts, he decided to assault the town of Harper's Ferry, which contained the largest armory in the country. Probably had more guns than any other place in America. Now, Brown believed that Harper's Ferry was at a invincible position, and that he'd be able to use its hundred thousand firearms to train and equip the army of slaves he was

sure would flock there once word of his efforts got out. In April, 1858, John Brown met Harriet Tubman, who at that point had made eight secret trips to Maryland and led dozens of slaves to freedom. Brown was deeply impressed by Tubman, and this is like a problematic wokeness, I don't know what you call this. Yeah. He referred to her as a man in all of his writings and talking of her. And he did it because he respected her so much.

He said that she was naturally the most man that he had ever met. So he's saying this out of respect, but it's kind of problematic. It's like an 1800s woke compliment, but a 2019 dude. Yeah. He also referred to her as General Tubman, which is a less problematic appellation of respect. And for her part, Harriet Tubman was equally taken with John Brown. Kate Larson, one of Tubman's biographers, says Tubman thought Brown was the greatest

white man who ever lived. So he is very popular for his dedication with the sort of leading figures of black liberation in this period of time. Yeah. I would say. He got co-signed by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Yeah. Yeah.

Pretty solid. Those are some pretty solid co-signs. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Like if he'd written a book, good names to have on the jacket. Yeah. Now, John Brown solicited both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman for help with his planned

attack on the South. John was unable to help due to illness and may have also been unwilling to help because he was worried that if it failed, it would expose the Underground Railroad. And Frederick refused because he rightly viewed the attempt as suicidal lunacy. He warned Brown that he was going into a perfect steel trap and that he would not get out alive. So Douglass clearly respects what Brown is doing, but is like, I'm just not willing to kill myself for this. I think, you know, I, and he was doing a lot of stuff outside of that.

Yeah. I think he made the right call. For sure. In May of 1858, John Brown and 35 of his followers convened in Chatham, Canada to host a constitution. How do you get to Canada? It's not hard to get to Canada. All right.

You're up in New England. It's right there. All right. Just seems like he's all over the place. He's like. Yeah. He travels around. I mean, it just seems like, yeah, he's moving around a lot.

I mean, it just, it's hard enough to travel in 2019. Well, yeah, but like you're in, if you're in Illinois, like getting up to Canada, it's like going to fucking Sacramento from Los Angeles. Like it's not really a big deal. It's like right there. I don't like Sacramento. Well, I don't like Sacramento either. I'd rather be in Canada, but yeah, for sure.

I'm just making a point. So in May of 1858, John Brown and 35 of his followers convened in Chatham, Canada to host a constitutional convention in order to create a new American government. See, by this point, the failures of the existing government to do anything about slavery and a recent Supreme Court ruling that black people had no claim to the rights guaranteed by the constitution had convinced John that a whole new government needed to be established. Just he basically decides our constitution is too like stained by the evil of slavery to continue.

And what we part of what we need to do is like build a new country, basically. And the foundation of new country needs to be black liberation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, yeah. There's some weird stuff to his plans, too. He's not a perfect man. No, I'm sure he's.

I'm going to read a quote. He's flawed even though he's cosigned, but he's flawed. Yeah. He's flawed. He's flawed. And I think this quote from Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz makes it clear kind of both what was neat about what he was doing there and what was a little problematic. John Brown cited this infamous ruling in his constitution's preamble, which explained

why a new government was needed to protect our person's property, lives and liberties. But the 48 articles that followed were less concerned with rights than with the command structure of Brown's highly militarized state. The role of its weak president in Congress was mainly to advise a powerful commander in chief who could tap the treasury as needed for money and valuables captured by honorable warfare. Article, I think, 25 was directed towards another preoccupation of Brown's. It forbade filthy conversation, indecent behavior, intoxication and unlawful intercourse.

The constitution was read aloud at Chatham, debated and signed the same day. Every man was anxious to have his name at the head, wrote one of Brown's Iowa party, but the delegate showed distinctly less enthusiasm two days later when they reconvened to elect officials. The black men nominated for the presidency declined to stand and the post was left vacant along with many others. Only two congressmen were appointed and the cabinet was filled by Iowa recruits. Brown, unsurprisingly, was elected by acclamation as commander in chief.

So you're right. It's like, okay. It's some problematic stuff in there. It's like filthy conversation, what did you say, unlawful intercourse? Yeah. Intoxication, I wouldn't have done well. He's the fuck police a little bit. You would not survive.

There are people who will compare John Brown. Intoxication? Yeah. There's people who will compare John Brown to Osama bin Laden, and it's not 100% obviously what he was fighting for was better, but you're not 100% off. He was a long bearded, uncompromising, religious fundamentalist who was willing to kill for his beliefs. John Brown grew up poor, and again, what he was fighting about was fundamentally more

moral than would, and also Brown didn't attack civilians. He understood they were going to die, but he didn't make them as target, but there are some parallels. He is a religious fundamentalist and not in a fun way. No, he's the fuck police. He's the fuck police. You can't say fucks, you can't fuck, and there's no drinking, so there's no drunk fucks. It's a marker of how fucked the times are, that John Brown is still 100% the best guy

in the country. He's still the wokest white man in the country, but he's also the fuck police in more ways than one. Not a great time. I just want to side note to listeners, if you look up young John Brown, looks a lot like Igor from Young Frankenstein. He absolutely looks like Igor from Young Frankenstein, to an extent that's bizarre. Bizarre, yeah.

