[Aurelius]

"Was it because Turner was just on a murder spree and Brown was out to free slaves?"

Everything that I have read about Brown suggests that antislavery was just an excuse for indulging his real love, which was homicide, the more brutal the better.

[wardaddy]

Bump....really, it would seem they could find better "heroes" to defend doesn't it? I doubt any of these Brown defenders on this thread are brainwashed public school kids steeped in Afrocentricity.. hence what's their excuse?

[Non-Sequitur]

If his first love was homicide then he would have practiced it more indiscriminately. He stuck to killing people while fighting his own war on slavery. The whole Kansas-Missouri border was like that prior to the war. For example, on May 19, 1858, 30 pro-slavery men crossed the Kansas border south of the Marais des Cygnes River. They rounded up 11 local free-state men and marched them to a ravine near the Missouri border. There, they opened fire on the unarmed prisoners, killing five and wounding five other. One man escaped being shot by falling to the ground and playing dead. John Brown showed up a few weeks later and began construction of a fort near the ravine. I guess that didn't work out because he headed east after that.