This is how one man tried to end slavery all by himself

I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

That's Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking out against escalating violence in America in the 1850s.

Following the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the settling of Kansas had devolved into open territorial warfare between anti-slavery "free staters" and pro-slavery "border ruffians." Representatives were physically assaulting senators on the Senate floor. Average American civilians were perpetrating acts of savagery toward one another that fell short of "domestic terrorism" only because, 80 years into the American experiment, there wasn't yet a national moral consensus definitive enough to terrorize.

But a reckoning was imminent. As Emerson foretold, the U.S. would have to reject slavery or allow the notion of freedom it so exalted to perish as a consequence.

John Brown stepped into the 1850s a man accustomed to both the opportunity and the volatility of American life. He'd lived in eight different towns across five different states, sired over 20 children with two wives, founded a post office, built a school and started at least three different tanneries. He'd made and lost fortunes, gone bankrupt, become an authority on wool production, and travelled overseas to London to do business.

He had, with the bluntest application of will, done whatever it took to drink the nectar of life and liberty that American democracy promised.

Brown believed in the core concept of America, if not the frustrating political mechanics of governing it. Brown loved America. But eventually he, and the radical forces he came to represent, could no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of living free in a society that countenanced slavery.  His trajectory as an abolitionist militant began with this vow:

Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!

Unlike notable abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, Brown distrusted politics. He rejected advocacy. He was animated by a righteous certainty that American slaves must take their freedom for themselves. Brown wanted to empower slaves in the bluntest way possible, with guns and an incitement to violence against their masters. Brown was the Civil War's harbinger — come two years ahead of the horsemen.

After the failure of his famous raid on the federal armory in Harper's Ferry–where his small force had been put down by a detachment of U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee–after the slaves of West Virginia had failed to rise up with him, Brown was captured and sentenced to die a traitor's death. But before he did, he made this final statement:

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

Pundits like to bat around the phrase "the price of freedom" as if the blood of innocents was ever the currency that human progress accepts. But pundits aren't the authors of humanity's rise, heroes are. Innocent blood may be spilled in the course of human struggle, but progress is purchased by the blood of the willing.