Frederick Douglass, image courtesy of the Library of Congress

John Brown's zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.

Frederick Douglass

Douglass was a nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. On August 16, 1859, Brown met with Douglass and tried to convince him to join him at Harpers Ferry. Just two months later, after Brown's arrest at Harper's Ferry, authorities found a letter from Douglass to Brown. Douglass fled to Canada and then to a planned lecture tour of England to escape arrest on charges of being an accomplice in the raid. When he returned to the United States in 1860, he was not charged in the raid.

A fanatic, a murderer, and a troublemaker. One of the best things Robert E. Lee ever did was to hang old John Brown

Harry S. Truman

In a letter smuggled into John Brown's prison cell, Watkins wrote:

Although the hands of Slavery throw a barrier between you and me, and it may not be my privilege to see you in the prison house, Virginia has no bolts or bars through which I dread to send you my sympathy...I thank you that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race. You have rocked the bloody Bastille; and I hope from your sad fate great good may arise to the cause of freedom...
— Frances Watkins

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), was an African-American writer, lecturer, and political activist, who promoted abolition, civil rights, women's rights, and temperance. John Brown was the principal at Union Seminary in Ohio when Watkins taught sewing there.

Mahala Doyle sent this letter to Brown while he was in jail:

Altho' vengeance is not mine, I confess that I do feel gratified to hear that you were stopped in your fiendish career at Harper's Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You can't say you done it to free slaves. We had none and never expected to own one...My son John Doyle whose life I begged of you is now grown up and is very desirous to be at Charlestown on the day of your execution.
— Mahala Doyle

On May 24, 1856, John Brown traveled to Pottawatomie Creek and directed his men in the murder of five proslavery settlers including Mahala Doyle's husband and two of her sons. Although proslavery forces launched a manhunt, Brown evaded capture until the raid on Harpers Ferry.

Lucius Bierce,
image courtesy of the City of Akron, Ohio.

When Brown was hanged in December 1859, Lucius urged that courts and businesses in Akron be closed, and mourning bells tolled for a solid hour across the town. At a rally, he gave Brown a rousing send-off, praising him as "the first martyr in the irrepressible conflict of liberty with slavery."
Lucius said:

Thank God I furnished him with arms, and right good use did he make of them. Men like Brown may die, but their acts and principles will live forever.

Lucius Bierce

Lucius Bierce was a founding member of the state Republican party and the mayor of Akron, Ohio six times from 1839 to 1868. He was an ardent abolitionist, and he financed anti-slavery efforts. One of his friends and neighbors in Akron was John Brown. As an attorney, Lucius was well acquainted with Brown who also happened to be a co-religionist in the local Congregational church. When Brown left Ohio for Kansas, he took with him, compliments of Lucius Bierce, a wagonload of arms and ammunition somewhat questionably appropriated from a disbanded militia store. Included in the haul were the broadswords that Brown and his henchmen would use to butcher three members of the Doyle family, proslavery settlers on the banks of Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, a few months later.

Though it convert the whole Northern people, without exception, into furious, armed abolition invaders, yet old Brown will be hung! That is the stern and irreversible decree, not only of the authorities of Virginia, but of the PEOPLE of Virginia, without a dissenting voice...The miserable old traitor and murderer belongs to the gallows, and the gallows will have its own.

Richmond "Whig" newspaper editorial quoted in the "Liberator", Nov. 18, 1859
 

I am here to plead his cause with you. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain, which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; his is an angel of light.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is most famous for Walden, his essay on civil disobedience, and appreciation for nature. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, praised the writings of Wendell Phillips, and defended radical John Brown.

Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life, for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this Slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, — I say LET IT BE DONE.

John Brown
 

Old Brown has just been executed. We cannot object even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States (1861–1865), and staunchly opposed the expansion of slavery into federal territories. His victory in the 1860 presidential election further polarized the nation and led to seven Southern slave states seceding from the United States to form the Confederate States of America. These events soon led to the American Civil War.