John brown more succesful

It would cause a lot of damage. If I remember correctly, John Brown "spoke to God" and thought it was God's will for him to kill slave owners. The rebellion would be eventually suppressed, and it would just piss off the South a lot more.
 
what if john Browns raid on harpers ferry had succeded in starting a slave revolt throughout the southern states

1) The rebellion is crushed. All of the Southern States had trained militias, which would have cooperated with the U.S. Army to crush the revolt. And, except in South Carolina and Mississippi, whites outnumbered blacks by a significant margin in all the Slave States. Very few of the slave rebels will be armed with anything besides clubs and whatever farm implements they can steal. Brown won't have time to drill, train or discipline them. Against an organized military force, they are dog meat.

2) Lots of innocent white women and children die, killed by Brown's rabble of revenge-crazed slaves, which he won't have time to properly train or discipline. So they will basically, as happened in previous slave revolts, kill any white person they find indiscriminately.

3) Public opinion across the nation, North and South, is horrified at what Brown has unleashed. Most people conclude that blacks can't be trusted with freedom...surely if they are set free, they'll go on the rampage and murder every white they can get hold of! Abolitionists across the North are lynched or driven into exile.

4) If you thought slavery was bad before, you ain't seen nothing yet. Regulation and control of the surviving slave population will get even more stringent than they were in OTL. You probably have a Klan-type organization rise up to rule through terror via random killings and mutilations, with the law looking the other way. What won't happen is the surviving Southern whites suddenly saying, "Oh, I see, slavery is wrong and we brought all this on ourselves." The blame will go to John Brown and the people who financed him...the abolitionists. And the average Northerner will agree with them.
 

Dialga

Banned
Actually, I think you'd see an earlier ACW. All those lynchings and harsher slave laws would lead to disunion for sure. At the very least, national discontent would grow very rapidly.
 
Actually, I think you'd see an earlier ACW. All those lynchings and harsher slave laws would lead to disunion for sure. At the very least, national discontent would grow very rapidly.

By October of 1859, when John Brown's raid took place, the pro slavery South and the free soil North were already very polarized. Secession and war was abated basically because of a President with southern sympathies who did not want to upset the status quo. The Republican party had gone from nothing to being the majority party in about 5 years because of Northerners outrage over how the Democratic party had sold out to the South and slavery. (eg. Kansas Nebraska Act and Dred Scott). So the only thing keeping the South in the Union in 1859 was that a Republican was not in the White House. The talk throughout 1860 was not so much if a Republican would be elected, but whether the South would secede when a Republican was elected.

Had John Brown's raid been more successful, I think many Northerners would have looked at President Buchanan and the Democratic party and blamed them, for allowing the rebellion to happen, allowing a climate where such violence could take place, not suppressing it further, etc. More than likely, it would not have sped up the ACW but would have further strengthened the Republican hand in the upcoming elections. It could have made it more likely that a more radical Republican was nominated for president instead of Lincoln, but if such other guy was elected, the Southern states still would have seceded and more than likely the war would have started at roughly the same time.
 
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