The Day They Hanged Old Brown: The Making of Celebrity and Martyrdom in the Civil War Era

Abolitionist, fanatic, terrorist, freedom fighter, alleged murderer—all of those labels fit John Brown. Yet he also qualified as a mid-nineteenth-century celebrity. Reserved only for a few, celebrity in Brown’s time was, in historian Carolyn Eastman’s words, a quality “of being well known, an attribute, a degree of popularity and fame—the state of being celebrated by others,” as Brown certainly was.

Brown’s lifespan covered most of the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, a tim...