The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.
Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War.
Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists.
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection.
There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders.
We don't know who John Brown was, and in many ways, his work shaped where we are today. He was a Pennsylvanian. He was the prototypical Yankee who fought back and suffered in doing so.
John Brown was tried for treason, murder, and inciting slaves to insurrection.
Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.
In such a condition of affairs, the practical difference between the abolitionist and the sympathizer, to the man who lost his slave and could not recover it, was very nebulous.
For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.
No opposing quotes found.