#basically after he got in Harper's Ferry he didn't move any more and just let the government make him a martyr

[illimitable-freedom]

from Midnight Rising: John Brown and the raid that sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz:

"Thoreau cast Brown as an exemplar of principled resistance to authority. "Is it possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" he asked. "Are laws to be enforced simply because they are made?" Brown, he said, had resisted unjust laws and stood up for human dignity, "knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any & all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all." (210-211.)

"I felt for a number of years", Brown later wrote in a letter to a young abolitionist, "a steady and strong desire to die." But in the same letter he expressed his undying commitment to the destruction of slavery. "Certainly the cause is enough to live for," Brown wrote, and he was "now rather anxious to live for a few years more." (28).

i see so many thomas jefferson fans, but barely any john brown fans?? like, hello?? that man was fucking legendary