Old John Brown, the Man Whose Soul Is Marching On

John Brown’s body may lie mouldering in the grave—but what did he do with it before it got there? Walter Hawkins begins with the question behind the marching song, and with a man who believed his life belonged to freedom.

Writing in the 1910s, Hawkins looks back to the United States before the Civil War, where slavery and the demand for liberty were drawing the nation toward crisis. He traces Brown from a boy raised on the Bible and the pioneer frontier to an abolitionist driven by an unshakable sense of duty. His devotion could seem eccentric, even reckless; his campaign against slavery would carry him into danger and make his body, as well as his convictions, part of the cause. Was Brown a fool swept along by fate—or a servant of a purpose larger than himself?

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