50 Fun Facts About John Brown (Abolitionist)

Which future Confederate general led the U.S. Marines who stormed John Brown's stronghold at Harpers Ferry?

Robert E. Lee was home on leave just across the Potomac when the order came. With no uniform to hand, he directed the assault on Brown in civilian clothes.

Which stage actor wore a borrowed militia uniform to watch the abolitionist Brown go to the gallows in 1859?

John Wilkes Booth left rehearsals in Richmond and slipped in with a militia company sent to guard the gallows. Six years later he shot Abraham Lincoln.

Julia Ward Howe wrote which Civil War anthem to the tune of John Brown's Body?

Battle Hymn of the Republic came about when a friend urged Howe to write new words for the tune the troops were singing. The Atlantic Monthly printed her poem on its front page in February 1862.

Which Underground Railroad conductor did John Brown address as General and hope to recruit for his Harpers Ferry raid?

Harriet Tubman helped Brown find recruits and raise money. She fell ill in the weeks before the raid and took no part in the attack itself.

The father of which future president worked at the Ohio tannery run by John Brown's father?

Ulysses S. Grant's father, Jesse, lived with the Brown family for some years while he worked there. His son went on to command the Union armies in the Civil War.

John Brown grew the long beard seen in his most famous portraits in 1858 mainly for which reason?

Brown grew it as a disguise, to change his usual appearance while he secretly planned his raid. Federal warrants were already out for his arrest over his fighting in Kansas.

John Brown's raiders took hostage a great-grandnephew of which Founding Father and seized the great man's sword?

George Washington's sword was seized together with the hostage, a local slaveholder. The family said it was a gift from the king of Prussia, a claim that has been disputed.

Which actor played a young Custer pursuing John Brown in the 1940 Hollywood film Santa Fe Trail?

Ronald Reagan played Custer four decades before he became president. Raymond Massey played Brown, and the script took many liberties with the real history.

John Brown's farm and grave lie just outside which village in New York's Adirondack Mountains?

Lake Placid, later the host of two Winter Olympics, sits about three miles from the farm. Brown's widow brought his body home there, a journey of five days.

On the short wagon ride to the gallows in 1859, John Brown sat on top of which object?

His own coffin was his seat in a furniture wagon, with lines of troops on both sides to stop any rescue. Brown had already said he did not want to be rescued.

John Brown was convicted in 1859 of murder, inciting a slave uprising and which third crime against Virginia?

Treason against the state of Virginia, not against the United States, made the case a state trial. The jury needed only 45 minutes to find Brown guilty on every count.

Harpers Ferry, the Virginia town John Brown raided in 1859, was home to which kind of federal facility?

An armory at Harpers Ferry made guns for the U.S. Army, and about 100,000 muskets and rifles were thought to be stored there. It was destroyed in 1861 to keep it from being captured in the Civil War.

Which famous orator met John Brown in a Pennsylvania stone quarry in 1859 and refused to join his raid?

Frederick Douglass judged the plan a suicide mission and went home. The friend travelling with him, Shields Green, chose to stay and fight beside Brown.

In 1858 John Brown had supporters adopt his own Provisional Constitution at a convention held in which country?

Canada was a refuge for people who had escaped slavery: in Chatham, Ontario, where Brown met his delegates, they made up a third of the residents.

Which French novelist, living in exile on Guernsey, published an open letter pleading for John Brown's pardon?

Victor Hugo warned that putting Brown to death could crack the Union apart and lead to civil war. His letter was reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic.

Which president sent U.S. Marines to end John Brown's raid in October 1859 and let Virginia put him on trial?

James Buchanan called out the Marines within hours, since they were the only federal troops nearby. He had earlier offered a $250 reward for Brown's capture.

John Brown ordered nearly a thousand of which old-fashioned weapon to arm enslaved people who had never fired a gun?

Pikes, long poles tipped with blades and forged by a blacksmith, were never used in the raid. A proslavery activist later sent one to the governor of every slave state as a warning.

Which future Confederate general attended John Brown's execution in charge of cannon crewed by military cadets?

Stonewall Jackson was then a little-known professor at the Virginia Military Institute. He commanded two howitzers manned by twenty-one of its cadets.

Which Black nationalist leader said that John Brown was the one white man his organization might have accepted?

Malcolm X barred white members from his Organization of Afro-American Unity, yet he said Brown might have been let in if he were still alive.

Which actor played John Brown in The Good Lord Bird, the 2020 Showtime miniseries he also helped create?

Ethan Hawke co-created the series, which is told by a fictional enslaved boy nicknamed Onion who is swept up into Brown's band of fighters.

News that which Massachusetts senator had been beaten with a cane in the Senate helped enrage John Brown in May 1856?

Charles Sumner was beaten nearly to death by a South Carolina congressman. Massachusetts refused to replace him, so his empty desk sat in the Senate for more than three years as a reminder.

Along which Kansas creek did John Brown's band drag five proslavery settlers from their cabins and kill them in 1856?

Pottawatomie Creek gave its name to the massacre, which set off three months of revenge raids and battles that left 29 people dead.

John Brown's sons used which heavy blades to kill five proslavery settlers in Kansas on a single night in May 1856?

Broadswords did the killing while Brown gave the orders. He took no part in the stabbing himself, firing only a single shot into a man who had already fallen.

John Brown and his sons were marching to defend which antislavery Kansas town when it was sacked in May 1856?

Lawrence lost its two antislavery newspapers and the Free State Hotel in the attack. The only death was an accident that killed one of the attackers.

John Brown's outnumbered stand against proslavery raiders at which Kansas town in 1856 gave him a lasting nickname?

Osawatomie Brown, as he was known from then on, lost the fight and saw the town looted and burned. Standing up to a much larger force still made him a hero in the North.

