The Glenn Beck Program - July 25, 2026


Bleeding Kansas to Harpers Ferry： John Brown's Radical Crusade ｜ The American Story ｜ Ep 15


Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

140.51

Word count

7,911

Sentence count

567

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.320 The Hulu Original Series Furious is coming to Disney+.
00:00:04.560 Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer.
00:00:13.140 Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur.
00:00:22.120 Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu Original Series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney+.
00:00:30.000 Across the American frontier in 1832, a spiritual fire is beginning to burn.
00:00:37.920 It's toward the end of a period historians will later call the Second Great Awakening.
00:00:43.060 It's a wave of revival meetings and conversations that sweep across towns and cities all over America.
00:00:49.720 One man deeply affected by the revival is a young newspaper editor named Elijah Lovejoy.
00:00:56.200 He works for a newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, a city perched on the uneasy edge between the slave South and the free West.
00:01:05.220 Lovejoy experiences a religious conversion so powerful that he sells his stake in the newspaper business and heads east to Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.
00:01:15.480 He is determined to become a minister.
00:01:18.200 Two years later, 1834, a group of St. Louis businessmen approached him with a new venture.
00:01:24.260 They want to launch a newspaper devoted to religious and moral education,
00:01:29.100 and they want Lovejoy to run it.
00:01:31.940 So the newly trained pastor returns to the frontier city
00:01:35.880 and becomes the editor of the St. Louis Observer.
00:01:39.700 Lovejoy dives into the work with anti-slavery editorials
00:01:43.120 that slowly grow more and more pointed.
00:01:46.440 At first, he supports gradual reform of slavery.
00:01:50.040 But by 1837, he demands total emancipation.
00:01:54.860 The reaction in St. Louis is vicious.
00:01:58.640 Lovejoy receives constant death threats.
00:02:01.520 Now, a husband and a father, he moves his family across the Mississippi River to the town of Alton in Illinois.
00:02:08.580 It's a free state, hoping the river would serve as some sort of a moral border.
00:02:14.200 But the river does not hold back the pro-slavery fury.
00:02:18.120 In Alton, Lovejoy pastors a Presbyterian church and continues publishing his anti-slavery newspaper.
00:02:25.500 A mob breaks in, destroys his printing press, and thanks to donations from supporters on the East Coast, he is able to buy a new one.
00:02:33.360 But the pro-slavery mob again breaks in, steals the press, and dumps it in the Mississippi River.
00:02:43.320 Lovejoy isn't stopped, he just keeps going.
00:02:45.860 November 7th, 1837, around 3 o'clock in the morning, a steamboat delivers yet another replacement printing press.
00:02:54.520 Lovejoy is at the warehouse to receive it, but like clockwork, a pro-slavery mob quickly arrives and surrounds the warehouse.
00:03:03.480 One man climbs a ladder and tries to set the roof on fire.
00:03:07.500 Lovejoy rushes out of the warehouse with a gun and fires up at the man.
00:03:12.360 As soon as he does, multiple gunshots crack through the cold night air.
00:03:17.620 When the smoke clears, 34-year-old Elijah Lovejoy lies dead on the ground, shot five times by the mob.
00:03:27.120 News of the killing spread all across the north.
00:03:30.020 In a small town of Hudson, Ohio, an abolitionist stronghold, mourners gather at a memorial service for Lovejoy.
00:03:37.940 Among them is a tall man, a thin man with a stern expression.
00:03:43.800 His name is John Brown.
00:03:47.000 John's known among this crowd for his help on the Underground Railroad,
00:03:50.880 assisting runaway slaves on their escape north.
00:03:53.900 Brown suddenly rises from his seat, and the somber room grows even more quiet.
00:03:59.540 With his eyes blazing, he raises his right hand and says,
00:04:03.500 Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses,
00:04:09.820 I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.
00:04:15.100 At that moment, no one in the room realizes
00:04:18.120 the significance of what they've just heard.
00:04:22.420 But that vow?
00:04:24.460 It is the spark that ignites one man's war
00:04:28.140 and accelerates America's unraveling.
00:04:31.300 This is the American story, The Beginnings, adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton.
00:04:42.940 Episode 15, John Brown's Radical Crusade.
00:04:47.060 In 1849, the South clung desperately to parody the Senate
00:04:59.240 because when the 31st Congress opened in December that year,
00:05:02.760 there were exactly 30 states represented,
00:05:05.460 15 that allowed slavery and 15 that did not.
00:05:09.900 That even split meant the South could block any legislation
00:05:13.500 perceived as threatening to their way of life.
00:05:16.700 But in the House of Representatives, free states dominated 140 to 91.
00:05:23.860 The South knew that without Senate equality,
00:05:26.520 their influence would crumble, leaving slavery vulnerable to the Northern whims.
00:05:31.440 It was a very fragile truce, and with the nation constantly expanding,
00:05:35.800 the cracks in that truce were harder and harder to patch.
00:05:40.060 But there was one senator who still thought he was up to the task.
00:05:43.920 Henry Clay of Kentucky
00:05:46.640 By 1850, the Great Compromiser was 72 years old.
00:05:52.440 He was battling tuberculosis,
00:05:54.240 but still wheeling and dealing like it was 1820 all over again. 0.75
00:05:57.980 That was the year of his Missouri Compromise
00:06:00.380 that had kept the Union stitched together.
00:06:03.560 Clay, now again 72, rose in the Senate chamber,
00:06:07.240 clutching a gift he'd recently been given,
00:06:10.060 a fragment of wood from George Washington's coffin.
