Hello and welcome to Behind the Paddle Podcast with me, Porcelain Victoria. Today, well, we have a very I I again I found this interesting. We're going to be talking about one specific person and what they did in their life and how important they have been. Yeah. So the title of this podcast episode is Fire and Thunder: The Legacy of John Brown. See, I don't really agree with what exactly we teach in schools. I feel like there needs to be a lot more education on very much important subjects, and it needs to be doubled downed on and also taught how in everyday life there still is struggles that some people go through. So yeah, I I really wanted to make a podcast episode about the legacy of John Brown. And through this episode you will see who this man was. So the year is eighteen hundred. The United States is a young and restless republic. Thomas Jefferson has just been elected the nation's third president. In Virginia and Carolinas, cotton is blooming and with it the brutal expansion of cattle slavery Chattel slavery. That same year in a modest wooden house in Torrington, Connecticut, a boy is born. His name is John Brown. In sixty years he will be hanged for treason, but not before he becomes one of the most and revolutionary figures in American history, a man whose name to this day conjures freedom, fanaticism and fire. Welcome to Fire and Thunder, a deep dive exploration of John Brown's radical life and legacy. So part one I'm gonna try and do everything in this podcast episode. So John Brown's lineage was steeped in religious dissent and political defiance. His paternal grandfather, Captain John Brown, fought in the American Revolution, and the family traced its ancestry to Puritans who fled Europe for religious freedom. These weren't passive immigrants. They were deeply devout Calvinists who believed in a strict moral order and divine sovereignty over all human affairs. His father, Owen Brown, was a man of muscular principle, a tanner by trade and a devout congregationalist by faith. Owen taught his children that life was not for comfort, but for conviction. He saw slavery not as a social or economic issue, but as a personal affront to God. When John was five, the family moved west to Houston, Ohio, part of the Connecticut Western Reserve, a frontier outpost where abolitionist sentiment was unusually strong for the time. Hudson was a haven for New England transplants and anti-slavery agitators. As a boy, John attended the church that openly denounced slavery from the pulpit, a rarity in most of the country. At the age of twelve, Brown witnessed something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. While travelling with cattle in Michigan, he saw a black boy about his age being beaten with a shovel by a white man. The child screamed for help. No one intervened. Brown later described the incident as a moral shock. From that day forward, he declared he would devout his life to the destruction of slavery. This was more than new full empathy for Brown. It was theological. He believed that slavery was an abomination that cried out to heaven for vengeance. This wasn't abstract moralizing, it was a sacred mission. Brown's Christianity was rooted in Calvinist orthodoxy. He read the Bible obsessively, particularly the Old Testament stories of divine justice, righteous violence, unconventional purpose. He identified with prophets more than apostles, Elijah more than Paul, Moses more than Jesus. Where some Christians found peace in Christ's mercy, Brown saw urgency in God's wrath. The world he believed was under judgment and slavery was the greatest national sin. And like the Hebrew prophets, he believed that redemption would come not through passive endurance, but through purifying fire. This theological intensity was deepened by his personal trials. At twenty, he tried to attend seminary in Connecticut, but lacked the financial means. Instead he turned back to trade, becoming a tanner like his father, working with hides and chemicals in the gritty, noxious conditions of early industrial America. In eighteen twenty he married Diampie Lust. They had seven children together. Tragedy struck early and often. One son died in infancy, another at four years old. Diamphy herself died in eighteen thirty two after a difficult childbirth. Brown was devastated. He remarried, but clearly not that devastated, because he actually remarried that same year, to Mary Day, and had thirteen yes, thirteen, more children, so twenty in total, but Death remained a close companion. Nine of his children would die before him. These losses did not break him. They clarified his sense of purpose. Brown came to see suffering as evidence of God's shaping hand, trials that refined rather than punished. Like Job, he accepted pain as part of divine calling. Like Abraham, he was willing to offer up his children on the altar of duty. For nearly two decades, John Brown struggled financially. He attempted careers as a cattle broker, a land surveyor, a postmaster, and even a wool merchant. He was arrested for debt, declared bankruptcy multiple times, and was once jailed in Illinois after a failed business venture. These failures earned him a reputation as eccentric, erratic, and perhaps unstable. Man, I mean that is a lot of job opportun like jobs right there. And nothing seemed to stick. But Brown's failures in commerce contrasted sharply with his clarity of moral vision, while many men pursued wealth in exchange in the expanding frontier economy. Brown dedicated himself to moral action. By the eighteen thirties and forties, he was fully immersed in abolitionist networks. He helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada. He