H.P. Pufncraft

226 years ago yesterday, John Brown was born in a one room house in Torrington, Connecticut. By any honest modern definition, he grew up to become one of the most consequential terrorists in American history. He failed at almost everything before that. Tannery: bankrupt. Wool brokerage: bankrupt. Cattle trading: bankrupt. Land speculation: bankrupt. He buried four children to dysentery in a single month in 1843, lost his first wife in childbirth, fathered 20 children across two marriages, and drifted from one collapsing venture to the next while becoming convinced that God had personally chosen him as the instrument of slavery's destruction. On the night of May 24, 1856, he put that conviction into practice. In retaliation for the pro-slavery sack of Lawrence, Kansas, he and a small band including four of his sons rode to a settlement along Pottawatomie Creek, dragged five unarmed men out of their cabins in front of their wives and children, and hacked them to death with cavalry broadswords. The youngest victim was 20. None of the five had personally owned slaves. The killings were meant to send a message, and they did. Three years later, secretly financed by six wealthy New England abolitionists known as the Secret Six, he led 21 men in a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. The plan was to seize tens of thousands of weapons, distribute roughly a thousand iron pikes he had commissioned in advance to enslaved people across the South, and ignite a continent-wide uprising. He understood, and accepted, that this would mean a war of extermination across the slave states. The first person his men killed was Heyward Shepherd, a free Black baggage handler. The raid collapsed within 36 hours. He was captured by Col. Robert E. Lee, tried for treason, and hanged six weeks later. Maj. Thomas Jackson, soon to be Stonewall, commanded the gallows guard. John Wilkes Booth borrowed a militia uniform to attend. Victor Hugo wrote from France pleading for his life. Emerson called him a saint who would "make the gallows glorious like the cross." His final note, slipped to a jailer on the walk to the scaffold: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." 16 months later: Fort Sumter. Within five years Union soldiers were marching south singing "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave." The honest assessment is uncomfortable. He committed political murder of unarmed civilians to coerce a society, which is the textbook definition of terrorism. He plotted to trigger a race war he expected to consume hundreds of thousands of lives. He was a religious fanatic who believed God spoke to him directly, who treated his own sons as expendable soldiers in that mission, and two of them died at Harpers Ferry because of it. If a man with the same résumé acted today, on behalf of any cause we did not already agree with, no one would hesitate to call him what he was. He was also right. Slavery was a moral crime so vast that the country did, in the end, only purge it in blood, exactly as he predicted, at a cost of roughly 750,000 lives. He was one of the very few white Americans of his generation willing to actually die alongside Black men for Black freedom while polite abolitionists were still writing pamphlets. Frederick Douglass, who knew him and refused to join the raid because he thought it was suicide, said it cleanly: "His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun." John Brown forces an awkward question that Americans have never really resolved. If terrorism is violence in service of a political end, and the political end is the immediate destruction of chattel slavery, what exactly are we supposed to do with him.

Now let’s work on a joint investigation into the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good — instead of cherry picking when we seek justice and when we turn a blind eye.

She wrote Allah in the sand, the waves wiped it out instantly! Then she wrote Jesus and the waves respected it, never touching it. Not coincidence. That's the name above every name. JESUS REIGNS FOREVER! 🙏🏻🕊