John Brown Today

John Brown’s Trial: The “Lost” Narrative of George H. Hoyt

July 25, 2022 Louis DeCaro Jr. Season 4 Episode 6
John Brown Today
John Brown’s Trial: The “Lost” Narrative of George H. Hoyt
Show Notes Chapter Markers

In this episode, Lou presents a narrative written by John Brown's young lawyer, George H. Hoyt, written only a few years after the abolitionist's hanging.  Hoyt went to join John Brown in Charlestown, Virginia (today West Va.) and support his lawyers, but really went as a spy for Brown's supporters in the North who wanted to launch a rescue. But not only was the rescue impossible by the time that Hoyt arrived in Virginia, but Brown did not want to escape.  Hoyt thus became part of the drama of Brown's trial and last days, a story that can be found in more detail in Lou's book, Freedom's Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia (2015).

The Hoyt narrative is provided in ten short segments that somewhat follow the serialized narrative that appeared in the Leavenworth Conservative in 1867, as well as a kind of epilogue that Hoyt published in The Kansas Weekly Tribune in 1870.  The narrative, written from a firsthand eyewitness reveals a great deal about Brown's trial and the supposed "fair trial" that he received at the hands of a court dominated by slaveholders and guided by Sen. James Mason of Virginia, the architect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and one of the ringleaders of the slaveholders' betrayal that would follow in 1861 following Lincoln's election.

Guest music: "Bittersweet" by Silent Partner

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Prologue
JB Today Introduction
Part I - Down to Charlestown
Part II - A Slaveholders' Tribunal
Part III - "I'm Ready for Anything That May Come Up"
Part IV - "The Slightest Uneasiness"
Part V - Meeting With Judge Parker
Part VI - Under the Lion's Paw
Part VII - His Lawyers Finally Arrive
Part VIII - "The Commonwealth Has Its Rights"
Part IX - A Sunday With John Brown
Part X - "So Let it Be Done!"
Closing & Guest Music