150 years ago today John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Va.

Henry David Thoreau wrote of John Brown

“He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or office-​holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.”