What name was given to the proslavery raiders John Brown fought, who crossed into Kansas to swing its elections?

Border Ruffians, people said, voted and shot in Kansas but slept at home across the state line. They seized polling places and cast illegal ballots.

Which breech-loading guns, nicknamed Beecher's Bibles in Kansas, did Northern backers send John Brown for his raid?

Sharps carbines earned the nickname after the preacher Henry Ward Beecher raised money to arm antislavery settlers with them. Brown was sent 198.

In December 1858 John Brown raided farms in which slave state, freeing eleven people and guiding them north to freedom?

Missouri's governor put a $3,000 reward on Brown's head. He escorted the group for nearly three months anyway, until they were safely out of the country.

In which 1856 Kansas clash did John Brown's fighters force a proslavery militia captain and his men to surrender?

Black Jack lasted three hours and ended with the man who had set out to capture Brown as his prisoner. Brown called it the first regular battle between the two sides in Kansas.

John Brown was born in 1800 in the town of Torrington, which lies in which New England state?

Connecticut was home for only five years. The family then moved to Ohio's Western Reserve, which became the most antislavery region in the country.

The Northern backers who paid for John Brown's 1859 raid are remembered by which name?

The Secret Six got that name from writers long after Brown's death. Despite the group's rich reputation, only two of the men were actually wealthy.

Which rich New York landowner sold John Brown his Adirondack farm and later helped pay for the Harpers Ferry raid?

Gerrit Smith gave away farmland to Black New Yorkers, which is what drew Brown to the mountains. Smith's cousin was the suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

John Brown moved to the Adirondacks to help a settlement of Black farmers that went by which nickname?

Timbuctoo grew out of a giveaway of farms to Black New Yorkers. Bitter cold and the hard work of clearing forest drove most settlers away, and none of their buildings survive.

After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, John Brown founded which armed group to protect escaped slaves in Massachusetts?

League of Gileadites members were mostly free Black residents, told to act quickly, quietly and efficiently. Nobody was ever dragged back into slavery from their city afterwards.

Which Concord writer delivered the speech A Plea for Captain John Brown two weeks after the Harpers Ferry raid?

Henry David Thoreau spoke up before anyone else had said a friendly public word for Brown, ignoring local abolitionists who warned him that it was too soon.

Which painter put a towering abolitionist Brown at the center of Tragic Prelude, his mural in the Kansas State Capitol?

John Steuart Curry painted Brown with a Bible in one hand. The image later reached rock fans as the cover of the band Kansas's first album.

Which scholar and civil rights pioneer published a biography titled simply John Brown in 1909?

W. E. B. Du Bois traced Brown's hatred of slavery to a childhood moment, when the young Brown watched an enslaved boy being beaten with an iron shovel.

Which poet won a Pulitzer Prize for John Brown's Body, an epic poem covering the whole Civil War?

Stephen Vincent Benét wrote the epic while living in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was later staged on Broadway as a dramatic reading.

Which detective, founder of a famous private agency, gave John Brown $500 and a train ticket in March 1859?

Allan Pinkerton was a friend of Brown who also helped buy clothes and supplies for his party. Two years later he was guarding Abraham Lincoln on the way to his inauguration.

Which author won the National Book Award for The Good Lord Bird, a comic novel about a boy who joins John Brown?

James McBride presents the book as the found memoirs of an old man who, as a boy, was mistaken for a girl by Brown and went on living as one among his followers.

Reporters used which recent invention to send daily news of John Brown's 1859 trial to papers across America?

The telegraph carried each day's courtroom reports to newspapers across the country. On the first night of his raid, Brown's men had cut those same wires at Harpers Ferry.

Before his antislavery raids, John Brown built a reputation as an expert on which farm animals?

Sheep and fine wool were Brown's trade in the 1840s, when he and his sons managed the flocks of a wealthy businessman in Akron, Ohio.

Harpers Ferry, the scene of John Brown's raid, stands where the Potomac River meets which other river?

The Shenandoah joins the Potomac at the tip of the town, at a spot where three states now meet. Harpers Ferry is also the lowest point in West Virginia.

The small brick building where John Brown made his last stand at Harpers Ferry was built to house what?

Fire engines and a guard room shared the building, which was later nicknamed John Brown's Fort. It has since been taken apart and moved four times.

Which of John Brown's raiders, the oldest man he led, joined hoping to free his enslaved wife and children?

Dangerfield Newby had tried and failed to buy his family's freedom. He died in the raid, and letters from his wife were found on his body.

John Brown's men drilled for the Harpers Ferry raid among Quakers in the village of Springdale, in which state?

Iowa Quakers sheltered the men for a winter. One of them, sure that Brown would be killed, later sent the War Department an anonymous warning, which was ignored.

The first person killed in John Brown's 1859 raid, a free Black man named Heyward Shepherd, held which job?

Baggage handler Heyward Shepherd worked at the town's railroad station. He was shot after walking out onto the bridge to look for a watchman the raiders had driven off.

The English mercenary John Brown paid to drill his recruits had earlier fought in Italy under which commander?

Giuseppe Garibaldi's old comrade, Hugh Forbes, was paid $100 a month as drillmaster. He quarrelled with Brown over money and strategy, then tried to expose the plan to politicians.

A Marine lieutenant's sword thrust failed to kill John Brown at Harpers Ferry because the light dress blade did what?

Bent double was how Lieutenant Israel Greene described it: he carried only a light uniform sword, and it struck something hard in Brown's gear. Brown lived to stand trial.

After sledgehammers failed, U.S. Marines broke into John Brown's stronghold using which object as a battering ram?

A ladder found lying nearby did the job, swung by about a dozen Marines. Once they were through the door, the fight inside was over in three minutes.