00:06:13.040 He waved around the relic for all to see, asking if it was an omen in the nation's doom.
00:06:19.280 Then, with his typical fire, he answered his own question.
00:06:22.940 No, sir, no.
00:06:25.040 It was a warning voice, coming from the grave to the Congress,
00:06:29.380 to beware, to pause, to reflect before they lend themselves to any purposes which shall destroy the Union.
00:06:36.760 Let us go to the altar of our country and swear, as the oath was taken of old, that we will stand by her, that we will support her, that we will uphold her constitution, that we will preserve her union, and that we will pass this great, comprehensive, and healing system of measures, which will hush all the jarring elements and bring peace and tranquility to our homes.
00:07:06.760 In one of the most famous congressional debates in U.S. history,
00:07:12.600 the Senate hashed out Clay's solution for seven grueling months.
00:07:17.720 The Compromise of 1850.
00:07:20.260 That one finally passed, and it was a patchwork of deals.
00:07:23.540 California entered as a free state, tipping the balance.
00:07:26.520 Then New Mexico and Utah territories were organized without slavery bans,
00:07:30.900 leaving it to the popular vote later.
00:07:32.620 and the slave trade, though not slavery itself, was abolished in Washington, D.C.
00:07:38.540 At the time of this compromise, Washington, D.C. hosted one of the largest slave markets in the
00:07:44.100 nation. There was an open-air pen near the U.S. Capitol where enslaved people were held like
00:07:50.040 livestock before auctions. To sweeten the deal for slave state politicians furious about the
00:07:56.600 imbalance created by California's free status, the Fugitive Slave Act was tacked on.
00:08:02.620 This was a nightmare law.
00:08:05.000 It mandated that all citizens, north or south, assist in capturing escaped slaves,
00:08:12.220 and anyone who refused would face heavy fines or imprisonment.
00:08:16.920 The Fugitive Slave Act turned the entire U.S. into a hunting ground for escaped slaves.
00:08:24.360 Overnight, every free black person in the north became suspect.
00:08:32.620 In 1851, 23-year-old Thomas Sims bolted from slavery in Georgia, stowing away on a ship to Boston.
00:08:40.280 In Boston, he hid out for months, tasting freedom.
00:08:43.780 But his owner, James Potter, tracked him down.
00:08:47.680 Federal marshals and local cops ambushed Sims on a Boston street.
00:08:52.200 He tried to resist, but he was dragged to a courthouse jail.
00:08:57.180 Predictably, Sims was ruled a runaway slave.
00:09:01.200 Eight days after he was captured,
00:09:03.440 Sims was escorted to a ship bound for Savannah,
00:09:06.760 flanked by 300 guards to fend off any resistance by the abolitionist crowd.
00:09:12.180 Spectators jeered, but there was no rescue attempt.
00:09:16.360 When Sims reached Georgia, his former owners decided to make an example of it.
00:09:20.960 In the town square, Sims was stripped to the waist
00:09:24.520 and whipped with 39 lashes across his bare back.
00:09:27.980 In the North, slavery suddenly no longer felt so distant.
00:09:33.620 The Fugitive Slave Act angered Northerners because the law forced them into complicity.
00:09:39.300 In effect, the federal government demanded that ordinary people help enforce slavery,
00:09:44.200 and the moral shock out of that demand began to ripple across the country.
00:09:48.340 One of those deeply affected Northerners was a writer.
00:09:51.620 Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe.
00:09:57.980 Stowe was born in Connecticut in 1811.
00:10:03.060 He was the daughter of a famous evangelical preacher, Lyman Beecher.
00:10:07.480 Her family was full of reformers and intellectuals, and she grew up debating at the family table.
00:10:13.160 She received a much more formal education than was typical for women at the time,
00:10:17.520 and her skill as a writer was evident early on.
00:10:21.040 When Harriet was 21, her father became the president of a seminary in Cincinnati.
00:10:26.300 There, she met and married a professor named Calvin Stowe.
00:10:30.460 They eventually had seven children, and she wrote articles to help make ends meet.
00:10:34.760 But her path towards writing one of the most influential books in American history began with tragedy.
00:10:41.900 In 1849, a cholera epidemic swept through Cincinnati.
00:10:47.060 Among its victims was Stowe's 18-month-old son, Charlie.
00:10:51.460 No cure existed at the time, and she watched helplessly as his life drained away in her arms.
00:10:58.420 She later said that losing Charlie helped her understand the pain enslaved mothers felt when their children were sold away.
00:11:06.160 Two years later, as her family discussed the horrors of the Fugitive Slave Act, her younger sister, Isabella, urged her.
00:11:13.020 If I could use a pen as you can, Hattie, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.
00:11:21.860 Stowe reached out to the editor of The National Era. It was a prominent abolitionist newspaper.
00:11:27.460 She proposed a serialized story about the evils of slavery.
00:11:31.540 In her letter, she wrote,
00:11:33.640 Up to this year, I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject,
00:11:39.320 and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power.
00:11:45.960 But I feel now that the time has come when even a woman or a child
00:11:50.900 who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.
00:11:56.080 I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.
00:12:00.840 The series began appearing in 1851.
