One of the familiar attacks on John Brown (and by extension his anti-slavery legacy) involves his failed business ventures and accusations that he was a swindler and a drifter, roaming from place to place – only briefly and uneventfully staying in North Elba, Essex County, NY.
“Over the years before his Kansas escapade Brown had been a drifter, horse thief and swindler,” Columbia University historian John Garraty once wrote. Garraty served as the president of the Society of American Historians and was co-author of the high school history textbook The American Nation (he died in 2007).
A closer look at Brown and the his family, however, reveals an experience typical of many Americans, then and today, and the importance of North Elba in Brown’s plans for a raid into Virginia. [Read more…] about The Last Days of John Brown: North Elba
John Brown’s raid on the slaveholders of Virginia is often considered a hopeless fool’s errand, but it was far from it. Brown’s plan was simple enough: capture weapons and ammunition form the Harpers Ferry federal Armory, retire to the countryside and conduct nighttime border raids to free Southern slaves.
This is the story of the October 16, 1859 anti-slavery raid, during which 
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