biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1800–59)
|
| biography:
| Abolitionist, born in Torrington, Connecticut, USA. The son of an itinerant tradesman, he grew up in Hudson, OH and received little formal schooling. His mother died insane when he was eight years old, and several of her nearest relations were also seriously disturbed. He became a tanner, one of his father's trades, then successively a land surveyor, shepherd, and farmer. He married (1820), and after his wife's death he remarried (1831), fathering 20 children altogether. He migrated from place to place in the 1830s and 1840s, failing in several businesses and engaging in unprofitable land speculations. He had been an abolitionist from his youth, but he was in his fifties before he began to plot emancipation by main force. By 1855 he and six of his sons and a son-in-law had moved to Osawatomie, KS to participate in the struggle to keep it a non-slave state. After pro-slavery forces attacked and burned the town of Lawrence, KS, he led a small force, including four of his sons, to nearby Pottawatomie Creek where, on the night of 24 May 1856, they killed five pro-slavery men; he took full responsibility for the killings. Returning to the East, now dangerously obsessed with abolition through violence, he gained the patronage of Northern activists such as Gerrit Smith, who supplied him with money, arms, and moral support. Dreaming of setting up a free state for liberated slaves in the Virginia mountains, he planned a raid on the Harpers Ferry, VA armory. He and his men seized the armoury (16 Oct 1859) but were captured when a detachment of US Marines under Colonel Robert E Lee stormed the building. Tried for treason and hanged (2 Dec), he became legendary, a martyr to Northern supporters such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a dangerous fanatic to most Southerners. |
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