Brown, John, American slavery abolitionist; settled in Kansas, and resolutely opposed the project of making it a slave state; in the interest of emancipation, with six others, seized on the State armoury at Harper's Ferry in hope of a rising, entrenched himself armed in it, was surrounded, seized, tried, and hanged (1800‒1859).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Brown, Henry Kirke * Brown, John