Robert E. Lee, for the moment an officer in the U.S. Army. Lee quickly crushed Brown’s insurgency, killing ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons. The effect throughout the South was galvanic. The raid and its leader were the embodiment of the chivalry’s darkest imaginings of slave uprisings. As one historian would later put it, “Not even the fieriest radical could ever have made the threat of an internal holocaust appear so real and imminent to Southerners as had the grim, dedicated Brown.”