00:12:04.620 At first, Doe expected she would produce three or four installments of the story,
00:12:08.320 but she ended up writing 40 and the national era nearly doubled its readership. In March 1852,
00:12:15.840 the stories were published together as a novel titled Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's the story of Tom,
00:12:22.880 a pious slave who was sold away from his family and ends up working for a brutal slave master,
00:12:28.400 and Eliza who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. It was the first major
00:12:34.400 American novel with a black main character, and its impact was staggering. Within a year,
00:12:41.720 that book sold 300,000 copies just in the U.S. In Britain, it sold 1.5 million. In the 1800s,
00:12:51.000 it was only outsold by the Bible. As the book exploded across the nation,
00:12:57.300 Stowe wrote to a friend about the emotional source of the story.
00:13:00.800 I have been the mother of seven children, the most beautiful and most loved of whom
00:13:06.860 lies buried near my Cincinnati residence. It was at his dying bed and at his grave
00:13:13.920 that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.
00:13:20.260 In those depths of sorrow which seem to be immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God
00:13:26.940 that such anguish might not be suffered in vain.
00:13:31.020 I allude to this here because I have often felt
00:13:33.920 that much that is in that book
00:13:36.120 had its root in the awful scenes
00:13:38.420 and bitter sorrow of that summer.
00:13:41.860 The novel transformed the national conversation.
00:13:45.780 Stage plays based on the story spread across the country.
00:13:49.140 Americans were gripped and repulsed
00:13:51.560 by the cruelty of slavery
00:13:53.140 and presented in such dramatic, vivid detail.
00:13:56.660 The Underground Railroad grew more active, reaching its peak during the following decade.
00:14:01.760 When critics accused her of exaggeration, Stowe responded in 1853 with a book called
00:14:08.420 Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, presenting the original facts and documents upon which the story is founded.
00:14:16.580 She argued that, if anything, she had softened the brutality of slavery in her novel.
00:14:21.800 In the book's introduction, she wrote,
00:14:23.580 The book is a very inadequate representation of slavery, and it is so necessarily for this reason, that slavery in some of its workings is too dreadful for the purposes of art.
00:14:38.180 Amid this growing national crisis over slavery, Congress stepped in to make things worse.
00:14:44.040 In January 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, introduced a bill called
00:14:50.460 An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas.
00:14:54.420 Sounds benign, but it did something extraordinary.
00:14:58.760 It repealed the Missouri Compromise, which for more than 30 years had prohibited slavery north of the 3630-degree latitude in the Louisiana territories.
00:15:10.600 Douglas argued that settlers themselves should decide
00:15:13.600 whether to allow slavery in the new states by popular vote.
00:15:16.880 Anti-slavery Americans were outraged
00:15:19.120 because under the Missouri Compromise,
00:15:20.940 both Kansas and Nebraska should have been free territory.
00:15:25.620 Now, slavery could expand there.
00:15:28.780 As soon as Congress passed the law,
00:15:31.400 settlers from both sides of the slavery debate rushed into Kansas,
00:15:35.940 each hoped to control the first territorial elections.
00:15:39.640 Well, the result was chaos.
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00:18:05.540 By March 1855, a force of 5,000 pro-slavery Missourians, known as border ruffians, invaded
00:18:15.600 Kansas.
00:18:16.600 They seized the polling places and installed their own pro-slavery legislature.
00:18:21.820 Violent clashes spread across the territory, which soon earned the nickname Bleeding Kansas.
00:18:28.100 Here's how one journalist described the tense atmosphere at the time.
00:18:31.620 In this region, when men went out to plow, they always took their rifles with them and
00:18:35.460 always tilled in companies of from 5 to 10. Whenever two men approached each other, they
00:18:41.000 came up pistol in hand, and the first salutation invariably was, free state or pro-slave? It
00:18:48.340 not infrequently happened that the next sound was the report of a pistol.
00:18:53.180 The struggle over slavery had moved beyond politics. Now, it was war.
00:18:59.580 john brown born in 1800 in connecticut his family were strict calvinist his environment was all
00:19:12.920 about right versus wrong there were no gray areas to him or his family and there were consequences
00:19:17.820 for your choices early in his life the family moved to ohio when he was 12 years old he was
00:19:24.700 helping drive some cattle to a farm in Michigan. While there, he witnessed the landlord brutally
00:19:29.740 beat a slave boy with an iron fire shovel. The boy was about the same age as Brown,
00:19:36.360 and that memory haunted him. It seared into his mind like a brand.
00:19:42.360 In that moment, slavery became a palpable evil to him, something that demanded action.
00:19:49.760 Years later, those early convictions would harden into another form of evil.
00:19:54.700 In his 20s, Brown married and started a family.
00:20:00.580 His wife had seven children before she died suddenly in 1832.
00:20:04.620 A year later, he married Mary Ann Day, an uneducated 16-year-old, half his age.
00:20:11.760 She would have 13 children.
00:20:14.440 That meant John Brown would ultimately father 20 children.
00:20:19.000 Feeding that many children required money, and money was something Brown struggled to keep.
00:20:25.560 In 1835, Brown uprooted his growing clan into Hudson, Ohio,
00:20:30.800 where he'd become a station master on the Underground Railroad.
00:20:35.260 His job was to hide runaway slaves in his home
00:20:38.060 and then guide them north under the cover of darkness, risking everything.
00:20:44.100 It was dangerous work.
00:20:46.400 Slave catchers roamed the countryside, 0.88
00:20:48.080 and remember, federal law demanded that escaped slaves be returned.
00:20:53.240 But Brown didn't care.
00:20:54.700 For him, this was much more than just activism.
00:20:57.660 This was a divine calling.
