Chapter 106: Animosity accelerates when the North casts Brown as a hero.

While at first Northerners regard the raid as the work of a madman, the New England Transcendentalists campaign to recast him as a martyr to a righteous cause. Ralph Waldo Emerson leads the way in characterizing Brown on the eve of his execution:

That new saint than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of
men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who,
if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.

For others, Harper’s Ferry simply becomes the kind of bloody nose the South deserves – with John Brown as the necessary messenger. While never the Christ-like figure conjured up by Emerson, he is seen as the right-minded vigilante, exercising frontier justice on his own to prevent the imposition of more slavery.