proclamation. you don t have, you know, exactly. what we re talking about here is so fascinating. you have no hallowed grounds. or different hallowed grounds. or different. we d be in a different country. we would be in a literally different country. so in that vain and i know that you have actually slept in that sounds kinkier than that. it s one of the very many devastating battlefield sights within the journey. it was because of antietem that lincoln was then, if you will, free to release the emancipation proclamation. talk to us about the fact that that s just a stone s throw from harper s ferry, and it s three years but hundreds and thousands of lives in between. it s bizarre. the story comes full circle in this essentially very small geographic area. you have brown at the kennedy farm invading harper s ferry in 1859. harper s ferry is a flash point and the civil war changes hands a dozen times. stonewall jackson takes harper s ferry a awe few days before
are just heart-breaking saying, you know, come save me, dangerfield, because like many virginia slaves of that era, she was scared that she was going to be sold to a gang labor plantation in the deep south, and that s exactly what happened. six months later, she s sold to a plantation in louisiana. so you read these letters, and they re just heart-breaking. but we have them, thanks to the state of virginia. you speak about the biracial nature of his band and also his support. he had influential african-americans and very influential white northern americans from emerson and thoreau. but the society the secret six, can you speak to that? who actually was funding this? right. yeah. brown was not a lone gunman. i think this is, again, a problem the way we remember him. we remember him as this possibly insane figure who this act was sort of part of one man s disturbed imagination. well, in fact, this was a full-blown conspiracy. and just maybe your first point about his bla
thim o getting the other nomination and the other effect it has is that it begins the fury in the south. we can t trust any northerner, so that steven douglas, who has sort of seemed the likely democratic nominee, who could unite north and south, the party is split. douglas is one nominee. there is another democratic nominee, breckenridge. and then a whole other party forms. when you have the november election, no for candidates in the field and lincoln wins with less than 40% of the vote. if i had to guess, i would say if you hadn t had the raid, probably douglas would have become president who was a northerner who was very conciliatory towards the south, and this whole war would have been deferred for at least another four years. and who knows. i mean, then any number of other scenarios could have unfolded. so that s just a guess. i mean, but it s a significant it s more than significant, and it s so compelling. because that, of course, you just unrolled that a little b