John+Brown's+Raid

In the winter of 1857-58, John Brown, who had been a leader in and a promoter of lawlessness during the troubles in Kansas undertaken, as he himself confessed, for the purpose of inflaming the public mind on the subject of slavery, that he might perfect organizations to bring about servile insurrections in the slave States-collected a number of young men in that territory, including several of his sons, and, with the use of funds and arms that had been furnished for his Kansas operations, placed these men under military instruction, by one of their number, at Springdale, in Iowa.