John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry with twenty-one men in 1859, intending to spark a slave insurrection across the South. The raid failed, Brown was hanged, and the South used his violence as proof that abolitionists were dangerous fanatics. But Brown's execution galvanized the North, his prophecy that slavery would end only through bloodshed proved correct within two years, and the Civil War he helped provoke killed more Americans than any other conflict in the nation's history.

This episode traces Brown from his devout Connecticut childhood through the Bleeding Kansas violence, the Harpers Ferry raid, the trial that made him a martyr, and the war he accurately predicted.

• Brown's religious conviction that slavery was a sin requiring violent resistance
• The Bleeding Kansas campaign and the Pottawatomie  ...