00:21:00.360 Yet while Brown was a successful abolitionist,
00:21:02.740 he proved a miserable failure as a businessman.
00:21:07.080 Over the years, he launched venture after venture.
00:21:09.700 He tried tanning leather, sheep breeding, land speculation, raising cattle,
00:21:13.740 and nearly every venture completely collapsed.
00:21:17.020 Creditors piled up and lawsuits followed in four different states.
00:21:21.460 By 1842, Brown declared bankruptcy.
00:21:26.280 All of his family's belongings were auctioned off.
00:21:30.260 Brown was completely broke and humiliated.
00:21:34.060 But that fire against slavery?
00:21:36.460 Oh, it only burned hotter now.
00:21:39.240 By 1855, John Brown was scraping by on a farm in upstate New York,
00:21:43.860 and that's when five of his sons decided to move to the Kansas Territory.
00:21:49.580 They were determined to join the crusade to help make Kansas a free state.
00:21:54.460 But their father stayed behind. He was 55 now. He was tired and still in debt.
00:22:01.260 But then an urgent letter arrived from his son, John Brown Jr. Anti-slavery settlers
00:22:06.620 in Kansas were being threatened and attacked. They needed weapons. As John Brown Jr. put it
00:22:12.860 to his father, quote, We need them more than we need bread.
00:22:16.860 head." Something about this urgent request stirred Brown's inner vigilante. The very
00:22:22.880 next day, he snapped into action. He scrounged up every weapon he could find, and he told
00:22:28.280 his family that he was going to Kansas to make it a free state.
00:22:38.660 In May 1856, Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner delivered one of the most explosive
00:22:44.320 speeches ever heard on the Senate floor. He titled it The Crime Against Kansas, and he unloaded on
00:22:51.620 the pro-slavery forces in America. Sumner saved some of his most bitter words for South Carolina
00:22:58.940 Senator Andrew Butler, a Democrat. Butler was at home recovering from a stroke. Sumner mocked
00:23:05.920 Butler with a brutal metaphor and declared that Butler had taken a mistress who, though ugly to
00:23:13.620 others is always lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the world is chaste in his sight.
00:23:20.940 I mean the harlot slavery. Two days later, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks,
00:23:29.240 a cousin of Senator Butler's, strolled into the Senate chamber. The Senate had adjourned for the
00:23:35.380 day, and the chamber was mostly empty. Charles Sumner just sat there silently at his desk,
00:23:41.820 signing copies of his speech to send to his constituents.
00:23:45.660 Brooks approached and said,
00:23:48.040 Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over, carefully.
00:23:52.960 It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.
00:23:59.600 Brooks suddenly raises his cane and smashes it down on Sumner's head.
00:24:05.640 Blood gushes out, blinding Sumner.
00:24:08.200 He tries to stand, but his legs are trapped under his desk, which is bolted to the floor.
00:24:13.120 Brooks keeps swinging dozens of blows to Sumner's head and face.
00:24:17.780 Sumner finally manages to free himself from the desk and staggers down the aisle.
00:24:22.420 But Brooks grabs Sumner's lapel, holding him up for more blows that actually splinter his cane.
00:24:29.280 Bystanders finally intervene, but Sumner collapses on the floor, senseless.
00:24:34.320 His head gashed open, blood soaking his clothes.
00:24:37.180 Brooks just strolls out unscathed. News of the attack exploded across the nation. To the south,
00:24:46.180 Brooks became a hero. To the north, it felt like proof that slavery's defenders had abandoned
00:24:51.020 reason together. Meanwhile, at the same time, hundreds of pro-slavery border ruffians from
00:25:02.980 Missouri, sacked the free state town of Lawrence, Kansas. They torched homes and businesses and
00:25:09.500 smashed printing presses. The anti-slavery residents didn't put up any resistance.
00:25:14.860 That same day, word reached John Brown's camp that Senator Sumner had been nearly beaten to
00:25:20.080 death in Washington. One of John Brown's sons later described the reaction. At that, the men
00:25:26.240 went crazy it seemed to be the finishing decisive touch john brown saw it as confirmation of what
00:25:34.400 he already believed peaceful resistance was over brown then declared something must be
00:25:42.160 done to show these barbarians that we too have rights two nights later may 24 1856 brown makes 0.57
00:25:53.920 his move. Under the cover of darkness, he gathers a small raiding party, four of his sons, 0.87
00:26:01.120 his son-in-law, and two other men, all armed with rifles, revolvers, and swords.
00:26:09.440 Brown led the men towards the Pottawatomie Creek. Their targets were pro-slavery settlers.
00:26:16.400 The first cabin belonged to James Doyle. Brown and his men forced Doyle and two of his sons
00:26:21.600 outside the terrified family barely understood what was happening then the swords came down
00:26:28.480 the men's heads were split open and their arms cut off brown shot james doyle in the head
00:26:35.920 then they moved on the killers at two more cabins they dragged out additional men
00:26:42.800 accused of supporting slavery by the time the night ended five men lay dead and mutilated
00:26:51.600 Brown and his men then washed the blood off their swords in a stream and
00:26:56.520 disappeared into the night. John Brown was no longer simply an abolitionist, now
00:27:03.540 he was a murderer. He and his followers lived like fugitives, sleeping in hidden
00:27:09.660 campsites and constantly moving. Pro-slavery militia scoured the
00:27:14.760 countryside searching for Brown, but it was a journalist named James Redpath who
00:27:20.220 finally stumbled upon Brown's encampment deep in the woods. Instead of exposing him,
00:27:25.980 Redpath listened. He was fascinated by what he heard. In his reports, Redpath portrayed Brown
00:27:33.420 as a kind of prophetic warrior instead of a murderer. He wrote,
00:27:38.700 After every meal, the old man would retire to the densest solitudes. He would say that
00:27:43.820 the Lord had directed him in visions, that for himself, he did not love warfare but peace.
