Less than twenty-four hours after launching his long-planned war of liberation, Brown had effectively made himself and his surviving men prisoners. Perhaps he was deluded into thinking the people of Virginia were like those of Kansas, where his audacity had more than once made up for his deficiency in numbers. But in Kansas he fought Missourians, for whom Kansas was a political cause, not their home. Nor in Kansas was he threatening to start a slave rebellion, the hoary nightmare of white Southerners. In Kansas his irregular forces fought irregulars; at Harpers Ferry he faced organized
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