The Lord Is a Man of War

In 1859, the antislavery firebrand John Brown led an armed raid on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, hoping to ignite an uprising of enslaved people and poor whites that would trigger a national crisis. He failed and was executed but his actions helped shove the nation into civil war.

Brown is one of the most controversial figures in American history; most prior commentators have considered him either a fanatic or fool. In The Lord Is a Man of War, historian Walter Johnson gives us a new Brown: a man who was neither insane nor naïve but moved by a coherent, biblically anchored vision that linked the destruction of slavery to critiques of capitalism and inequality. The result is the most significant historical biography since David Blight’s Frederick Douglass, a fiercely urgent book about a man who envisioned not only freedom for the enslaved but a radically new America.