kind of the brown view of the universe. this is like 9/11. this raid hits the nation like a shock. people are scared, they're thinking war. and seward is someone who has made quite or quite perceived as militant statements. sam chase, another man in the race, had given money to brown. and here's lincoln, who then very deftly uses brown as a foil, really. he criticizes brown to position himself as the safe moderate choice in the republican field. you know? here we have these quite out there guys who are a little like brown. that's not what the republican party is about. we're not about taking on slavery in the states where it exists. we're not john browns. he talks about this quite explicitly each in his famous cooper union speech. he talks about john brown at length. so, one, i think it contributes

thim o getting the other nomination and the other effect it has is that it begins the fury in the south. we can't trust any northerner, so that steven douglas, who has sort of seemed the likely democratic nominee, who could unite north and south, the party is split. douglas is one nominee. there is another democratic nominee, breckenridge. and then a whole other party forms. when you have the november election, no for candidates in the field and lincoln wins with less than 40% of the vote. if i had to guess, i would say if you hadn't had the raid, probably douglas would have become president who was a northerner who was very conciliatory towards the south, and this whole war would have been deferred for at least another four years. and who knows.

i mean, then any number of other scenarios could have unfolded. so that's just a guess. i mean, but it's a significant -- >> it's more than significant, and it's so compelling. because that, of course, you just unrolled that a little bit further, and suddenly you don't have an emancipation proclamation. you don't have, you know -- exactly. what we're talking about here is so fascinating. >> you have no hallowed grounds. >> we would have no hallowed grounds! >> or different hallowed grounds. >> or different. we'd be in a different country. we would be in a literally different country. so in that vein, and i know that you have actually slept in -- >> that sounds kinkier than it is. >> antietam is one of the many

devastating two real battlefield sights. but it was because of antietam that lincoln was then, if you will, free to release the emancipation proclamation. talk to us about the fact that -- that's just a stone's throw from harper's ferry, and it's three years, but hundreds and thousands of lives in between. >> it's bizarre. the story comes full circle in this essentially very small geographic area. you have brown at the kennedy farm invading harper's ferry in 1859. harper's ferry is a flash point and the civil war changes hands a dozen times. stonewall jackson, a leading part of the force, takes harper's ferry a few days before, and that's why the battle happened. the union realizes lee has divided his army. they attack.

and, as you said, as a result of antietum, which is seven miles from the kennedy farm, lincoln issues the emancipation proclamation. so, you know, this incredible journey in our history all occurs in this very tight geographic area. i mean, it really is quite stunning. this is the irony while i was sort of, not bashing lincoln, but suggesting that he wasn't the great emancipator initially that people imagined. he actually was on the conservative end of the anti-slavery spectrum. and this comes through again very much in his attitude towards brown. the great irony is that he eventually comes around to brown's position and that slavery -- this must become a war against slavery and ends up, you know, taking the step that begins to fulfill brown's

mission, but also like brown, becomes a martyr through the cause. here's a final strange twist in their connection. one of the odd things about the harper's ferry story is it's almost a casting call for the confederacy. rob e. lee and jeb storm lead the troops in a counterattack against john brown, stonewall jackson turns up there. it's almost a prequel to "gods and generals" which was a prequel to "gettysburg." but jefferson davis is leading the charge in congress. you see all of these figures 18 months before the civil war. but in the final twist is at john brown's hanging, one of the guards is john wilkes booth, who later writes about being quite inspired by brown or talks to his sister about it. she writes about it. she calls him the great man of the century. here's a man who took an act that changed the course of american history, and that's

ultimately what john wilkes booth then does in assassinating lincoln. >> chill bumps. i got 'em. i hope you all do, too. >> yeah. . >> when you read this book, you're going to get more, because i'm going to tell you something that you do so remarkably well, and that is these names, they're names on history book pages for most people. but you actually open up their hearts, their lives, their thoughts and fears to us. there are stories in here that are just astonishingly powerful, one of which is the story of african-american dangerfield newby, who was a freed black man who had his wife and six children? >> yeah, five or six. >> five or six children who were still enslaved, and he had raised $750 to buy their freedom. the master reneged.