00:27:50.220 When the interview appeared in the Eastern newspapers, many readers in the North saw
00:27:55.120 something different from the man Southerners feared. They saw a hero, a man willing to fight
00:28:01.980 slavery when others only talked about it. A Broadway play soon appeared that conveniently
00:28:07.520 ignored Brown's role in the Potawatomi murders, blaming the killings instead on his enemies.
00:28:14.360 The play helped fuel the propaganda of Brown as hero rather than terrorist.
00:28:20.500 And across the North, the legend of John Brown began to grow.
00:28:25.100 To many Americans, he was a dangerous fanatic.
00:28:28.580 To others, he was a righteous soldier of God.
00:28:32.300 But one thing was now clear.
00:28:34.820 John Brown had crossed a line, and there was no going back.
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00:30:31.020 Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland about 1818.
00:30:40.960 He never knew his exact birthday or his father, who was a white man, and possibly even his enslaver.
00:30:46.940 His childhood unfolded in fragments.
00:30:49.920 He was separated from his mother at a very early age and raised by his grandmother until he was old enough to work the fields.
00:30:56.300 For several years, he lived in Baltimore,
00:30:58.700 where the wife of his enslaver began teaching him the alphabet.
00:31:02.880 With that essential knowledge, he gradually taught himself to read and write.
00:31:07.820 As a teenager, he taught other slaves to read using the Bible.
00:31:11.900 By his teens, Douglas had a reputation for being difficult and rebellious.
00:31:17.780 So he was hired out to the farm of Edward Covey,
00:31:21.180 who was known as being a so-called slave breaker.
00:31:25.140 Covey was a cruel overseer who specialized in crushing spirits through endless hard labor
00:31:31.460 and regular lashings. For six months, Douglas endured frequent whippings that left his back
00:31:37.220 scarred and his resolve tested. But one sweltering August morning in 1834, something snapped.
00:31:47.060 When Covey attacked Douglas, trying to tie him up for another whipping, Douglas clawed back.
00:31:52.500 The 16-year-old evaded, grappled, and wrestled with Covey for two hours.
00:31:58.500 Finally, an exhausted Covey backed off.
00:32:01.500 And from that day on, the whipping stopped.
00:32:05.500 A few years later, Douglas escaped north.
00:32:08.500 He made it to New York City, and he married a free black woman named Anna.
00:32:13.500 Once free, he did something few formerly enslaved people dared to do.
00:32:18.500 He told his story.
00:32:21.500 In 1845, he published his memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
00:32:29.260 The book exploded across the abolitionist world.
00:32:32.580 Readers were stunned by its clarity and power, but the success created a new danger for Douglass.
00:32:38.640 He was now famous. In fact, too famous.
00:32:42.620 Under American law, he was now still legally the property of his enslaver.
00:32:47.380 Anyone could seize him and drag him back into bondage.
00:32:51.500 So, to avoid capture, Douglass left the U.S. entirely.
00:32:57.240 For nearly two years, he traveled across England, Ireland, and Scotland,
00:33:02.080 giving speeches and selling copies of his narrative.
00:33:05.460 Audiences packed halls to hear the former slaves speak.
00:33:10.740 Eventually, British abolitionists raised money to purchase his freedom.
00:33:15.280 When he returned home to the U.S., he was finally legally free,
00:33:19.220 and his family settled in Rochester, New York, where he began publishing his own abolitionist
00:33:25.640 newspaper. It was during this period that Douglas met John Brown in Springfield, Mass.
00:33:31.980 Brown was a tall, gaunt man with blazing eyes and a beard that made him look like
00:33:36.920 an Old Testament prophet. Douglas immediately sensed the depth of Brown's commitment,
00:33:43.320 as he wrote,
00:33:43.980 Though a white gentleman, Brown is in sympathy a black man
00:33:48.460 and as deeply interested in our cause
00:33:50.840 as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.
00:33:55.400 But Brown's ideas went beyond speeches and rallies or petitions,
00:34:00.000 beyond politics.
00:34:02.040 During that first meeting, Brown described something far more radical,
00:34:06.420 a war to destroy slavery.
00:34:09.440 Douglass remembered the intensity of Brown's words.
00:34:12.380 Brown denounced slavery in language fierce and bitter and thought that slaveholders had forfeited their right to live.
00:34:20.260 He thought that he had no better use for his life than to lay it down in the cause of the slave.
00:34:28.740 In 1852, there were approximately 3.5 million slaves in the United States, roughly 14% of the nation's population.
00:34:37.880 That summer, Frederick Douglass was invited to deliver the keynote address
00:34:42.200 at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York.
00:34:46.500 Most of the crowd expected a patriotic speech.
00:34:50.320 Instead, Douglass delivered a devastating moral indictment of his country.
00:34:55.740 He did not mince words in challenging the nation's conscience.
00:35:00.940 The feeling of the nation must be quickened.
00:35:03.600 The conscience of the nation must be roused.
00:35:05.980 the propriety of the nation must be startled,
00:35:09.740 the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed,
00:35:13.020 and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.
