The Daily History Chronicle

On May 24, 1856, abolitionist John Brown led his sons and a small band of men to three farmhouses along Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, and committed five murders he believed God had commanded. The Pottawatomie Massacre is one of American history's most morally complex events: premeditated killing, carried out in service of a just cause, by a man who would become the most celebrated martyr of the Civil War. This episode holds it all at once and refuses to let either side off the hook.