On Saturday night, May 24, 1856, John Brown and his band visited house after house upon Pottawatomie Creek, and, calling man after man from his bed, murdered five in cold blood. They first visited the house of Doyle, and compelled a father and two sons to go with them. The next morning, the father and one son were found dead in the road about two hundred yards from the house. The father was "shot in the forehead and stabbed in the breast. The son's head was cut open, and there was a hole in his jaw as though made by a knife." The other son was found dead about a hundred and fifty yards away in the grass, "his fingers cut off and his arms cut off, his head cut open, and a hole in his breast."
Then they went to Wilkinson's, reaching there after midnight. They forced open the door and ordered him to go with them. His wife was sick and helpless, and begged them not to take him away. Her prayer was of no avail. The next day Wilkinson was found dead, "a gash in his head and side "
Their next victim was William Sherman. When found in the morning, his "skull was split open in two places, and some brains were washed out. A large hole was cut in his breast, and his left hand was cut off, a little piece of skin on one side." The execution was done with short cutlasses brought from Ohio by Brown.
-excerpt from "End of an Era"
I have had discussions with pro-CSA types who believe the Lawrence Massacre during the war was fully justified because it was done in retaliation for Kansas attacks on Missourians. If you accept this premise, then JB's murders on Pottawatomie Creek were equally justified.
(Personally I believe neither attack was justified.)
Here's the thing. A great moral crime was being committed against the slaves. If anybody ever had a moral right to use violence in their cause, the slaves did. Certainly they would have been far more morally justified in doing so than were American colonists in the 1770s, when they resorted to violence in resistance to what was mostly at the point possible future oppression.
If the slaves had a moral right to use violence against their oppressors, then others had a moral right to join them in their resistance, as the French assisted us in our Revolution.
John Brown was a very poor tactician, but few people at the time claimed he was crazy. Even the governor of VA, who visited him in jail, thought him a fine soft-spoken gentleman.
If you were being held in slavery in Algeria in 1800, would you have had a moral right to resist your owners with violence? If you believe you had such a right, why wouldn't American blacks held in slavery have the same right? I'm just interested in your reason why person A is entitled to defend his freedom with violence, but person B is not.