refused to buy products produced by slave labour. He even briefly established a wool consortium that attempted to bypass southern slaveholders entirely, though it failed. See he doesn't have much luck, but he's still got his morals, bless him. See now this is where somebody is using religious, I guess, in a good way, where they're seeing that slavery is just like nope, mm, wrong. And yeah, they're using the faith to do good, really. In 1847, a key moment occurred. Brown, Frederick Douglass, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Douglas, already a famous orator and former slave, was struck by Brown's intensity. Brown told Douglas that slavery could only be ended with bloodshed. He even showed him a rudimentary map, a plan to lead a guerrilla war through the Appalachian Mountains, arming slaves and setting up a revolutionary stronghold. Douglas later wrote Though a white gentleman, he is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery. Brown was beginning to see himself as a general in a coming war, not a metaphorical war of ideas, but an actual tactical conflict. He drilled his sons in markmanship. He read military strategy, he studied terrain. This man was ready. In private he began to speak of divine ordination. He believed he had been chosen by God for a holy mission, not chosen in the loose evangelical sense, but literally selected, like a biblical patriarch, to strike down a sinful empire. The empire slavery. By the late eighteen forties, John Brown had ceased to be merely a devout Christian, or concerned citizen. He was transforming into something else, a prophet of violence, a messianic revolutionary, a man with no allegiance but to divine law. As the nation hurtled towards division of slave over slavery, Brown's plans grew more ambitious and more dangerous. He would no longer work only in shadows. He would take up the sword, and the first blow would fall not in the plantations of the south, but in the volatile blood-drenched frontier of Kansas. So now we're gonna travel to the territory of Kansas, where John Brown and his sons stepped onto the national stage with brutal force. It's a land where elections are stolen, homes are burned, and men are murdered over the question of slavery. This little part is going to be called bleeding Kansas. It is 1854. The United States is coming apart at the seam. The fragile compromises that held the Union together are cracking. The Missouri Compromise is repealed. The Kansas-Nebraska Act opens new territories to the possibility of slavery, and the nation is told, Let the settlers decide. It is called popular sovereignty. But in practice it becomes a bloody competition, a race between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces to seize the land, populate the territory, and control its future. Kansas is no longer just a stretch of prairie, it is a battlefield. And into this storm steps a man with a Bible, a broad sword, and a vision from God. John Brown has come to make war on slavery and he will begin in Kansas. When the Kansas Nebraska Act passed in eighteen fifty four, it nullified decades of uneasy compromise by allowing settlers to vote on whether slavery would be legal. Congress turned the frontier into a tinder box. Settlers from Missouri, many of them slaveholders, rushed across the border to claim land and power. In response, abolitionists from the North began to organize free soil migrations to Kansas. Among these efforts was the Massachusetts Immigrant Aid Company, which sent dozens of northern families westward determined to build anti-slavery strongholds. Brown was living in North Elba, New York when news of canvas reached him. Several of his adult sons, John Junior, Jason, Owen, Frederick, and Salmon, had already moved there. In eighteen fifty five they wrote home, describing a state of siege. Pro slavery militants, militias were attacking free state settlements. Homes were being burned, abolitionist leaders were being threatened and driven out. Brown, ever the man of action, wrote back I must go to Kansas, I must fight. He gathered weapons and ammunition and supplies. He secured donations from northern abolitionists and secretly armed himself and his family. He travelled with wagons full of rifles hidden beneath hay, a broad sword at his side, and the conviction that God had prepared him for this hour. Brown arrived in Kansas Territory in October eighteen fifty five, a month before winter. He joined his sons near the Osawatame region, a rough, unsettled area on the frontier. Life there was hard, raw, and precarious. Cabins were few and supplies scarce. The Browns built crude shelters and began drilling with weapons at dawn. But even as they settled in, the violence was escalating. Earlier that year, pro slavery forces had sacked Lawrence, the main free state stronghold. A sheriff's posse of over eight hundred men, many from Missouri, attacked the town, burning buildings, destroying printing presses, and looting stores. Miraculously no one was killed. But the message was clear. Kansas would be won by the sword, not the ballot. Brown took this as a divine signal. If the pro-slavery side would use force, so would he. And he would not wait to be attacked. He later wrote that he had been fully convinced that we have now reached the point where blood must flow. The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. On the night of May 24, 1856, John Brown gathered a small group of men, including four of his sons and his son-in-law, and led them along the banks of Pottawamy Creek, near present-day Lane, Kansas. Their mission was to strike terror into the hearts of pro-slavery settlers. They targeted five men, all of them part