Continue. In December of 1858, as Brown's plans for an invasion of the South matured, he was suddenly presented with another opportunity to strike a blow against slavery. A Missouri slave named Jim Daniels found him in Kansas and told him that he and several other slaves were about to be sold and needed Brown's help. John gathered a force of 18 insurgents and set out for Missouri, where they carried out a highly illegal raid on a farmhouse and freed five slaves at gunpoint. They proceeded next to another farm and freed five more slaves.

A small group of Brown's raiders also broke into another home, freeing a single slave and shooting her owner dead. The raiders stole oxen, horses food, clothing, and also captured two white hostages before they crossed back into Kansas. This sparked rage across the South, and the governor of Missouri, as well as President Buchanan, offered rewards for Brown's capture. Many moderate abolitionists were also unhappy with Brown. They felt that invading a southern state, stealing property, and killing a slave owner

was a step too far. In a letter to the New York Tribune, Brown mocked these people, pointing out that the previous May, a force of pro-slavery militiamen had killed five anti-slavery settlers in Kansas. There'd been no outcry, he noted, but when he freed 11 human beings, the government and many people were, he wrote, filled with holy horror. Which is a solid point. So Brown was confronted on the road by 80 pro-slavery militiamen. He had only 22 men in his band, but they charged the pro-slavery forces and caused them to

flee in panic. Brown captured several horses and took more prisoners. By February of 1859, Brown had escaped Kansas, fleeing the law all the while, he succeeded in leading his group across Iowa and onto a boxcar headed for Chicago. The freed slaves made it from there to Detroit, where they were taken by ferry to Canada. One of the freed women gave birth along the way. She named her child, John Brown. That's dope.

That's a fucking dope story, right? It's a very, very cool shout out Detroit. Love that. Yeah. Now, the notoriety of Brown's raid energized his backers, the secret six, several of whom had started to wane in their enthusiasm for his cause. More money started to pour in and Brown spent the rest of 1858 gradually moving a small force of men and a large stockpile of arms and ammo onto a small farm that he had rented

in the outskirts of Harper's Ferry. The whole story of how they did this is rather fascinating. In Midnight Rising, breaks it down in granular detail. I really recommend that book. Yeah, that book sounds really fucking cool. It is cool. But the focus of our story today is the man, John Brown, and not the details of the attack on Harper's Ferry.

The plan failed. Brown and his men succeeded in taking possession of the armory, but they held it for less than two days. Ironically, the first fatality of the raid was a freed black man who was shot in the dark on accident. It just was a big tragedy. John's sons, Oliver and Watson, were killed during the fighting. And in fact, of the 19 men who went with Brown to Harper's Ferry, 10 were killed or

fatally wounded. Four towns people were also killed and more than a dozen militiamen and U.S. Marines were wounded. It's the Marines who finally bring him down. Not the proudest moment in the Marine Corps history. Yeah. Now, John Brown was badly injured but taken alive, and he survived long enough to stand trial.

He was obviously guilty by the laws of the time, and the trial was mostly significant because it provided John with a chance to speak to the nation and justify his actions. The speech he gave before being sentenced was considered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to have been one of the greatest speeches in American history. Are you going to read it? I would like to read it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

What accent are you going to do? I'm going to read this election from it now. Had I inferred in the matter which I admit and which I admit has been fairly proved for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case, had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this court would

have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. The court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever that I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act upon that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons.

I believe that to have interfered as I have done, and as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. 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 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. I mean, fuck yeah, lifetime, there's your movie right there, baby, come on. What the fuck?

It's a good speech. That is a good fucking speech. Yeah, and I like what he points out that like, hey, if I'd done what I'd done for these poor black slaves, like the children of any rich person in this country, I'd be held up as a hero. Yeah. Like, you just don't give a fuck about these people or consider them human, like fuck you. It's a good speech.

Yeah. Talk about hashtag no filter, man. Yeah. I love it. John Brown was executed by hanging on December 2nd, 1859. There it is. His last words, yep, his last words written on a scrap of paper and handed to a jailer were, I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never

be purged away, but with blood. He would prove to be very right. The US Civil War would start a little more than a year later. John Brown's raid was seen by many at the time and by many historians today as one of the primary sparks of that war. From the Smithsonian Magazine, quote, had John Brown's raid not occurred, it is very possible that the 1860 election would have been a regular two-party contest between anti-slavery Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats, says City University of New York historian

David Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist. The Democrats would have probably won since Lincoln received just 40% of the popular vote around one million votes less than his three opponents. While the Democrats split over slavery, Republican candidates such as William Seward were tarnished by their association with abolitionists. Lincoln at the time was regarded as one of his party's more conservative options. John Brown was, in effect, a hammer that shattered Lincoln's opponents into fragments, says Reynolds.

