John Brown: The Spark That Lit the Fire — The Complete Audiobook
On the morning of December 2, 1859, an old man rode to the gallows sitting on his own coffin and handed his jailer a prophecy: the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away but with blood. Sixteen months later, the Civil War began. John Brown had failed at nearly everything in fifty-nine years — tanneries, cattle, wool, farming — bankrupt, sued, and ridiculed along the way. The one thing he did not fail at was igniting the war that ended slavery.
Over eleven and three-quarter hours of listening follow the whole road: the Calvinist tanner's son raised on the Ohio frontier; the vow sworn after Elijah Lovejoy's murder to devote his life to destroying slavery; Frederick Douglass in his Springfield kitchen; the League of Gileadites raised against the Fugitive Slave Act; Bleeding Kansas and the Pottawatomie night this biography does not flinch from; 'Osawatomie Brown'; the Secret Six and their secret Boston money; the Missouri raid that freed eleven enslaved people and carried them a thousand miles to Canada; and Harpers Ferry — the seized federal armory, the Marines under Robert E. Lee, the treason trial, and the scaffold that turned a failed raid into the spark of emancipation. Saint or terrorist, prophet or madman: the documented man, weighed whole.
Inside this biography:
Chapter 1: The Tannery Son (1800–1820)
Chapter 2: Tanner, Surveyor, Dreamer (1820–1835)
Chapter 3: The Wool Merchant's Fall (1835–1846)
Chapter 4: The League of Gileadites (1846–1851)
Chapter 5: Kansas (1855)
Chapter 6: Pottawatomie (1856)
Chapter 7: The Hero of Osawatomie (1856–1857)
Chapter 8: The Secret Six (1857–1858)
Chapter 9: The Missouri Raid (1858–1859)
Chapter 10: The Kennedy Farm (1859)
Chapter 11: Harpers Ferry (1859)
Chapter 12: The Trial (1859)
Chapter 13: The Gallows (1859)
Chapter 14: The War He Foresaw (1860–1865)
Format: MP3 ZIP file audiobook, delivered as chapter files, yours to keep and play anywhere.
