John Brown Was an Abolitionist Term Paper

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The raid itself was an act deemed a form of terrorism, a term not then used but one that has been applied to Brown since. In some ways, the term fits, for he attacked in order to provoke an incident and to create fear in order to generate support for a wider war. Like many terrorists, he had a strong moral conviction and a belief in the rightness of his actions, though that in itself does not mean they were right. For those who believe that Brown helped spur the Civil War, his actions might be considered justified, while for those who see his attack as an aberration that had little real effect on subsequent events, his crusade was misdirected and foolish. What is certainly clear is that assessments of Brown do not exist in a vacuum and that how one views the man may depend on how one views his cause more than his actions.

Works Cited

Cullick, Jonathan S. "The Making of a Historian: Robert Penn Warren's Biography of John Brown.
" The Mississippi Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 1 (1997), 33-37.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry." Secession Era Editorials Project (2007). December 8, 2007. http://history.furman.edu/~benson/docs/jbmenu.htm.

Oates, Stephen B. Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

Pease, Donald E. Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994.

Reynolds, David S. John Brown: Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.

New York: Knopf, 2005.

Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. Volume: 2. New York: Macmillan, 1892.

Shaw, Albert. Abraham Lincoln. Volume: 1. New York: The Review of Reviews Corporation, 1929.

Sinha, Manisha. "His Truth Is Marching on': John Brown and the Fight for Racial Justice." Civil War History. Volume 52, Issue 2 (2006), 161.Tourgee, Albion. Hot Plowshares. New York:….....

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