he was fed up. he was continuing to do that. and he had -- and this is something we do with our summer camp students and with our middle school students, is we make them go to harper's ferry as one of john brown's raiders. and they have to know the story, and with dangerfield newby, they have a coat with two notes. in one pocket is the actual letter that you write about here from his wife saying, husband come, come get us now. you can buy us now. come now. and in the other, of course, is a note from john brown saying we must free the millions of enslaved. and the man is looking at it saying, which do i do? can you tell the rest of the story? >> yeah. i think it's not known enough that this was among the many astonishing things about brown and his band. this was a biracial guerrilla band. and in this tiny mountain hideout -- you should go to the kennedy farm. it's a little log cabin.

it's like one of those little log cabins here in waterford. you had rought 20 men and women crammed into this little hideout all that summer. you can imagine how tense and sweaty it was. they're all writing letters to their lovers and family, essentially farewell letters because they know they might well die. among the letters are astonishing are from harriette newby to dangerfield. most were illiterate obviously. it's unusually to have them illiterate and we have their letters. and he goes there, really joins brown's band to rescue his wife and children. and the tragic part of it is he's the first of brown's band who is -- he's gunned down in the street in harper's ferry. his body is desecrated by angry whites. 50 miles short of his goal of

rescuing harriet. and the virginians collected these letters that he had from harriet that appear to have been on his person and published them. that's how we have them. the governor of virginia published all the documents, and they didn't see any indictment of slavery in these letters. they just published them. you just read these letters that are just heart-breaking saying, you know, come save me, dangerfield, because like many virginia slaves of that era, she was scared that she was going to be sold to a gang labor plantation in the deep south, and that's exactly what happened. six months later, she's sold to a plantation in louisiana. so you read these letters, and they're just heart-breaking. but we have them, thanks to the state of virginia. >> you speak about the biracial nature of his band and also his support. he had influential african-americans and very influential white northern

americans from emerson and thoreau. but the society -- the secret six, can you speak to that? who actually was funding this? >> right. yeah. brown was not a lone gunman. i think this is, again, a problem the way we remember him. we remember him as this possibly insane figure who this act was sort of part of one man's disturbed imagination. well, in fact, this was a full-blown conspiracy. and just maybe your first point about his black support, he, unlike many abolitionists, really sought black support and involvement. you know, really this was a white supremacist nation before the civil war north and south. whites regarded -- most whites regarded blacks as racially inferior, including lincoln, who wanted freed blacks to be resold in africa and central america because they couldn't live as equals to whites, and he's an

abolitionist. many were very condescending. their view was blacks were too docile to fight for freedom and leave it to us benevolent whites to care of this issue for you. brown completely rejected them. among those he saw support from was frederick douglas. he lived in douglas' home for a time. he meets with harriet tubman. blacks lived with him. he really lived his beliefs in a quiet, astonishing way. as to the white support, the secret six, really one of my favorite parts of the story. an area where there's a little room for humor, they were really parlor radicals. these entransincidentalists and very wealthy businessmen, mostly in the boston area who funneled brown money and guns.

and they fed him at salons in new england and brown dines with thoreau and emerson. alcott calls brown the manliest man they've ever met. they're intoxicated by this. it's quite a bit like the 1960s, when you had wealthy folks in manhattan hosting black panthers and other radicals. in the end, these people are not, shall we say, profiles in courage. when brown's raid goes bad and they're implicated, one of them is already overseas, three of the others flee for canada. my favorite, garrett smith, checks himself into an insane asylum in new york to avoid prosecution where he's treated with cannabis and morphine and that was apparently the treatment of the day. he comes out declaring he remembers nothing of the events of 1859, which might well have been true. so really only one of them,

thomas higgenson sort of remains true to brown. but yes, he has broad support from very prominent people, so this really isn't just a, you know, small band of in secret. a lot of people knew about this. >> i have about 1,000 more questions, but i want to open this because we did invite you for a conversation. so allow us to take questions from the floor. >> fare. >> fire away. >> my name is peter. i'm the architect at harper's ferry national park. >> one of my heroes. >> thank you for returning to hallowed ground for hosting this event. i was with you in september of 2009 for the 150th, the trek from the kennedy farm. >> right. october. >> october. it is such a wonderful event. i have two questions. when can we do that again? when can the journey through hallowed ground encourage the parks service and other partners to do that once every five years or so? another question is, when are we going to put your book into a movie?

