Radmad
@radmad.bsky.social
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![The popularity of “John Brown’s Body” among Union soldiers was a testament not merely to Brown’s rehabilitation but to his canonization. Like the Biblical prophets whose imprecations he echoed, Brown had little honor in a country which he believed to have invited divine judgment for its sins. But his words, deeds, and death were sanctified when the war came. In 1857, Illinois Senate candidate Lincoln pronounced Brown a fanatic, insisting that “not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary” to achieve abolition. In 1861, President Lincoln, still hoping to avoid war, was reported as saying that “emancipation would be equivalent to a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.” In 1863, Abe the Emancipator commanded thousands of troops—including former slaves—who marched to kill enslavers and liberate their captives, singing of a “terrible swift sword” not unlike the one which Brown wielded at Harpers Ferry. It was fitting, then, that at Cooper Union—the site of Lincoln’s most extended denunciation of Brown’s actions—Frederick Douglass recruited Black troops for Lincoln’s army by promising that “[e]very honest soldier who marches into Virginia goes there to carry out the object that led JOHN BROWN to Harpers Ferry.” Reluctantly but ineluctably, Lincoln proved Brown right.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:f4d76fjna5nxqsy2fu6cgmp3/bafkreihilxrzypy7zi6u4l2f2rg2c4db64j32uplj4vj5kzdl7gql2v4fe@jpeg)
Reposted by Radmad
Reposted by Radmad
Reposted by Radmad
