To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown by Stephen B Oates, 361 pages
"He said if a man stood between him and what he considered right, he would take his life as coolly as he would eat his breakfast." So spoke Mahala Doyle about the man who ordered her husband and two sons hacked to death outside their Kansas cabin for the crime of supporting the anti-abolitionist Law and Order Party. The man was John Brown, and he had come to Kansas to fight against slavery in the name of God and Justice. A friend of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Thoreau, in 1859 Brown and a handful of supporters attacked the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia - the spark intended to ignite a slave revolt throughout the South. Brown was captured, tried for treason and murder, convicted, and executed.
Was Brown a hero who fought, unsuccessfully but selflessly, for an end to centuries of slavery? Or was he a madman, a religious fanatic, a bitter failure driven by hatred? In Stephen Oates' telling, he was a little bit of both, and perhaps also something more. On the morning of his execution, Brown prophesied that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood." His life and death continue to pose questions about when violence is a suitable response to injustice.
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