Steel engraving made from a photograph compared with a photogravure. The photograph was taken about 1859. Original in the Kansas State Historical Society. The photogravure is from Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard's book: John Brown--A Biography Fifty Years After. JOHN BROWN facing page 98 Steel engraving, made as above. The photograph was copied from a daguerreotype taken in 1856. Original in the Kansas State Historical Society. CHAPTER I THE SUBJECT MATTER _Truth, crushed to earth shall rise again;_ --BRYANT The object of the writer, in publishing this book, is to correct a perversion of truth, whereby John Brown has acquired fame, as an altruist and a martyr, which should not be attributed to him. The book is a review of the historical data that have been collected and published by his principal biographers: Mr. James Redpath, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn and Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard. It is also a criticism of these writers, who have sought to suppress, and have suppressed, important truths relating to the subject of which they wrote, and who have misinformed and misled the public concerning the true character of this figure in our national history; and have established in its stead a fictitious character, which is wholly illogical and inconsistent with the facts and circumstances of Brown's life. Mr. Redpath, his first and most lurid biographer, was a newspaper correspondent of the type now generally called "yellow." He was a "Disunionist," and seems to have been a malcontent, who went to Kansas Territory to oppose the policy which the Free-State men had adopted for a safe and sane solution of the Free-State problem; and who sought to thwart their efforts to create a free state by peaceable means. He said:[1] I believed that a civil war between the North and South would ultimate in insurrection and that the Kansas troubles would probably create a military conflict of the sections. Hence, I left the South, and went to Kansas; and endeavored personally, and by my pen, to precipitate a revolution.