Henry Kagi was born in 1728 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and later settled in Virginia. Descendants lived in Ohio, California Nebraska, Virginia, and elsewhere. One descendant, John Henry, was born in Trumbull County, Ohio and was associated with the abolitionist movement.
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Written from John Brown's secretary of war: Received a note from J.B....requesting me to send writing case and package of papers...say to J.B. that I wrote him on my arrival here care of F.D., Rochester [Frederick Douglass]; Docketed by John Brown. Accompanied by a collateral photograph (See GLC07235.02).
A brief, illustrated biography of abolitionist John Brown, his efforts to destroy the institution of slavery, the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859, and the role his cause played in the onset of the Civil War.
John Brown's father on the day of his birth, May 9, 1800, wrote "John was born one hundred years after his great grandfather. Nothing else very uncommon." Many years later came the 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre, where his uncommon convictions led him and his band of abolitionists to kill five pro-slavery settlers in Franklin County, Kansas. Three years later, Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and his subsequent trial and execution helped push an already divided nation inexorably toward civil war. This is the story of John Brown, the age he embodied and the myth he became, and how the tragic gravity of his actions transformed America's past and future. Through biographical narrative, his life and legacy are discussed as a study in metaphor and power and the nature of historical memory.