-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Robert Hettinga wrote:

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And so on. Throughout history there have been those who spoke their mind. And others who told them to cool it, to not anger the local prince, to not rock the boat.

No, Tim. Your analysis is too simple, here. My point is, all John Brown & Co. did was get shot up one afternoon in Harper's Ferry. They didn't help the cause of abolition one whit.

"Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen, pages 167 through 169: "After 1890 textbook authors inferred Brown's madness from his plan, which admittedly was farfetched. Never mind that John Brown himself presciently told Frederick Douglass that the venture would make a stunning impact even if it failed. Nor that his twenty-odd followers can hardly be considered crazed too. Rather, we must recognize that the insanity with which historians have charged John Brown was never psychological. It was ideological. Brown's actions made no sense to textbook writers between 1890 and about 1970. To make no sense is to be crazy. "Clearly, Brown's contemporaries did not consider him insane. Brown's ideological influence in the month before his hanging, and continuing after his death, was immense. He moved the boundary of acceptable thoughts and deeds regarding slavery. Before Harpers Ferry, to be an abolitionist was not quite acceptable, even in the North. Just talking about freeing slaves - advocating immediate emancipation - was behavior at the outer limit of the ideological continuum. By engaging in armed action, including murder, John Brown made mere verbal abolitionism seem much less radical. "After an initial shock wave of revulsion against Brown, in the North as well as in the South, Americans were fascinated to hear what he had to say. In his 1859 trial John Brown captured the attention of the nation like no other abolitionist or slaveowner before or since. He knew it: `My whole life before had not afforded me one half the opportunity to plead for the right.' In his speech to the court on November 2, just before the judge sentenced him to die, Brown argued, `Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, it would have been all right.' He referred to the Bible, which he saw in the courtroom, `which teaches me that all things whatsoever 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 up to that instruction.' Brown went on to claim the high moral ground: `I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong but right.' Although he objected that his impending death penalty was unjust, he accepted it and pointed to graver injustices. `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 with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.' "Brown's willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was right had a moral force of its own. `It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived,' Henry David Thoreau observed in a eulogy in Boston. `These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.' Thoreau went on to compare Brown with Jesus of Nazareth, who had faced a similar death at the hands of the state. "During the rest of November, Brown provided the nation graceful instruction in how to face death. In Larchmont, New York, George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary, `One's faith in anything is terribly shaken by anybody who is ready to go to the gallows condemning and denouncing it.' Brown's letters to his family and friends softened his image, showed his human side, and prompted an outpouring of sympathy for his children and soon-to-be widow, if not for Brown himself. His letters to supporters and remarks to journalists, widely circulated, formed a continuing indictment of slavery. We see his charisma in this letter from `a conservative Christian' - so the author signed it - written to Brown in jail: `While I cannot approve of all your acts, I stand in awe of your position since your capture, and dare not oppose you lest I be found fighting against God; for you speak as one having authority, and seem to be strengthened from on high.' When Virginia executed John Brown on December 2, making him the first American since the founding of the nation to be hanged as a traitor, church bells mourned in cities throughout the North. Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman were among the poets who responded to the event. `The gaze of Europe is fixed at this moment on America,' wrote Victor Hugo from France. Hanging Brown, Hugo predicted, `will open a latent fissure that will finally split the Union asunder. The punishment of John Brown may consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it will certainly shatter the American Democracy. You preserve your shame but kill your glory.' "Brown remained controversial after his death. Republican congressmen kept their distance from his felonious acts. Nevertheless, Southern slaveowners were appalled at the show of Northern sympathy for Brown and resolved to maintain slavery by any means necessary, including quitting the Union if they lost the next election. Brown's charisma in the North, meanwhile, was not spent but only increased due to what many came to view as his martyrdom. As the war came, as thousands of Americans found themselves making the same commitment to face death that John Brown had made, the force of his example took on new relevance. That's why soldiers marched into battle singing `John Brown's Body'. Two years later, church congregations sang Julia Ward Howe's new words to the song: `As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free' - and the identification of John Brown and Jesus Christ took another turn. The next year saw the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment parading through Boston to the tune, en route to its heroic destiny with death in South Carolina, while William Lloyd Garrison surveyed the cheering bystanders from a balcony, his hand resting on a bust of John Brown. In February 1865 another Massachusetts colored regiment marched to the tune through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNGpBnj7jyGKQlFZpAQEF5wf+Ld2UdeRWbtoYKqptJPbRArQX3xyP7r5t TQuLWdYqHfEmvO4RVbCnsk0qKqFYfRHN1hPRUeaj7Zf8Y3QRghUBn7QkrIPiP6bz TU8N/Jf0RLwMOJq+bl1/BgdT8Ax9FKTMYU/i5Ye6aC9cnMAGmXmx6XTGvrhFhhFM eoyj6dHm91vr5qSJBUMZto1hlXDeSee3RsrnfN8f24hagEEIppHsYFz8kKZQ/5I5 aHWewMZTYI4H6mSbmj51mXzTrhmGfxEK+qx8GIevh4zuF6uZ7/CvO2czERuIIMIO oJOICZQlDYsx8dgGHxGpmpGM/jkLeQjCngv7moQ0Kjd0KoVe84DDhw== =ESwB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----