Questions About John Brown

[My Name Is Kate]

As much as I hate to have to say anything good about a murderer (John Brown), after reading Kate Larson's posts above, I'm beginning to think he had the right idea about how to end slavery in America, i.e., arm the slaves and provide them with whatever necessities they needed to try to make their own bid for freedom. It's too bad he encouraged the murder of slaveholders instead of resorting to killing as a last resort. If any killing had to be done, it should have been done by the slaves attempting an escape, and not by John Brown. After all, people do have the right to defend themselves and their families, and (as the Constitution proclaims) all people are (or should be) born free. But Brown's zeal for killing suggests that his anti-slavery sentiments were tainted with some other motive. Two wrongs do not make a right.

What was the comment Lincoln made after John Brown was hanged (edit: the actual comment was posted earlier in this same thread)? Wasn't it something to the effect that Brown had it coming because he was committing treason and not abiding by the Constitution? Was Lincoln abiding by the Constitution when he freed all the slaves? The Constitution recognized slavery as a legal institution, so that makes freeing the slaves and the 13th Amendment unconstitutional. If Lincoln's primary goal was to keep the Union together, and he saw slavery as the number one issue dividing the country, why didn't he join John Brown instead of running for president? How could a president's anti-slavery stance possibly do anything but further divide the country, when nearly half the states were not free states and had little, if any, desire to be free states? A president takes an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, so any president's hands were tied on the slavery issue. It had to be up to the slaves themselves (with the help of sympathetic free people from all over the country, including the south, if possible) if there was to be any possibility of slavery ending without a civil war.

Lincoln's second inaugural speech, with all its references to God and his just retribution visited on the country for the sin of slavery, indicate that Lincoln's thinking was in line with John Brown's. So the question remains: Why didn't Lincoln join John Brown's war on slavery instead of becoming president and instigating the Civil War with his stance against the expansion of slavery into the territories, which he had to know would not sit well with the slave-holding states, and very likely would result in a civil war? Was Lincoln's war on slavery actually more a war on the South than on slavery?