THE NEWLY MINTED 2016 QUARTER

By Jeff Paulk

Maybe I am a bit slower than most folks at noticing things, or maybe I just haven’t seen this until today, but the newly minted 2016 quarter pays tribute to John Brown.  “Who is John Brown?” many will ask.  Well, to give the short and sweet answer, he was America’s first terrorist.  It doesn’t surprise me that this government of ours would honor such a person.  After all, it, and the media, fall all over themselves when it comes to Martin Luther King, Jr. who had communist connections and associations, and was a plagiarist. The truth is not told about him, just as it is not told about Abraham Lincoln due to government control over the curriculum taught in our schools.  But, herein, I shall tell you the truth about John Brown.

John Brown was a radical abolitionist who envisioned violent slave uprisings in which slaves would murder their masters.  In Aug. 1855 he followed 5 of his sons to Kansas to help make the state a haven for anti-slavery settlers.  He led attacks on people who had moved to Kansas from Southern states. On the evening of 23 May 1856, he and 6 followers, including 4 of his sons, visited the homes of Southern men along Pottawatomie Creek, dragged their unarmed inhabitants into the night, and hacked them to death with long-edged swords, in front of their wives and children.  At once, "Old Brown of Osawatomie" became a feared and hated target of Southern transplants.  It did not matter that these people were not slave-owners, they were from the South and needed exterminating, just as General Sherman proceeded to do a few years later in Lincoln’s illegal war. 

       
In autumn 1856, temporarily defeated but still committed to his vision of a slave insurrection, Brown returned to Ohio. There and during 2 subsequent trips to Kansas, he developed a grandiose plan to free slaves throughout the South. Provided with moral and financial support from prominent New England abolitionists, Brown began by raiding plantations in Missouri but accomplished little. In the summer of 1859 he transferred his operations to western Virginia, collected an army of 21 men, including 5 blacks, and on the night of October 16th raided the government armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry.  From there he planned to arm the thousands of chattels who, learning of his crusade, would flock to his side. Instead, numerous bands of militia and a company of U.S. Marines under Bvt. Col. Robert E. Lee hastened to the river village, where they trapped the raiders inside the fire-engine house and on the 18th stormed the building. The fighting ended with 10 of Brown's people killed and 7 captured, Brown among them.
       
After a sensational trial, he was found guilty of treason against Virginia and was hanged at Charlestown, amid much fanfare,  Dec. 2, 1859. The stately, fearless, unrepentant manner in which he comported himself in court and on the gallows made him a martyr in parts of the North.
Source: "Historical Times Encyclopedia of the Civil War" Edited by Patricia L. Faust
  
If John Brown was so determined to put an end to slavery, why didn’t he start by trying to end it in the North?  Child slave labor was quite common in the northern factories, but that doesn’t get taught in our schools. What an upside down country we live in.  We have monuments, schools, and streets dedicated to people who have done their best to destroy what our Founding Fathers established, and at the same time, we have people trying to destroy the history, culture, and heritage of one specific group of people, Southerners, but if the same deeds were perpetrated upon any other group in this country, we would see the media and the government howling like a run over dog.  Now we have a newly minted coin to honor America’s first terrorist, who, by the way, in case you were not aware, is the subject of the famous song, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, written by Julia Ward Howe, which is blasphemy in song. But that’s another topic for another time.