Two choices? That's it? John Brown's raid can be seen from many angles. It could be seen as a terrorist act that was hoped to spark a huge uprising of the enslaved and the creation of a liberated Virginia in the hills west of the Alleghenies. And it could also be seen as another failure in a long series of failures of a frustrated businessman and farmer given to magical thinking about his inability to prosper being a direct result of slavery, instead of because of his narcissistic confidence and overestimation of his real abilities, and possibilities...the plot of a deeply unhappy man looking for someone to blame, somewhat like Lee Harvey Oswald.

Of course, like all his previous ventures it failed. On his way to the gallows he remarked at what a beautiful area it was, that he hadn't looked at it before. Clearly, he hadn't done any preparation. If he'd spent some time in that part of Virginia, he would have discovered that the enslaved in Harper's Ferry and the surroundings were not a powder keg to touch off, a restive group that would rise to rebellion. If he had spent some time west of the Alleghenies, he would have found fewer enslaved but he would also have found very lukewarm support -even hostility- to creating a breakaway Abolitionist republic. And considering the mounting Southern paranoia about slave revolts and a growing Underground Railroad, as well as the Southern honor culture that was never far from violence, he could have easily realized there would be an overwhelming punitive response to his raid ( even if the first responders, members of the local militias, quickly took themselves off to the nearest tavern and became too drunk to be effective). It was absurd then and now to think dozen-odd volunteers with pikes were going to end slavery, dismantle a national economic system or bring down a government.

But that's just what John Brown's raid was. What it meant to people is something else. Had it happened in, say, 1820, he would likely have been seen as some sort of mad man. However, in the incredibly fierce antagonism between the north and south in 1859, he quickly became an important symbol to abolitionists in the North, a symbol of the righteous violence that many wanted in reprisal to the Southern violence that had successfully been employed in safeguarding and spreading slavery. And when that reprisal finally happened in a realistic way, at the hands of the Union Army, John Brown could be usefully put into a song. It was the first time and the one place where he wasn't really pointless.