John Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Hudson, Ohio, where his father Owen ran a tannery, sheltered escaped slaves, and employed Jesse Grant, father of Ulysses S. Grant. At 12, Brown watched a man beat an enslaved boy with an iron shovel, and his strict Calvinist faith turned that memory into a sense of divine mandate. This episode traces his adult life as a father of 20 children who failed as a surveyor, wool merchant, postmaster, and bank director, was wiped out in the Panic of 1837, and declared bankruptcy in 1842.

While his businesses collapsed, Brown ran an effective Underground Railroad station from a Pennsylvania tannery with a hidden ventilated room. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act pushed him toward violence: in Kansas he led the Pottawatomie killings of May 1856, fought at Black Jack and Osawatomie, and lost his son Frederick. In October 1859 he seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry with a provisional constitution in hand, but no uprising followed. Captured by Marines under Robert E. Lee, he was convicted after 45 minutes of jury deliberation and hanged on December 2, 1859.

• In 1843 alone, three of Brown’s children died of dysentery.
• His station is estimated to have helped about 2,500 people reach safety over roughly 10 years.
• An Ohio church expelled him after he seated a Black man in his family pew.
• His raiders cut the telegraph wires and took hostages including Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington.
• Church bells rang in Northern cities on the day of his execution, and Union troops later marched to the song John Brown’s Body.