…Booth also managed to snag one of the steel pikes Brown had had manufactured to arm the slave rebellion as a souvenir.

…Despite his personal dislike of the abolitionist, whom he rather ironically described as a “traitor and terrorizer”, Booth would later tell his sister: “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of this century.”

…Booth was appearing at a theatre in Richmond at the time of Brown’s trial and on a whim he dressed up in military uniform to accompany a unit of the Richmond Greys who had been dispatched to county seat of Charlestown to provide security for Brown’s execution on the scaffold…

…Brown, who has a strong claim to be one of history’s first religious terrorists, had already murdered 5 pro-slavery settlers in Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, in May 1856. He’d make a great subject for a @theresthistory.bsky.social series…

…In December 1859 John Wilkes Booth was actually present at the execution of the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, whose raid on Harper’s Ferry in Virginia on 16 October 1859 set in motion the events that led to the outbreak of the Civil War…

Awesome, can’t wait to listen