John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, seizing the facility with 21 followers in an attempt to spark a slave uprising by capturing weapons and distributing them to enslaved people in the region. The raid exposed how thoroughly the Slave Power had …
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On the night of May 24-25, 1856, radical abolitionist John Brown, five of his sons, and three other associates murder five pro-slavery men at three different cabins along Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas Territory. The victims—James P. Doyle and his sons William and Drury, William Sherman, and Allen …
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Presbyterian minister and abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy is murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, struck by five bullets while defending his printing press from destruction. The murder of Lovejoy—whose fourth printing press had been hidden in a warehouse owned by …