How Did John Brown Influence His Radical Abolitionist Beliefs?

. I would say that John Brown’s biggest influence for his radical abolitionist beliefs and for most of the decisions he made in life was his father. His father was also a pretty intense believer in anti-slavery himself, and growing up John admired his father greatly and grew to believe the same values as his father. John Browns father was an active abolitionist who had his eyes opened to how unfairly slaves were treated after attending multiple revival meeting and listening to a sermon by a man named Jonathan Edwards that labeled slavery as a sin. His father ran a station that was part of the Underground Railroad and had a hatred for slavery that he passed down to his children, strongly affecting John in particular. Another really big influence …show more content…
In the long run, John Brown planned to completely destroy the institution of slavery. He sought to bring slavery to its knees and to free all who were entangled in its web of hatred and abuse. He had huge dreams for how he would bring slavery to an end, but many of them died with him after he was executed in Charleston. One of his monumental plans involved building an enormous 2,000 mile long passageway through the Appalachian Mountains running from the North all the way down into Georgia. He planned to have people in groups go out and raid plantations and rescue the slaves and bring them through the passageway to the north. If John Brown would have been able to go through with this plan, it would have been an even larger success than the Underground Railroad and would have crippled slavery. Another one of his biggest steps toward ending slavery, which actually succeeded, was the creation of the League of Gileadites in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. The League of Gileadites was an organization that Brown created whose purpose was to protect slaves that escaped from those coming after them. A third pretty big step he took in abolishing slavery …show more content…
The answer to this would depend on from which point of view the occurrences are being observed. By definition, a terrorist is one who uses violence and intimidation in pursuit of political gains. Other ways to describe a terrorist would be an extremist and a fanatic. In some respects, it would be correct to view John Brown as a terrorist, one who would brutally kill hundreds in order to get his point across to the nation, every drop of blood purposefully furthering his cause. Of course, this is only the view of one side of the spectrum. There are other less recognized descriptions of a terrorist that I feel would just as equally describe John Brown: A rebel. A revolter. A revolutionary. Though we may refuse to believe so, sometimes sacrifice is necessary for the greater good, as history has told us many, many times. However, the fault in this is the question of who “needs” to be sacrificed and who doesn’t. Most will say that the enemy, or the opposing side, are the ones who should sacrificed, but the thing about that is who should be considered the enemy? Whose lives don’t deserve to be sacrificed? There isn’t a universal right or wrong, and there are always grey areas. Since each side of a dispute views the other as the enemy, thinking that whatever they themselves believe is right and just by their own standards, unnecessary bloodshed occurs and nothing moves forward until one side destroys the other. This same logic applies to the proslavery versus antislavery fight. I