“some of that praise should have survived to the present.”
If by “the present” you mean 2015, it seems to me like very little of our history has survived to the present.
Why is Arlington a cemetery? Who was the Yellow Rose of Texas? How many people did German saboteurs kill within our borders? How many people did FDR clap in mental hospitals without due process? What did Kennedy give Khrushchev in return for publicly ceasing to install missile silos in Cuba?
If you like historical novels, there is a great one about John Brown. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flashman-Angel-Lord-Papers-Book/dp/000721720X?tag=duc08-21 (Caution: contains some indecency.)
I’ve read a couple of biographies of John Brown. Otto Scott’s “Secret Six” being one of them, the title of the other escapes me at the moment.