Rewriting John Brown's story 150 years later

updated 7:21 p.m. ET June 12, 2009

HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. - A century and a half later, Americans still don't know quite what to think of John Brown, a fervent abolitionist who launched a bloody attack meant to take down slavery.

Certainly, he aimed to be a hero. He believed his plan was the necessary means to a righteous end: Storm a federal arsenal, seize thousands of weapons, arm a gathering guerrilla force and start the revolution that would end the morally reprehensible but perfectly legal institution.

Yet the first casualty of his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry was a free black man, a baggage handler who bled to death on the street while Brown's raiders grabbed hostages and holed up at a fire engine house. Within 48 hours, Brown's rebellion was dead, along with at least four civilians, 10 raiders and a U.S. Marine who helped retake the building.

Brown's methods have been debated ever since, the grandiosity of his plot and his willingness to kill or be killed a timeless fascination. This year, the National Park Service has declared that his raid was the opening salvo in the country's brutal Civil War, with sesquicentennial commemorations beginning in West Virginia.

John Brown the terrorist?
But in 1959, as America began to contemplate the centennial of the War Between the States, Brown was largely left out of the discussion.

Segregation of schools and public lynchings still made headlines that year, and many white Southerners feared civil rights activists would use tales of the raid to agitate. Blacks feared being marginalized, or worse. And so John Brown was pushed aside.

"John Brown was, in effect, a terrorist. Whether you agree that what he was doing was right or not," says Gerry Gaumer, spokesman for the Park Service in Washington, D.C. "There are people in the Taliban who believe what they're doing is right. Can you separate John Brown from what's going on in Iraq or Iran or Pakistan or Afghanistan?

"They fervently believe what they're doing is right," he says. "But is there a better way?"

Retracing an abolitionist's footsteps
This month, the Park Service is offering walking tours that retrace Brown's footsteps through the picturesque town at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. Descendants of raiders, soldiers and townspeople will gather in August, then return for the Oct. 16 anniversary to explain their ancestors' roles.

Had his own been among the bodies in 1859, Brown might have remained a bit player in the larger drama of the war. But that was not his fate. On trial for treason, murder and inciting a rebellion, he refused to apologize and declared the fight for freedom sanctioned by God and the Bible.

Swiftly convicted and executed, he became a potent and enduring symbol — to the North, a heroic martyr willing to die for equality; to the South, a lunatic killer attacking a way of life. And so he remained for a century or more, a complicated man often dismissed with simplistic labels.

Later, people began to talk more openly about slavery and the roles that blacks and other racial and social groups had played in the nation's defining conflict.

Historians' view of slavery changes
Slowly, says historian Jean Libby, historians stopped dismissing Brown as a madman and began to put him in the context of his times, times when — to the undying outrage of Brown and his wealthy supporters — courts ruled that black people were not citizens but property of whites.

Textbook writers, Libby says, gradually began to acknowledge that slaves had come from Africa with culture and history of their own, in need of neither handlers nor teachers.

"Now slavery is portrayed differently," she says, "and so is John Brown."

Brown, a Connecticut native, had despised slavery since he was a boy and witnessed a slave being beaten. He spent months plotting to seize 100,000 weapons in what was then Virginia, retreat into the mountains and begin a guerrilla war with slaves who would join him, emboldened by his success.

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