Brown, John (1800–1859)

US slavery abolitionist. With 18 men, on the night of 16 October 1859, he seized the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, apparently intending to distribute weapons to runaway slaves who would then defend a mountain stronghold, which Brown hoped would become a republic of former slaves. On 18 October the arsenal was stormed by US Marines under Col Robert E Lee. Brown was tried and hanged at Charlestown on 2 December, becoming a martyr and the hero of the popular song ‘John Brown's Body’.

Brown was born in Connecticut and grew up in Ohio where he was heavily influenced by strong antislavery sentiment. He studied for the Congregationalist ministry and, although he abandoned this at the age of 18, he remained deeply religious. He then led an itinerant life and tried farming in several of the eastern states before he settled as a farmer in Kansas in 1855.

At the time Kansas was deeply divided over the slavery issue following the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which allowed the settlers of the territory to decide whether or not to permit slavery. Like many evangelicals of his era, Brown regarded abolition as a moral crusade, but unlike most of his contemporaries he accepted the use of violence to promote the abolitionist cause. In 1856, spurred by the sack of Lawrence, Kansas by proslavery forces, Brown and five of his sons attacked and murdered five proslavery farmers living on the Pottawatomie River, an incident later known as the ‘Pottawatomie massacre’. They managed to escape punishment, and Brown spent the next three years collecting funds from wealthy abolitionists in order to establish a colony for runaway slaves in the mountains of Virginia.

After the unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown and his men were sentenced to death. Northern abolitionists cited the executions as an example of the government's support for slavery. For those sympathetic to the abolitionism, John Brown was a martyr who died for his belief that slavery should be abolished. As time went on Brown's name became a symbol of the pro-Union, antislavery cause. In 1881 the African-American leader Frederick Douglass delivered a speech honouring him, and Harpers Ferry became the site of Storer College, a school for African Americans. See United States: history 1783–1861, the Dred Scott Case and Harpers Ferry.

Brown, John (1826–1883)

Scottish servant and confidant of Queen Victoria from 1858.

Brown, John (1810–1882)

Scottish essayist. His essays are simple and unaffected; they include ‘Rab and his Friends’ (1859; about a dog) and ‘Marjorie Fleming’ (1863), and were collected in Horae Subsecivae (1858–82) and John Leech (1877).

Brown was born in Biggar, Lanark. At Edinburgh University he studied medicine. Except for two years in Chatham, Kent, 1831–33 as assistant to a Scottish doctor, he spent all his life in Edinburgh.

Brown, John (1715–1766)

English poet and dramatist. He defended utilitarianism as a philosophy in his ‘Essay on the Characteristics of Shaftesbury’ (1751). His Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), a vehement satire on luxury, was exceedingly popular, and his Barbarossa (1754) was played with success by David Garrick.

Brown, John (1735–1788)

Scottish physician. He was the founder of the Brunonian system of medicine: the Brunonian theory attributed disease processes to a state of too great or too little excitability of the tissues; treatment resolved itself into stimulation if the excitability was lessened and soothing remedies if the excitability was too great.

As a result of his obvious aptitude and intelligence, he was admitted free to the lectures at Edinburgh University. In 1780 he published his Elementa Medicinae, in which he explained a new system of treatment. Written in Latin he was famous as a Latin scholar this book gained him a world-wide reputation.

Brown, John (1816–1896)

English steel and armour-plate manufacturer. Brown maintained and improved the Bessemer process of steel production and invented a method of rolling armour-plate. Hammered armour-plate had been used hitherto, but Brown's method was so successful that he received orders from the Admiralty for armour-plate for about three-quarters of the ships in the British navy. In 1856 he started the huge Atlas works for the manufacture of armour-plate, railway buffers, ordnance forgings, railway carriage axles, tyres and steel rails.

Brown was born in Sheffield, England. At the age of 14 he became an apprentice in a file and table cutlery factory, of which he ultimately became the manager. He invented the conical steel buffer for railway wagons and was the first to make steel rails. He was twice mayor and master-culter of Sheffield. Brown was knighted in 1867.