At midnight on 16 October 1859, John Brown gave the order: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” With his interracial band of twenty-one men, Brown launched an attack against the institution of slavery. He captured the town of Harpers Ferry, intending that slaves use weapons from its arsenal to rise up and claim their freedom. Federal forces overwhelmed the band after thirty-six hours, and Brown was taken to a Virginia jail cell, then indicted on counts of assault, murder, conspiracy, and treason. On 2 November he made his final address to the court and stood to hear his sentence. He would be publicly hanged in Charlestown on 2 December 1859. Brown returned to prison and asked the jailer, “Have you any objections to my writing to my wife and telling her that I am to be hanged?”

That letter was one of more than a hundred that Brown wrote from his jail cell during the six-week period before his execution – letters that turned his “forty days in prison” into “the mightiest Abolition document that America has known,” as W. E. B. Du Bois would later put it. Published in newspapers and widely read, Brown's prison letters helped shape public perception of his raid. Across the North, derision turned to praise, and in the South, journalists’ contemptuous dismissals gave way to warnings that Brown was a portentous omen. His survival at Harpers Ferry seemed fortunate for the abolitionist cause. He might have perished but instead, as Wendell Phillips averred in his funeral oration for Brown on 8 December, “God ordered better” and granted “those noble prison hours.”

Freedom's Dawn is the first book focussed on those six fascinating weeks between Brown's arrest and execution. A companion volume edited by DeCaro, John Brown Speaks: Letters and Statements from Charlestown (2015), also collects Brown's own writings during that period. DeCaro makes a vital intervention into a scholarship that still struggles with how to make sense of John Brown. Immediately after his raid and death, and in the 156 years that followed, Brown became one of the most contentious figures in American culture, a national symbol embodying contradictions: a Christ-like hero and satanic demon, a meteor of peace and of war. Americans continue to view Brown's legacy with a deep sense of ambivalence. Although for some he is the nation's archetypal freedom fighter, for most he is a dangerous fanatic, to be relegated to the historical dustbin with a corps of other easily forgotten quixotic madmen. Given his divisiveness, it is perhaps difficult for historians to be dispassionate. Apart from biographies, they continue to dismiss or sideline him. In most surveys of American history, Brown still receives a mere paragraph.

Louis DeCaro liberates Brown from the confines of historical parenthesis, using his evolution from felon to martyr during those six weeks of imprisonment to explore antebellum culture, religion and politics. The book highlights the degree to which Brown drove a wedge into the slavery debates and reveals Harpers Ferry as both a microcosm and the beginning of the Civil War. For example, Brown's raid heightened white fears of a large-scale slave revolt in a region where 40 percent of the population was black. Planters in South Carolina asked Governor Wise for samples of the pikes that Brown had intended to give slaves and several thousand troops remained in the Harpers Ferry area for months after the raid. The raid also seemed to signal abolitionist hatred of the South and northern disregard for southern institutions. Insisting that the northern response to Brown's raid and execution revealed an anti-slavery consensus in the North, prominent southerners used Brown to attack Republicanism and call for secession.

Distanced through myth, defensively simplified, Brown's life can be prevented from speaking these and other dangerous truths – that his efforts were defensive actions amid an existing war (slavery was, Brown explained in 1858, a “war of one portion of its citizens upon another”) and that he was insane only if racism was sane. Instead, out of DeCaro's scrupulous, vivid and authoritative history, emerges a nuanced portrait of a polarizing figure, a new vision of a country in crisis, and a new understanding of how marginal abolitionist views in 1859 became such a mass movement that Lincoln might call the Civil War and Emancipation “a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale,” just a few years later.