Because Brown helped to disrupt the party system, Lincoln was carried to victory, which in turn led 11 states to secede from the Union. This in turn led to the Civil War. Yeah. So that's John Brown. So do we think that his religion kind of influenced his no-fuck's-given attitude because he essentially, no matter what he did on earth as a living being, his fate was decided at birth? So do you think that maybe his no-fuck's-given attitude towards I'm going to do risk it all,

but also do you think that had some sort of influence on his ethos and ideology as a human? I don't think he actually believed that aspect of Calvinism very strongly. I get the feeling from him, he doesn't act like a guy who thinks everyone around him is going to hell. But I don't know. I may be wrong on that. What I'll say, I think more than anything, the reason he acts the way he does is that he is absolutely convinced about everything that he believes, that he is 100% right.

And that made him probably pretty insufferable to be around. He's a stubborn bastard, horrible husband, he's not great father, probably a very strange friend, but great abolitionist. But a great abolitionist and the man, the only white man who was willing to do the thing that was so clearly necessary at that point in time. Somebody needed to go into the South and just start fucking shooting people over this stuff. That's what needed to happen. It's fucked up.

We don't want things to have to go that way, but that's what had to happen. He was the wokest white man of the 1800s, which is a compliment and an insult. Yeah, it's an insult to everyone else. But yeah, he's a remarkable person. And you can see why people as varied as like abortion clinic bombers and Willem Spronson, who was outraged about the deportations by ICE and the child concentration camps. Why people like both of those people can see something in him inspirational. Yeah.

And I go back and forth myself as to like, what would John Brown be today? Because obviously, if he'd been like a hardcore fundamentalist, religious person, you might assume he would be one way. But I also kind of get the feeling of John that if he'd grown up in a different era, he might have been a fundamentalist of something else. This is the kind of guy, it kind of depended on how he was raised. But whatever he was, I don't know. I think more than anything, because there were a lot of Calvinists who were slave-owning

assholes. There were a lot of religious people, like Bible-believing Christians in this period, who used it as a justification for their slavery. So I think that while he was a fundamentalist religious man, the core of what John Brown was was a respecter of human dignity and freedom and his outrage at what was being done to blacks in America. I think the core of his personality, were he alive in a modern age, would be outrage at injustice rather than any particular religious ideology.

I do feel that about him. Yeah. I mean, that seems... You would have picked. Sorry. I mean, I feel like after hearing this entire thing, I feel like that is kind of a very accurate interpretation of him. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, definitely heroic, definitely flawed, definitely did what was necessary and definitely was the only one to really do it in the way he did. Yep. Authentic. And as you can be flawed, but if you're the only one doing the thing that needs to be done, that's all that really matters in the end.

Yeah. Yep. So that's John Brown. John F. Brown. John F. Brown. He would be really pissed at me using fuck so much in this episode celebrating him. But... Oh, yeah.

He's the fuck police. I forgot. He's the fuck police. But he's also dead now. He's not gonna get angry at me. Yeah. And you know, we don't know where he ended up because... We don't know where he ended up.

Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Fuckin' John Brown. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuckin' John Brown. I like it. Sophie, you got any pluggables to plug?

I really like this one show called Behind the Bastards. And I really like this other show called Worst You're Ever. And if you haven't listened to it, it could happen here yet. What are you doing? Yeah, I don't know that listeners of this show would like Behind the Bastards or Worst You're Ever. But I guess they might. Yeah.

I mean, I guess I have Instagram. Sophie, underscore Ray. Do you want to tell people how to find that Instagram? Do you want to tell people how to find that Instagram? Underscore Sunshine. Lots of underscores. Yeah. Sophie Ray of Sunshine with underscores in between the words.

I post pictures of Anderson. That's where you can find pictures of Anderson and you getting that listeners is my Christmas present to all of you. Yeah. I don't have Twitter because Robert has Twitter and Robert doesn't have Instagram because I have Instagram. That's just how that works. Cool.

Well, I love Twitter. I don't. But you can find me there. Those words. I write okay. Yeah. You can find me not on Instagram, but you can find this podcast on Instagram or Twitter at At Bastards Pod.

You can find the answer to the question of what you need to do in our trying times. If you look into the stories of men like Raul Wallenberg and John Brown, and that's all I'm going to say on the matter. So go hug a cat, celebrate whatever holidays you do or don't celebrate or just celebrate the fact that most things are going to close down for a couple of days and we all have a chance to chill and then come back in the next year, ready to kick ass, take names and seize Harper's Ferry. And don't have dreams about petting a raccoon.

Yes. But many dreams about don't actually do not do not. John Brown will come back from the dead and kick your ass if you have dreams about petting a raccoon. But I guess the friend of squirrel is what I'm trying to say. The friend of squirrel, the friend of squirrel, don't dream about raccoons. Except the squirrel that tortures my dog, that squirrel is an asshole. Yeah.

I think John Brown would have hated that squirrel too. Yeah. Fuck that guy. Anyways, happy whatever end of year. Yeah. Yeah. Go have fun. Drink lots of eggnog.

I will. Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck

in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.