Rewriting John Brown's story 150 years later

'Ahead of his time'
"He was so ahead of his time," says Alice Keesey Mecoy, who discovered she was Brown's great-great-great granddaughter in 1976.

Libby had come to Mecoy's grandmother, asking to photograph the family. Mecoy found the story "kind of cool," but she was 16. Only after her own children had left home did she grow so interested as to make her ancestor's life her full-time research project. This fall, the 49-year-old former accountant and office manager from Allen, Texas, is presenting a paper in Harpers Ferry on the women surrounding Brown. A book is in the works.

"He wasn't only against slavery. He was for equality of all people, men and women, any color, any religion. He firmly felt everyone was equal," she says. "And that was such a radical thought for the time."

Brown became part of the popular culture of his times, and that legacy endures: An American reggae band uses the song as its name and Brown's likeness on its album covers. In 2007, a rare daguerreotype of Brown sold for $97,750 at a Cincinnati auction.

Brown's raid viewed as a moral act
While many defend Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, few label the slaughter of five pro-slavery leaders in Kansas three years before as anything but premeditated murder. Brown's raiding party on Pottawatomie Creek hacked the men to death with swords in an execution that University of Maryland professor Martin Gordon calls "probably the most misunderstood event of his career."

"Why did he use swords? Not because he's a barbarian, but because he didn't want anyone to hear what he was doing. Rifle fire would wake up the town" says Gordon, president of the Council of America's Military Past.

"This was a very selective act of terrorism, moral justice, take your pick. Criminal action, take your pick," Gordon says. "But he wanted to teach the pro-slavery element in Kansas a lesson, so he picked five of their leaders, pulled them out of their house and killed them as silently as he could."

In his own death, Brown became what the pro-slavery New York Journal of Commerce predicted when it published an editorial urging that he be imprisoned rather than hanged for his crimes.

"Monsters are hydra-headed, and decapitation only quickens vitality, and power of reproduction," the newspaper warned.

Frederick Douglass knew Brown
Escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had tried to talk Brown out of his doomed raid, acknowledged its importance decades later, in an 1881 speech in Harpers Ferry.

"Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises," he said. "When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone — the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union — and the clash of arms was at hand."

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