>> allow us a segue. >> i think dennis leads that march every year. it was pretty raw when i did it which was appropriate because on the night that brown did it in 1859 with his men, it was wet and cold. so it didn't make for the most pleasant of hikes. but, you know, i found it very powerful. i was staying at a little motel outside harper's ferry, and we finished this whole thing at about midnight. i was sort in the research phase of my book, but i ran back to my motel and i merely sort of typed out my sort of experiences that night, blended with the history of what happened. that became the prologue of my book. >> which is just wonderful.

>> aside from giving you materials, and i'm sure there's other writers in the room, they put you in the right frame of mind. one of the hardest things about writing history is you're capturing the strangeness of the past but also communicating to a contemporary audience. there was something about that night, each just simple things. the steam coming off the horse as we, you know, walk -- marched in. the clop, the sounds. all of that just, i felt, made me able to write that scene in a way that otherwise from archival search alone would have been more difficult. on your second question, there have been movies that elude to john brown. some pretty bad ones. "santa fe trail." he's kind of too hot to handle. what do you do with brown? he's not a hollywood hero. he's a very complex figure. here's a guy we would feel was on the right side of history except that he shed blood to achieve his aims.

he's sort of a quintessential american with a bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. and that's -- i think he makes us very uncomfortable, and that's why i find him fascinating, why i think he's worthy of more study, but i think he poses a challenge. it's a very dramatic story, particularly all the other characters, and there's much more romance in this story than i would have guessed going into it. brown's followers are almost all young men unmarried, and they're working it hard with the girls in the entire lead-up, you know. and we have their love letters and we have some wonderful romantic stories. but i think it's a great story, but i am not sure it fits an easy hollywood mold. it's like nat turner, another figure in our history that there's never been a movie about that i know. >> want to go to tim? >> could you talk briefly about

the true, organized military battles of the civil war which took place in kansas? >> okay. all right. yeah. in telling this story, i spent quite a bit a time in kansas because brown's career as a militant abolitionist doesn't begin at harper's ferry. he really comes out of the closet so to speak in kansas, which in the mid 1850s which the front line in the war over whether slavery will expand to new western territories. i think what you're alluding to, which is quite remarkable and surprised me, and i think people outside of kansas and missouri aren't aware of is five years before the first battle of manasis, you have northerners and southerners killing each other over slavery in kansas in open-field combat with musket and cannon. these are small battles, not huge numbers of people involved. but it really is a preview of the civil war. john brown is right in the middle of it.

he's, you know -- he's one of the principal warriors in this really, i guess you would call it, a low grade conflict, maybe more like in iraq than a civil war. it really is to me a fascinating and not forgotten, but not recognized nearly as much as it should be. >> i want neil keller. >> yep. hi, neil. >> do you think john brown was -- do you think the bloodshed was necessary to end slavery? >> to end slavery. for those who may -- >> you can count on neil to get right to the core. was john brown right and was bloodshed necessary? again, this is -- i'm not going to dodge that question, but i think this, to me, again, was one of the reasons i wanted to write about this. because john brown really kind of drives people crackers, even leading scholars.

you read c. van woodward or a great writer like robert penn warren, they go right off the rails because everyone wants to irnl say he was a monster and a madman or a martyr and a freedom fighter and a hero. there's very little middle ground. it's a mistake to try to fit him into either box. this was, again, what is so fascinating about him is he raises these really prickly questions. is violence ever justified in the cause of justice? i think we would all agree he was right in recognizing not only that slavery was the great moral wrong in the nation, but that, you know, we needed to address it and confront this issue. and also be uncomfortable with the fact that he dragged pro slavery settlers from their beds in kansas in the middle of the

night and slaughtered them with broad swords. there was no way in my view to feel all one way or all the other about john brown. there are john brown. there are many people who do. i'm not able to do that. he is like every human being. he is an immensely complex figure. while the years i spent researching this book. i would not say he is a warm and cuddly guy. then another moment i would say how could you do this? that is part of what i find compelling about him. i'm not just prepared to say all right or all wrong. had to be this way or not. >> judith. >> the greater journey from slavery to abolitionist. you mentioned several things that the northern abolitionists

