Martyr or Madman: John Brown’s Lingering Legacy

“Tragic Prelude" is a 31-foot-by-11-foot-by-6-inch mural by John Steuart Curry, in 1937, for the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, Kansas. "I wanted to paint him as a fanatic, for John Brown was a fanatic. He had the wild zeal of the extremist, the fanatic for his cause—and we had the Civil War, with its untold misery," Curry said in a 1939 newspaper interview. Public Domain

Sunday, Oct. 16, 1859. A light rain fell across the dark and sleeping town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

The name of the town lost its apostrophe in 1891, and earlier, in 1863, the town itself became a part of West Virginia, as the only state to secede from a Confederate state.