of a group that had threatened and harassed free state settlers. These were not anonymous strangers. Brown had studied them, gathered intelligence. He believed they were planning further violence. In the dead of night, Brown's group entered the cabin of James Doyle, dragged him and his two sons into the road, and hacked them to death with broadswords. They then moved on to the cabins of Alan Wilkinson and William Sheerman, both killed in similar fashion. Brown allowed one of the Wilkinson sons to live, instructing him to tell him to quote, tell your neighbours what you saw tonight. The bodies were discovered the next morning, butchered, mutilated, and left as a message Brown had not used guns. He wanted these killings to be personal, intimate, unforgettable. As the psychology goes, with a knife, it's much more personal, much more slower than with a gun. The Padawanami massacre sent shockwaves across the country. Southern newspapers branded him a terrorist, a terrorist, a fanatic, a murderer. Northern abolitionists were divided. Some recoiled in horror, others whispered approval. But Brown never apologized. In fact, he refused to publicly confirm his role for years. Privately he believed he had done God's will, striking down wicked men like the prophets of old. He later wrote to a friend, God is my judgment. It is not a case for civil law. The national press exploded with news of the killings. The New York Herald called the event quote, a massacre by northern fanatics, end quote. Pro slavery forces used it as evidence of abolitionist lawlessness. Well, that's kind of calling the kettle black. Free state leaders tried to distance themselves. Even Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, a modern Republican, called it a deplorable act. But in the backrooms of northern abolitionist circles, something else was happening. Radical figures like Gerrit Smith and Franklin Sanborn began to see John Brown not as a liability, but as a potential weapon. Quietly they began funneling him money and supplies. They would later be known as the secret sticks, a cable of wealthy northern men who financed Brown's growing war. Brown, meanwhile, did not retreat. He went deep underground, organizing raids, collecting weapons, and travelling east to secure more support. He became both feared and mythologized. To the south he was a terrorist. To the north, a firebrand. To slaves, a whispered rumour, a white man who killed for their freedom. By eighteen fifty seven John Brown had become more than a man. He was becoming a symbol of justice, of vengeance, of holy war. His mind was consumed by a single vision, a slave revolt launched from the heart of the South, sustained by mountain rebouts, and led by him. He began drafting blueprints for a secret stronghold, Appalachian mountains, complete with armories, supply lines, and a black militant. He studied guerrilla warfare, mapped terrain, and trained volunteers. He told his allies that when the time came, he would strike a blow that would make the nation tremble. In private, he wrote, I expect to effort a mighty work, though it cost the life of every man of us. God will surely attend to his own cause in the best possible manner. And so, with Kansas still bleeding, John Brown turned his eyes to Virginia. There, at a sleepy riverside, Arsenal called Harper's Ferry, he would make his final stand. We're going to witness one of the most dramatic and controversial moments in American history. A failed raid, a fiery trial, and the making of a martyr. This little bit is called Harper's Ferry. By the summer of 1859, John Brown was no longer operating in the shadows of Kansas or the backwoods of Ohio. He had stepped onto the national stage. His name whispered in both reverence and fear. His mission still was to clear, to ignite a slavery uprising, strike at the heart of the slave economy, and set a fire that would engulf the South. The place he chose was Harper's Ferry, Virginia. It was a small town, quiet, nestled where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers met, but it was home to a federal armory, over a hundred thousand weapons stored inside. Brown believed that with those arms, and with God's will behind him, he could launch revolution. John Brown was not a madman, he was methodical, secretive and patient. For years he had been planning a military campaign. His idea was not to wage open war with southern armies, at least not at first. Instead, he envisioned a guerrilla uprising. He would seize weapons, retreat to the Appalapan mountains, and establish a base of operations. There he would offer freedom to any enslaved person who could reach him. From this redoubt, small bands of black fighters would raid plantations, freeing more slaves, expanding the rebellion. Until the system collapsed under its own weight. He called it the Subterranean Passway, a military version of the Underground Railroad fortified and armed. To fund this vision, he travelled north under false names, like Schubel Morgan, Isaac Smith, meeting with radical abolitionists. He found six men willing to fund his plans, later dubbed the Secret Six as we've spoken about. They included Garrett Smith, a wealthy landowner and radical, Franklin Sanborn, a Massachusetts intellectual, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a fiery preacher. None of them knew the full extent of Brown's plans. He kept the details to himself. In the spring of eighteen fifty nine, Brown rented a farmhouse near Harper's Ferry in nearby Maryland, under the name Isaac Smith. He began moving in weapons, pikes, rifles, ammunition, over a thousand pikes, each custom forged for arming freed slaves. He called them the