who were averting slavery from the developing nation. but also the misperception of southerners as the great protaganists. that at point in american history. recently, within the past ten years, there is a film. you also mentioned. a film that came up through sundance and is in distribution called "traces of the trade." it is about the brown and wolf family about the greatest -- >> i went to brown university. i know all about the brown

family. >> he ran the university and most of the north through the slave trade. and the documentary is available on youtube. it is a phenomenal story. i would like to enfold or have your opinion with regard to the greatest sin of slavery. i would like us to be absolved somehow in this little area of the world. >> in waterford, i'll absolve waterford. it was a quaker community. >> could you place the journey in the greater context of the slave trade? >> oh, gosh. i guess what i maybe just to restate. i was watching the leher hour

the other night. there was a young african-american with a placard saying "end black history month." his point is we shouldn't set this apart. black history is part of american history. this is all our story. and i guess that's what i was saying. in this era, at least, slavery is so much a part of the national story. we continue to do this with the south right up to the present in a different way. we still, i think, view the south, at times as northerners do, as an evil twin. we project what a national problems of racism and violence and lack of education. when that happens in mississippi or alabama, it's all over the news. when it happens in massachusetts and michigan, which it happens all the time, somehow it is a

different story. i think with our whole history, we have to -- i don't think it should be a blame game. i think we should recognize how much this was a part of our national story. i think we all know this. when you read the details of it and you read the dred scott decision in 1857 in which the majority of the supreme court decision, blacks have no rights as a white person is bound to expect. i think the word african-american is inappropriate for the period because they were not americans. they did not have the rights. even free blacks had no standing. they said the founders never intended them to have any standing. you read document after document like that and you read northern born presidents like franklin

pierce and the presidents of the 1850s essentially mouthing pro-slavery views. you see the picture differently. after brown's raid, you have massive demonstrations in the north against brown and in support of the slave-holding south because they are scared the union is going to split. they are saying, you are right. it is huge. we should stop thinking of this as somehow a southern story apart from the whole. i don't think that answers your question, but i try. >> joy. >> you referenced going to the places history happened. how important is it that we continue to protect those pla s places? places like the train station or harriet tubman's home?

>> you are speaking to the room. it embraces this. it is hard to people who don't know. maybe i'll answer that because we are all in agreement because these places should be safe. we're history nerds and preservati preservation. i would say when i talk to students, i'm very struck by there is so much you can do on the internet now. it is a remarkable tool. difficult i did it with this book. you can review the archives. i'm struck by how many students think that you can get it all through the computer and you don't need -- i'm talking about students in history classes at universities that somehow you don't need to see the place because you can get everything

you need to google and you can even look at it on google earth. i think as we all know you do need to go to these places. every time you do, you find something more. you find things you cannot come looking for. you have a different kind of experience. i would say particularly for the generation coming up that is their experience is so mediated to have real places that they can go and step outside of that laptop experience and be presented with the real places. i just think you can't replace that. of course, yes. save it all. [ applause ] >> on behalf of all of us, i want to thank you for coming this evening. i wanted to especially from the journey through hall owed

ground, give a token of our protection. as jen is getting that, what tony was just saying is why we are a team at the journey. i want those on our team to put your hand up. beth ericson and jennifer moore and robin myers, the director of educational programs and michelle kellogg. michelle is hopeful you will buy a copy or two or three of tony's books. we are blessed to have with us is the national advisor ron maxwell. the producer of "gods in general." and with whom we were able to do a very innovative program with warner bros. on his remarkable work on doing a limited edition

and partners with national geographic with beautiful maps and special features. ron has agreed to stay and sign a few for those who would like a copy of the limited edition box. most importantly what tony was just saying and joy, thank you for that question. there is no other solution than us all working together to raise awareness. once it is gone, it is gone. it is not just the bricks and mortar. it is truly is our culture. it is the stories. allowing people to step back in the boots and minds. it makes a difference with our students. i want to thank you for coming today. by you being here, we have been able to raise additional funds for our educational programs. tony, on behalf of all of us, a very small token of our