00:35:18.080 This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
00:35:22.180 You may rejoice. I must mourn.
00:35:26.580 What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? 0.82
00:35:30.560 A day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year
00:35:34.300 the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim five years later one of the
00:35:41.820 most famous and notorious u.s supreme court decisions in american history underscored the
00:35:46.940 hypocrisy and injustice that douglas railed against the case involved the enslave man named
00:35:53.580 dred scott and his wife harriet scott had lived for years with his enslaver who was an army surgeon
00:36:00.620 in territories like wisconsin and illinois where slavery was illegal his lawyers argued that this
00:36:06.780 residence made him legally free for years the case wound through the court system until it
00:36:12.940 finally reached the supreme court in 1857 chief justice roger taney delivered the seven to two
00:36:20.860 ruling which declared that no black person free or enslaved could be a citizen of the united
00:36:27.580 States. Therefore, Scott had no right to sue in federal court. The ruling also declared that
00:36:34.160 Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. In effect, slavery could expand
00:36:41.040 anywhere. For millions of black people in America, that decision meant the law offered
00:36:45.900 no protection whatsoever. Well, this decision emboldened the South, terrified the North,
00:36:51.960 and supercharged the abolitionists.
00:36:57.580 The same year that the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision,
00:37:05.420 Brown met a Massachusetts educator named Franklin Sanborn.
00:37:10.560 Sanborn was immediately charmed by the fiery abolitionists,
00:37:13.980 mesmerized by the heroic tales of his exploits in Kansas.
00:37:17.860 And soon, Sanborn introduced Brown to other like-minded radical reformers in Boston.
00:37:22.560 Out of those meetings emerged a clandestine group of wealthy supporters
00:37:27.620 who agreed to fund Brown's war on slavery.
00:37:31.180 They became known as the Secret Six.
00:37:35.980 In addition to Sanborn, the members included Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
00:37:40.880 a Unitarian minister and an abolitionist,
00:37:43.660 Garrett Smith, one of the richest men in New York and a longtime anti-slavery activist,
00:37:48.440 Reverend Theodore Parker, another influential Unitarian pastor. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe,
00:37:55.600 a respected physician and reformer who pioneered education for the blind. And George Luther
00:38:02.220 Stearns, a wealthy businessman who financed anti-slavery settlement in Kansas. In February
00:38:09.240 1858, John Brown met with his group in a Boston hotel room and finally revealed his grand plan.
00:38:17.040 He intended to seize the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia,
00:38:21.500 to distribute the weapons to the enslaved people and ignite a massive slave uprising.
00:38:28.900 The Secret Six were stunned at the idea.
00:38:32.720 Even Sanborn admitted the scheme sounded insane.
00:38:36.220 He later wrote,
00:38:37.060 It was an amazing proposition, desperate in its character,
00:38:41.160 seemingly inadequate in its provision of means and of very uncertain results, but
00:38:47.160 no argument could prevail against his settled purpose, with many or with few,
00:38:50.640 and he left us only the alternatives of betrayal, desertion, or support. We chose
00:38:56.040 the last. But before the raid could get underway, trouble erupted. Brown had hired
00:39:02.380 a British mercenary to help drill his crew in preparation for the raid, but the
00:39:07.500 two had a falling out. The mercenary exposed Brown's plan to several politicians. Well,
00:39:13.240 the Secret Six panicked. They urged Brown to delay the Virginia operation and create
00:39:17.680 diversions elsewhere. So, Brown returned to Kansas. There, he led a small band across
00:39:23.960 the Missouri border and attacked two pro-slavery homesteads. Brown and his men plundered the
00:39:29.920 homes, taking wagons, horses, guns, and money. They also liberated 11 slaves in the process.
00:39:37.180 The Raiders also shot and killed one of the slave owners, prompting President Buchanan
00:39:42.120 to offer a $250 reward for Brown's capture.
00:39:47.140 In January 1859, Brown traveled north with the 11 freed slaves, crossing the frozen prairie
00:39:52.940 in brutal winter conditions.
00:39:56.140 For weeks they traveled, staying just a step ahead of slave captures.
00:40:00.460 Finally, after 82 days and more than 1,000 miles on the run,
00:40:05.840 Brown watched as the rescued group boarded a ferry in Detroit, bound for Canada.
00:40:15.220 The diversion mission worked to help throw authorities off John Brown's trail.
00:40:20.980 So in June 1859, he rented a small farm in Maryland,
00:40:25.620 just a few miles north of Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
00:40:29.380 The farm became his secret headquarters.
00:40:33.400 There, hidden among the hills, he stockpiled weapons and drilled his handful of recruits,
00:40:38.600 preparing for the operation he believed would shatter slavery forever.
00:40:43.420 In August, Brown traveled to a stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
00:40:48.040 He was there for a secret meeting with Frederick Douglass.
00:40:51.320 Brown detailed his plan to raid Harper's Ferry, and he tried to convince Douglass to join the operation.
00:40:57.720 As Douglas later described it,
00:40:59.340 He put his arms around me in a manner more than friendly and said,
00:41:04.640 Come with me, Douglas. I will defend you with my life.
00:41:08.800 I want you for a special purpose.
00:41:11.540 When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.
00:41:18.120 Douglas listened carefully.
00:41:20.600 Then he pushed back.
00:41:22.720 He was horrified at the idea.
00:41:25.900 Douglas wrote,
00:41:26.520 I had once opposed the measure with all the arguments at my command.
00:41:31.700 It would be an attack upon the federal government and would array the whole country against us.
