Could John Brown's Raid have started the Civil War?

I don't think so. Abolition was hardly universally popular even in the north and his methods repelled everyone. His starting of a general slave revolt would have had effects, though: a Southern crackdown with significant Northern support. The revolt would also have showcased even more obviously the "brokenness" of the system.
 

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Greg Bear wrote a book called "Fire on the Mountain".

Where exactly that happens, but it's a mass slave revolt. As bad in it's own way as Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee", and "Man in the High Castle". Things happen for no real reason, a handful a volunteers break what would have been a blockade that would have been airtight, Mexico suports the slaves when she had almost no government and was about to be invaded by France, Britain, and Austria. And as for "Man in the High Castle", it's not really an alt at all, just a what if with no reason for the Axis' power's victories.
 
Where exactly that happens, but it's a mass slave revolt. As bad in it's own way as Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee", and "Man in the High Castle". Things happen for no real reason, a handful a volunteers break what would have been a blockade that would have been airtight, Mexico suports the slaves when she had almost no government and was about to be invaded by France, Britain, and Austria. And as for "Man in the High Castle", it's not really an alt at all, just a what if with no reason for the Axis' power's victories.

Actually it was Terry Bisson not that I would have known if I hadn't tried to find it on the London Libraries Consortium Catalogue. However to answer the question. No Brown would not have started a Civil War all that would have happened would have been a suppressed revolt with a lot of massacres which was why few slaves joined him. Slave revolts usually fail the classic one being the Spartacus uprising (the Roman one not the failed revolution in Germany). Frederick Douglas and allegedly Allan Pinkerton tried to talk John Brown out of it. Brown was by a lot of people's standards a terrorist as was his enemy Quantrell.
 
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