John Brown


it's a good movie but the story sucks! I hate how the movie portrays John Brown.

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It did make him seem to be a bit nuts and somewhat evil looking.

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Not inappropriate, since he was nuts and looked exactly like he was portrayed in the film.

"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae

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Maybe, Augustus,

He certainly had the beard when he took the Harper's Ferry Arsenal, but he did not have it in his last photograph taken before he went to Kansas. I haven't studied him deeply, but what little I have read does not indicate quite when he grew the beard.

However, his activities in Kansas were nowhere near as numerous or involved as indicated in the movie. He appears to have been 'in command' at the Pottawatomie Massacre and then in two much larger military operations Osawatomie and Palmyra. The latter two were both defensive. I have also not seen any indication that the federal army had any interest in John Brown until his seizure of the federal arsenal. Since that last act was an act of war, the army had few options other than marching on him.

Also, I think that "nuts" is a technical term, best left to professionals to apply. Although you may mean it in an allegorical sense.

The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.

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So it's nuts to use violence to free slaves but not to free this nation from the British? Sheesh

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His motives were noble but his methods were outrageous.

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Historians debate whether Brown was mentally unbalanced. He certainly was a terrorist, willing to commit acts of violence to overthrow governments, substituting his own sense of right and wrong for constitutions, elections, and the law-making process. His brand of violence is not the same as the militias and Continental army in the American Revolution, which (mostly) acted on orders of representative revolutionary bodies, such as the Continental Congress and the revolutionary state governments.

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The movie bases him not on reality but on JEB Stuart's viewpoint of him. No bias there, huh?

That movie vilified him for all future depictions of the man. You can read a book on the subject called "The Afterlife of John Brown" by Andrew Taylor.

-Nam

I am on the road less traveled...

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