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I would not call him insane - but ways to optimistic and to self confident that his own plans would work out. This happens to the best people sometimes.

this could properly be a confident and no question: right it is why? The raid on Harpers Ferry is generally theory to have finished plenty to set the rustic on a path in the direction of civil war. Southern slave-vendors, listening to preliminary comments that hundreds of abolitionists have been in touch, have been relieved the attempt became into so small. yet they feared different abolitionists could emulate Brown and attempt to lead slave rebellions. subsequently the South reorganized the decrepit protection stress gadget. those militias, properly-standard via 1861, became a waiting-made accomplice military, making the South extra perfect arranged for war. Southern Democrats charged that Brown's raid became into an inevitable results of the Republican celebration's political platform, which they linked with Abolitionism. In gentle of the imminent elections in November 1860, the Republican political and editorial reaction to John Brown tried to distance themselves as much as attainable from Brown, condemning the raid and brushing off Brown as an insane enthusiast. As one historian explains, Brown became into effective in polarizing politics: "Brown's raid succeeded brilliantly. It drove a wedge interior the path of the already tentative and fragile opposition-Republican coalition and helped to intensify the sectional polarization that quickly tore the Democratic celebration and the Union aside." Many abolitionists interior the North seen John Brown as a martyr who were sacrificed for the sins of the rustic. at present after the raid, William Lloyd Garrison printed a column interior the Liberator, judging Brown's raid as "properly-meant yet regrettably defective" and "an business enterprise so wild and futile as this". in spite of the shown fact that, he defended Brown's character from detractors interior the Northern and Southern press, and argued that people who supported the concepts of the yankee Revolution ought to not continually oppose Brown's raid. (Garrison reiterated the factor, including that "each and every time started, i won't be able to yet choose fulfillment to all slave insurrections", in a speech in Boston on the day Brown became into hanged).