Even from your bunker in Bizarro World, you ought to realize that even if he resented the cotton business it wouldn't have been the use of free labor that he complained about.
John Brown spent a lot of time working with Massachusetts wool merchants and other wealthy Massachusetts liberals. It was these wealthy liberal elites who financed his raid.
Distorted in so many ways. Brown wanted to get higher prices for the farmers from the woolen manufacturers. He wasn't on the side of the big manufacturers. When Brown became known as an abolitionist activist he connected with several upscale Easterners who gave him money. Most of them weren't truly rich and I don't see that any of them was especially active in the wool trade. But hey, why let facts stand in the way of an idiotic conspiracy theory?
How so? If I saw people getting rich because they were exploiting free labor, it would piss me the h3ll off! I would be quite angry and resentful about it, and i'm not the only one.
Ever hear Union people or just ordinary workers complain about slave labor in the third world, or H-1B visas?
Why wouldn't John Brown, who actually had to work for a living, not be resentful about his main economic competitors getting rich off of not only free labor, but labor which he consider to be evil and immoral?
Putting myself in his shoes, it would make me furious.
Distorted in so many ways. Brown wanted to get higher prices for the farmers from the woolen manufacturers.
Yes, he tried to organize Massachusetts wool merchants to regulate grades of wool so as to command a better price for the best quality and such. The Massachusetts producers were happy enough with the prices they were getting, and didn't see the need to buy in to his more complicated grading system.
Most of them weren't truly rich and I don't see that any of them was especially active in the wool trade.
The ringleaders of his funding efforts weren't wool merchants, but I dare say he wouldn't have made their acquaintance had he stayed down in Kansas instead of Massachusetts. Why was he in Massachusetts? To organize the wool merchants there.