weapons of justice. He was joined by a ragtaged group, twenty one men, including five black recruits, among them Osborne Perry Anderson and Shields Green, both escaped slaves. They drilled, they prayed, they waited. On the evening of october sixteenth, eighteen fifty nine, Brown called his men together, he passed out weapons and gave one final prayer. He read aloud from the Bible Exodus and Joshua Stories of Liberation and Conquest. No stirring speech, no patriotic fanfare. This was a divine appointment. That night they crossed the Potomac River by footbridge and silently entered Harper's Ferry. There were no guards at the Federal Armory. It was Sunday evening. The men easily caught the telegraph wires, overpowered the night watchmen, and seized control of the weapon stockpile. By midnight they had control of most of the town, the arsenal, the rifle works, and the bridge. Brown sent men to nearby plantations to spread the word. He expected enslaved people to rise and join him, but few came. By dawn the alarm had sounded. Townspeople began firing on the raiders from surrounding hills. A Baltimore and Ohio train stopped briefly in town, and Brown, hoping to appear reasonable, allowed it to pass. The train brought news of the uprising to Washington DC, and by mid morning the US Marines were mobilized. Brown and his men took hostages and retreated into the fire engine house, a small brick building near the armory. There they made their final stand. By october eighteenth, the town was surrounded. Local militants, federal troops, and angry civilians all converged. President Buchanan sent a detachment of US Marines, commanded by none other than Colonel Robert E. Lee, who would become the Confederate general just two years later. His aide, Lieutenant J. E. B. Stewart, another future Confederate icon. Lee gave Brown a final offer of surrender. Brown refused. He still believed that somehow the tide would turn, that the enslaved population would rise. At dawn, the Marines stormed the engine house. They smashed the doors with sledgehammers. In the chaos they killed several of Brown's men, including two of his sons, Watson and Oliver. Brown was beaten unconscious with a sword, with a sword pummel and taken prisoner. Ten of his men were dead, five had escaped. The raid failed. But the nation now was watching. John Brown was charged with treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, inciting slave insurrection and multiple counts of murder. His trial was swift. He was arranged on october twenty seventh, found guilty on november second, and sentenced to death. But the trial gave him what he had never had before, a national pulpit, a confined to a cot, wounded and pale, Brown spoke with clarity and force. He refused to plead insanity. He never begged for mercy. He claimed no personal gain. Instead, he framed his actions in moral and theological terms. In his final courtroom speech he declared 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, every man in this court would have deemed it an action worthy of reward rather than punishment. I believe that to have interfered as I have done in belief, in behalf of his dis of his despised poor was not wrong but right. The South saw a terrorist, the North saw something else. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Christ. Henry David Foreau wrote a fiery defense titled A Plea for a Captain, John Brown, calling him a man of rare moral courage. Even moderate northerners who disapproved of violence found themselves stirred by his defiance. Southern leaders were outraged. They saw Northern sympathy as proof that abolitionism was treasonous. Secessionist rhetoric surged. One Southern newspaper wrote The spark of Harper's Ferry will set the nation ablaze. And they were right. On the morning of December 2, 1859, John Brown was led to the gallows in Charlestown, Virginia. He rode in a wagon, seated atop his own coffin. Thousands of troops surrounded the area. It was the largest public execution in American history to that date. Fearing rescue attempts the authorities kept tight control. No black person was allowed within miles of the execution. As he was led up to the scaffold, he handed the guard a slip of paper. It read I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. He was hanged at eleven fifteen AM. His body was buried in North Elba, New York, but his legend could not be buried. In weeks after his death songs were sung in his honour. One set to a marching tune would echo across Union camps just two years later. John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on. John Brown failed in his raid, but he succeeded in something larger. He forced the nation to confront the moral horror of slavery and the violence needed to end it. What we're going to talk about in this final part is we're going to explore the legacy of John Brown, his influence on the Civil War, black radical thought, and the ongoing question of when violence becomes justice. Here we are, John Brown is dead, hanged by the state of Virginia, buried beneath the frozen soil of the Adoroc Mountains. But in death he became something more than a man. He became a symbol, a prophet, a martyr, a ghost that haunted the American conscience. His raid at Harper's Ferry failed, but politically, it detonated the fragile peace between North and South. In the coming months the South would demand loyalty, the North would refuse, and the nation would break. This hour we trace the fire John Brown left behind, from the song of Union soldiers marching into battle to WEB DuBos and Malcolm X invoking his name to the enduring question When does violence in pursuit of justice become not a crime, but a calling? In the weeks after Brown's execution, the American press lit it up with reactions. In the South, terror spread like wildfire. If a white man from the North could come up within a hair's breadth of sparking a slave revolt, then who else might come next? Southern militants drilled more often. State governments plast new laws restricting speech, gatherings, and literacy among enslaved people, villages committees formed, and most critically talk of succession secession became louder. In Charleston, South Carolina, a convention of fire eaters declared that if the North did not condemn Brown, the South would leave the Union. But the North did not condemn Brown. Public commemorations were held. Poets wrote verses, ministers delivered sermons praising his courage. School children memorized his final words. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that Brown would make the gallows as glorious as the cross. The cultural split become unmistakable. There was no longer a disagreement over tariffs or territory. This was a nation divided morally over the very definition of freedom, humanity, and justice. And in this moment John Brown's ghost rose. By eighteen sixty one, the first shots of the Civil War rang out at Fort Sumter. When President Lincoln called for volunteers, over seventy five thousand responded. Among them were young men from Massachusetts, Ohio, Iowa, many who had never seen battle, but who knew the words. John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on. This song spread rapidly through Union camps. It was sung in tents, on marches, in the mud and cold, of Antietam, Silo and Gettysburg. The melody was catchy, but the meaning ran deeper. John Brown had become the patron saint of the abolitionist war effort. It wasn't just a ballad. It was a battle cry. In eighteen sixty two Julia Ward Howe adapted the tune into what became known as the battle hymn of the Republic of Fiery Hymn about judgment, sacrifice and righteous war. Its opening line Mine eyes have seen the glory of Of the coming of the Lord. It was Brown's vision now turned into national prophecy. Abraham Lincoln never met John Brown. In 1859, Lincoln publicly condemned the raid, calling it quote misguided, but privately his views were more complex. He recognized that what John Brown had done, he had forced slavery into the open. He had made it a crisis that could no longer be evaded. As the war dragged on, Lincoln's position shifted. In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, not just a military tactic, but a moral act. Frederick Douglass later wrote that Brown's raid had been, quote, the beginning of the end of slavery. Brown had lit the fire. Lincoln fanned the flames. After the war, Douglas reflected on this strange relationship. He said, quote, John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. Brown had acted outside the law, but history would bend to his direction. To Black America, John Brown became a kind of sacred figure. Unlike many white abolitionists, he had not simply written pamphlets or given speeches, he had taken up arms. He had been willing to die and to kill for black liberation. Harriet Tubman reportedly said that she would have joined the Harper's Ferry Raid had she not been ill. Frederick Douglass, who refused to participate, later called Brown pure as Christ. In the twentieth century his legacy resurfaced again and again. Du Bois devoted a full length biography to Brown in nineteen oh nine, the central of his birth. Du Bois portrayed him not as a fanatic, but as the first true white American revolutionary who fought with black people not merely for them. Du Bois wrote, but John Brown came as near to being the voice of God as we are likely to hear. Later in the nineteen sixties, Malcolm X invoked Brown as a model of white allyship. The Black Panther Party admired him. Angela Davis taught his writings. His name was etched into murals, shouted in protest, and invoked by movements demanding not gradual reform, but radical justice. More than one hundred and sixty years later, John Brown still demands something of us. He asks What is justice? What are we willing to risk for it? Can violence ever be moral? He was not a perfect man. He was dogmatic. He used violence. He involved his sons in war. He believed he was chosen by God, but in a nation built on human bondage, he saw the truth clearly that evil cannot be reasoned with. It must be resisted. He left behind a blueprint and a warning. In his final letter written from jail to his family, he wrote, I am quite cheerful. I trust in God and I am confident that he will forgive me, and though I perish, I believe that my work will not. In fact, his work did not perish. It marched, it sang, it bled, it survived, and it still survives to this day. Now this has been Behind the Pad Podcasts with Meepulse and Victoria. I really hope you have enjoyed this episode of Fire and Thunder, The Legacy of John Brown. Thank you for listening. If you want to see the spicier version, which it sounds a bit weird when doing this episode, um then you can go see on Dark Fans and Many Vids, because I am actually sitting here naked while reading this podcast, which cannot clearly be shown on YouTube. But yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening. I really found this interesting. If you have any of the topics, then please send them to me. If you have any feedback, love to hear it. If you could give us a like on Spotify, Apple, whatever you're listening to, if you can rate it, if you can star it, please do. I would uh just appreciate five stars. Thank you very, very much. This has been Behind the Bad Podcast with me, Paulson, Victoria. And goodbye.