For the first fifty-odd years of his life, John Brown lived more or less anonymously. But when he arrived in Kansas in 1855, everything changed. Within a year he spilled the blood of his first victims upon the soil, and made Kansas bleed in turn. A few years thereafter, he led a doomed revolutionary uprising at Harper’s Ferry. Whether one calls him a Fanatic, Madman, or Saint, John Brown believed some terrible civil war was coming. He may have made one inevitable.
