I agree that John Brown was scum, but...the Freeper you're helping out here claimed that the lyrics of the song promote attacks on civilians. Words mean things. He's busted.
It refers to a dead Union soldier of the same (rather common) name, as Mark Steyn notes:
At the time, Dr Samuel Howe was working with the Sanitary Commission of the Department of War, and one fall day he and Mrs Howe were taken to a camp a few miles from Washington for a review of General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. That day, for the first time in her life, Julia Ward Howe heard soldiers singing:
John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave
John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave…
Ah, yes. The famous song about the famous abolitionist hanged in 1859 in Charlestown, Virginia before a crowd including Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth.
Well, no, not exactly. “By a strange quirk of history,” wrote Irwin Silber, the great musicologist of Civil War folk songs, “‘John Brown’s Body’ was not composed originally about the fiery Abolitionist at all. The namesake for the song, it turns out, was Sergeant John Brown, a Scotsman, a member of the Second Batallion, Boston Light Infantry Volunteer Militia.”
Why do you say John Brown was scum?He was a devout fundamentalist Christian and conservative in most of his moral beliefs.
He just believed slavery was an abomination and used pretty extreme tactics to see it abolished.
Unwise in retrospect perhaps but it certainly doesn’t make him”scum”.