00:41:37.520 All his arguments and all his descriptions of the place convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel trap
00:41:44.280 and that once in, he would never get out alive.
00:41:48.560 But Brown believed destiny was calling.
00:41:52.100 summer heats up in fx's the shards
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00:43:22.680 For more of the history that inspired this podcast series, be sure to read The American
00:43:27.880 Story, The Beginnings, by David Barton and Tim Barton. Available now at wallbuilders.com.
00:43:38.320 If you had stood in the small town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, 1859,
00:43:42.260 you might have thought it was one of the strangest places in America to start a revolution,
00:43:47.280 because Harper's Ferry didn't look like a battlefield.
00:43:51.300 The town sat at the meeting point of the Potomac and the Shenandoah Rivers.
00:43:55.680 Mountains rose on every side.
00:43:57.920 With the town nestled in a narrow ravine, it was beautiful, it was a quiet place.
00:44:02.820 And because of its terrain, nearly impossible to escape quickly.
00:44:08.020 Tucked inside this remote valley was something incredibly valuable.
00:44:12.260 The United States Federal Arsenal was a huge complex of workshops and warehouses and armories
00:44:19.020 that held one of the largest caches of weapons in the country.
00:44:23.820 Inside those buildings were roughly 100,000 muskets and rifles,
00:44:28.860 enough weapons to equip an army.
00:44:31.980 Or, in the imagination of one man, 0.52
00:44:35.020 enough to arm an uprising of enslaved people all across the South.
00:44:39.780 That man was John Brown, and on the night of October 16, 1859, he walked into Harper's Ferry to start a war.
00:44:50.240 Brown's force was tiny, just 21 men, including one fugitive slave, one college student, several free black men, and three of Brown's sons.
00:45:02.120 Brown left three of his men behind at the farmhouse in Maryland to guard their stash of weapons and supplies.
00:45:08.200 The remaining 18 men slipped into Harper's Ferry after dark.
00:45:14.920 First, they cut the town's telegraph wires, then they moved quickly to the arsenal complex.
00:45:21.400 There was only one guard on duty, and he surrendered almost immediately,
00:45:25.160 and Brown's men then moved to take two local slave owners hostage.
00:45:30.280 For a brief moment, it seemed as if John Brown's impossible plan might actually work.
00:45:35.800 But then came an unwelcome sound.
00:45:40.920 A passenger train approached Harper's Ferry.
00:45:44.600 The Raiders stopped the train.
00:45:46.660 That train's baggage master, a free black man named Hayward Shepard,
00:45:51.340 hopped off the train to investigate.
00:45:53.960 As soon as he realized the danger, he began warning the passengers.
00:45:58.840 Raiders yelled at Shepard to stop, but he continued.
00:46:01.840 Shepard fell dead.
00:46:08.140 The first victim of John Brown's war against slavery was a free black man.
00:46:20.800 As the sun came up, for some reason Brown let the train go, guaranteeing that the outside
00:46:25.820 world would soon learn of his attack.
00:46:29.040 Then the raiders quickly sieged about 60 hostages from the town.
00:46:34.480 Yet the uprising Brown expected never came.
00:46:38.400 There was no wave of enslaved men emerging from the surrounding countryside.
00:46:43.380 No columns of freedom fighters appeared to claim the weapons and join their leader.
00:46:48.280 Instead, word of the raid spread rapidly.
00:46:52.220 Local militia units rushed toward the town and quickly secured the bridges across the
00:46:56.440 rivers, cutting off the only escape routes. Brown and his men were trapped. Then the
00:47:04.440 militias and the townspeople opened fire on the raiders.
00:47:08.440 24 hours into John Brown's assault, it had been turned into a disaster. Eight of his
00:47:16.440 men were already dead or died. Two others managed to slip away and escape across the
00:47:21.440 Thoma. Brown gathered the survivors and the hostages and retreated into a small brick building
00:47:27.520 inside the arsenal grounds, the armory's fire engine house. They barricaded the doors with
00:47:34.660 two horse-drawn fire engines. From inside the building, Brown and his remaining followers
00:47:42.900 exchanged sporadic gunfire with the growing ring of militia outside, bullets pinging off
00:47:48.700 the walls in a deadly game of Captain Mouse. But around 11 p.m., the end of the first full day of
00:47:55.820 the siege, a force of 90 U.S. Marines arrived by train from Washington, D.C., and their commander
00:48:03.160 was Colonel Robert E. Lee. At dawn, Colonel Lee's Marines had the fire engine house surrounded.
00:48:13.480 A young lieutenant named Jeb Stewart approached the building under a white flag of truce.
00:48:17.720 He handed over a note. If they surrendered immediately, their lives would be spared.
00:48:23.720 But John Brown, defiant as ever, refused. So Lee gave the order.
00:48:30.060 The Marines rushed forward, smashing through the doors with a makeshift battering ram.
00:48:36.280 The first Marine inside clambered over the fire engines and leapt at Brown,
00:48:40.440 trusting his sword to run him through. But the blade was blocked by Brown's belt buckle.
00:48:45.640 instead brown was quickly beaten unconscious by the swarm of marines and the raid was over
00:48:53.080 when the smoke cleared 10 of brown's men were dead including two of his sons seven men including
00:49:00.860 brown were captured alive five of his men including another one of his sons escaped north
00:49:06.820 and were never caught authorities searched brown's hideout in maryland finding letters and documents
00:49:13.300 linking him directly to his clandestine northern backers, the so-called Secret Six.
