Bleeding Kansas to Harpers Ferry: John Brown's Radical Crusade | The American Story | Ep 15

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal.
So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Up from payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra, initial plan term only, greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy, see terms.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:33)
Across the American frontier in 1832, a spiritual fire is beginning to burn. It's toward the end of a period historians will later call the Second Great Awakening. It's a wave of revival meetings and conversations that sweep across towns and cities all over America.
One man deeply affected by the revival is a young newspaper editor named Elijah Lovejoy. He works for a newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, a city perched on the uneasy edge between the slave South and the free West. Lovejoy experiences a religious conversion so powerful that he sells his stake in the newspaper business and heads east to Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He is determined to become a minister. Two years later, 1834, a group of St. Louis businessmen approached him with a new venture. They want to launch a newspaper devoted to religious and moral education, and they want Lovejoy to run it. So the newly trained pastor returns to the frontier city and becomes the editor of the St. Louis Observer. Lovejoy dives into the work with anti-slavery editorials that slowly grow more and more pointed. At first, he supports gradual reform of slavery. But by 1837, he demands total emancipation.
The reaction in St. Louis is vicious. Lovejoy receives constant death threats. Now a husband and a father, he moves his family across the Mississippi River to the town of Alton in Illinois. It's a free state, hoping the river would serve as some sort of a moral border. But the river does not hold back the pro-slavery fury. In Alton, Lovejoy pastors a Presbyterian church and continues publishing his anti-slavery newspaper. A mob breaks in, destroys his printing press, and thanks to donations from supporters on the East Coast, he is able to buy a new one. But the pro-slavery mob again breaks in, steals the press, and dumps it in the Mississippi River.
Lovejoy isn't stopped, he just keeps going. November 7th, 1837, around 3 o'clock in the morning, a steamboat delivers yet another replacement printing press. Lovejoy is at the warehouse to receive it, but like clockwork, a pro-slavery mob quickly arrives and surrounds the warehouse. One man climbs a ladder and tries to set the roof on fire. Lovejoy rushes out of the warehouse with a gun and fires up at the man.
As soon as he does, multiple gunshots crack through the cold night air. When the smoke clears, 34-year-old Elijah Lovejoy lies dead on the ground, shot five times by the mob.
News of the killing spread all across the north. In a small town of Hudson, Ohio, an abolitionist stronghold, mourners gather at a memorial service for Lovejoy. Among them is a tall man, a thin man with a stern expression. His name is John Brown. John's known among this crowd for his help on the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves on their escape north. Brown suddenly rises from his seat and the somber room grows even more quiet.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:59)
With his eyes blazing, he raises his right hand and says, Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:15)
At that moment, no one in the room realizes the significance of what they've just heard. But that vow, it is the spark that ignites one man's war and accelerates America's unraveling.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:33)
This is the American Story, The Beginnings, adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton. Episode 15, John Brown's Radical Crusade.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:55)
In 1849, the South clung desperately to parity in the Senate, because when the 31st Congress opened in December that year, there were exactly 30 states represented, 15 that allowed slavery and 15 that did not. That even split meant the South could block any legislation perceived as threatening to their way of life. But in the House of Representatives, free states dominated, 140 to 91 The South knew that without Senate equality, their influence would crumble, leaving slavery vulnerable to the Northern Whims. It was a very fragile truce, and with the nation constantly expanding, the cracks in that truce were harder and harder to patch. But there was one senator who still thought he was up to the task. Henry Clay of Kentucky.