150 Years Later, John Brown's Failed Slave Revolt Marches On He had a safe house, weapons and a mole planted among his unsuspecting victims.
He had wealthy backers, a juicy military target outside Washington and fanatical followers ready to die for their cause.
He was a religious zealot who hated what he saw as an evil and corrupt system. And 150 years ago this week, in what is now the quaint tourist town of Harper's Ferry, W.Va., he fueled the smoldering fires of Civil War, helped doom slavery in America and prepared the way for the civil rights movement and beyond.
He was John Brown, a 59-year-old abolitionist patriarch who sired 20 children, directed his share of the blood-letting in "Bleeding Kansas," and now hoped to start a slave insurrection that would spread from the mountains of Virginia to the plantations of the deep South