00:49:19.260 Within days, the evidence hit newspapers all across the country,
00:49:22.180 and suddenly the identities of those elite abolitionist funders were exposed.
00:49:27.540 Panic rippled through the group.
00:49:29.600 Garrett Smith, the wealthy eccentric,
00:49:31.740 he suffered a complete breakdown and was hauled off to a lunatic asylum.
00:49:35.680 Theodore Parker, the Unitarian minister,
00:49:38.120 he was in Italy, dying of tuberculosis.
00:49:40.560 And three of the others fled to Canada.
00:49:44.260 Even Frederick Douglass, knowing that he would be implicated for meeting with Brown just months
00:49:48.660 before the raid, fled north to Canada and then to England, staying away from America for almost six
00:49:54.900 months. Only Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the other Unitarian minister in the group, stayed put. He
00:50:02.980 felt responsible for what happened to Brown and later reflected. I should have realized the need 0.94
00:50:08.500 to protect John Brown from himself.
00:50:11.340 We of the six were not, are not, great men.
00:50:15.900 Back in Virginia, John Brown's criminal trial was brief.
00:50:19.860 His lawyers made a final desperate attempt to save his life.
00:50:22.320 They gathered affidavits from friends and relatives claiming Brown suffered from hereditary
00:50:27.120 insanity.
00:50:28.380 But Brown rejected the argument outright.
00:50:30.280 He insisted he was completely sane.
00:50:32.820 He was also resigned to his fate, writing,
00:50:35.380 I have no doubt that our seeming disaster will ultimately result in the most glorious success.
00:50:43.140 I have been whipped, but I am sure I can recover all the lost capital by only hanging a few moments by the neck.
00:50:50.440 On the morning of December 2nd, 1859, John Brown handed a note to one of his guards.
00:50:57.740 On it were written his final words.
00:50:59.880 I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.
00:51:08.980 I had vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.
00:51:13.900 The 59-year-old was loaded into a wagon, sitting atop his own coffin,
00:51:19.480 and escorted to the gallows under the watchful eyes of 1,500 armed guards.
00:51:25.140 Virginia's governor had called in the massive force,
00:51:28.140 paranoid about any rescue attempt or further unrest.
00:51:32.140 Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson were there in attendance.
00:51:37.500 A young actor named John Wilkes Booth was also there to watch.
00:51:42.340 He had borrowed a uniform and snuck in with the Richmond militia.
00:51:47.120 The only journalist present was David Strother, who later described the scene.
00:51:52.480 I stood with a group of half-dozen gentlemen near the steps of the scaffold when the prisoner
00:51:57.800 was driven up. He stepped from the wagon with surprising agility and walked hastily toward
00:52:03.760 the scaffold, pausing a moment as he passed our group to wave his pinioned arm and bid
00:52:08.920 us good morning. I thought I could observe in this a trace of bravado, but perhaps I
00:52:14.320 was mistaken.
00:52:16.220 The noose was fitted around the neck of this once obscure farmer turned revolutionary.
00:52:20.940 Mary, Strother, watched closely.
00:52:23.940 I stood within a few paces of him and watched narrowly during these trying moments to see
00:52:29.200 if there was any indication of his giving way.
00:52:32.460 I detected nothing of the sort.
00:52:34.840 He had stiffened himself for the drop and waited motionless till it came.
00:52:40.100 The trapdoor fell with a crash.
00:52:47.220 As Brown's body swung, a Virginia colonel bellowed out.
00:52:51.180 So perish all such enemies of Virginia,
00:52:54.960 all such enemies of the Union, all such foes of the human race. 0.86
00:53:00.580 The South erupted in celebration 0.70
00:53:02.980 at the news of the execution.
00:53:05.820 But up north, many church bells tolled for John Brown.
00:53:11.060 Years later, Frederick Douglass reflected on Brown's death.
00:53:14.680 Did John Brown fail?
00:53:17.080 John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic.
00:53:23.620 His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine.
00:53:28.140 I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.
00:53:32.720 John Brown's raid intensified the bitterness tearing the nation apart.
00:53:37.620 Most Northerners condemned it as the reckless act of a fanatic.
00:53:41.820 But many also began to see Brown as a tragic hero, maybe even as a martyr, and that scared the white Southerners.
00:53:51.140 To them, Brown was the ultimate nightmare, a fearless, armed abolitionist, accompanied by black allies, and willing, even eager, to die to destroy slavery.
00:54:03.680 In their minds, no threat to slavery had ever been greater. 0.82
00:54:06.660 after harper's ferry a terrifying question haunted the south if one man could do this
00:54:15.420 how many others would be next
00:54:19.160 coming up on the american story the beginnings faradini has davis step forward raise his right
00:54:34.260 hand and swear allegiance to the Southern cause. Then, Ferradini goes over the details of their
00:54:41.240 plan. Lincoln's travel schedule had been released to the press. His train would pull into Baltimore's
00:54:47.620 Calvert Street station at 12.30 p.m. February 23rd. Lincoln would have to exit the station for
00:54:53.980 a one-mile carriage ride to the Camden station, where he would catch his final train to Washington.
00:54:59.600 A large crowd would surge toward the president as he walked through the station.
00:55:04.660 Police officers, many of them Southern sympathizers, would be conveniently distracted by a staged fight.
00:55:11.500 In the chaos, an assassin would slip through the crowd, fire on Lincoln, and vanish into the fleeing mob.
00:55:17.940 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast
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