John Brown False Narrative Essay

A narrative is a way of retelling a story, the most common way to retell a story is in words. People use narratives in literature and in social studies.The narrative my group and I choose was the narrative of John Brown.John Brown, an abolitionist, led a slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. However, it was unsuccessful attempt. John Brown was portrayed as a traitor and was sentenced to death . Textbooks often portray John Brown as a insane man during the Civil War time period but in reality he wasn’t. The idea that John Brown was insane man for leading a slave revolt is a false narrative and should be disrupted.

II. A false narrative is a narrative that contains numerous of false information or only tells one side of a story. Some

This is a false narrative because this is only look at the side of a white person perspective. Whites during the civil war period owned slaves and treated them unfairly, so having a white person treat slaves fair was unheard of. The real story is that Brown was born and raised around an abolitionist center. Brown was friends with black people so this made him believe that black people were not inferior. As he got older he led battles into Pottawatomie (a pro-slavery settlement) to protest the mistreatment of slaves. After numerous battles at Pottawatomie, whites people would write that John Brown was practically a cold-blooded killer and he had no reason to kill. The same thing happened at Harper 's Ferry, but he was captured. Brown went to trial that same year and was sentenced to the death penalty. Some say that his lawyers and family came up with a story that he was mentally ill, in effort to escape the death penalty but that didn’t work. In James W. Loewen book Lies My teacher Told Me he says that “We must recognize that the insanity with which historians have charged John Brown was never psychological. It was ideological. This mean that John Brown was not mental, it was just good for political reason to say that about