"Between cheap whiskey, land claim disputes, the red man fighting for their land, and low women, your basic western settler was prone to a good dustup at any time. "Fistfights was common out west on the prairie," he recalls. The young Henry (nicknamed "Onion") is as precocious as Huck Finn as he narrates his journey through our turbulent country. Was he a crazy zealot or a martyr for a just cause? No slave who fought with Brown survived to shed light on the man whose armed insurrections electrified the nation and led to the Civil War - that is, until James McBride's "The Good Lord Bird." In McBride's third novel, 12-year-old Henry Shackleford, whom Brown frees during one of his raids, travels with the elusive outlaw for three years, survives Harper's Ferry, and lives to a ripe old age "The Good Lord Bird" is his story.Īnd it is a good one. Brown was captured, tried for treason and hanged. Severely outnumbered, Brown and his men were defeated within 36 hours by Robert E. His intent: to arm slaves and end slavery. 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 21 men on a raid of the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Va.
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