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.
John Brown has often come down to us as a lone nut, bent on an suicidal mission, but this is far from the truth.
The first week of September 1859 at the Kennedy farm, where John Brown (wearing a short beard as a disguise and using the name Isaac Smith) and his growing band were gathering, was a time of indecision and internal conflict. From Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Brown’s previous hideout, arms and supplies were being brought by wagon. Those at the Kennedy farm had known that they were to attack Virginia, but when Brown told them the target would be a federal armory, several balked. 
This is the story of the October 16, 1859 anti-slavery raid, during which 
A few weeks ago, on a snowy and cold Sunday, I decided to take a trip to a place in North Elba that I have been meaning to visit since I first moved to Lake Placid – John Brown Farm, the last home of the nineteenth century abolitionist. 
Adirondack Life contributor and independent scholar