John Brown: Kontroversiel figur og eftermæle

I chose the topic of John Brown since I have a great love for history, including the American Civil War, and the period of unrest leading up to it. I also knew as soon as I got my main topic, which is called Stereotype, Discrimination and Prejudice, that I wanted to speak about racism. However, I was afraid that presenting about solely the subject of racism would frankly be uninteresting, so I decided to choose John Brown as my topic.

John Brown was born in 1800 in Connecticut and died in 1859 in what is now West Virginia. John Brown was a fierce abolitionist, which is a term that was used in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, that describes those that supported the abolition of slavery. Throughout his life he was barely able to support his large family, as he had twenty children, though it should be noted that several died young.

However, in 1855 he went to go to the Kansas Territory, with five of his sons, not in search of employment, but to fight for the abolitionist cause in which he so strongly believed. This led to a conflict know as Bleeding Kansas, which consisted of a series of violent confrontations between antislavery settlers and proslavery settlers, in which John Brown played a very big role. The goal for him was to make sure Kansas turned into a free state, which at the time was a state in which slavery was illegal. What John Brown is most famous for during Bleeding Kansas is an event called the raid on Harpers Ferry, where John Brown and his militia raided a proslavery town in hopes of inciting a slave revolt. The raid ultimately failed, and John Brown was captured and executed, going down as a martyr of the abolitionist movement.