Brown was pretty special, wasn't he?
He was certainly an unusual person.
As Fredrick Douglass said, he could live his life to give freedom to the slave, but Brown was more committed, and he would die to give freedom to the slave.
The slave power was basded on the use of force, torture, occasional murder, and other forms of coercion. John Brown recognized that, and was willing to turn those methods against the slave power.
And for that, the slave power supporters will never forgive him. After all, they were special, entitled to use force to support slavery, and noone else was permitted to use their methods against them.
I didn’t know that the Virginia treason statute had a provision about alternative governments in it. I learn something from these threads.