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"When a prophet like John Brown appears, how must we of the world receive him?"
John Brown is one of the more enigmatic figures in history because he, unlike most of us, knew absolutely what he believed, and unlike almost all of us, wouldn't compromise on what he knew. And so, knowing that slavery was wrong and that violence was an acceptable means to defeat the evil of slavery he got a bunch of people killed in a sort of insane raid the intention of which was to create an armed highway of black exodus from slavery through the mountains. Is he a hero for this? Or an insane person? Or do our normal categories not apply?
I tend to think the world is thicker and stronger because John Brown lived in it once.

Thanks is due to Marilynne Robinson, in this as in many things, for recalling Brown to our national attention in her Gilead novels.