Publisher's Synopsis
America once sold human beings like hogsheads and considered a lynching time for a picnic; but we recently sang "Hail to the Chief" to the first African-American President. The Declaration of Independence dealt the first race card when it declared all men were created equal except the African. This unholy compromise led to the bloodiest war in our history, the Civil War, a Biblical conflict that changed the world, freed millions from bondage and inspired a national mythology. It was started by John Brown.
Brown's vision of freedom took hold of the soul of America with his bloody slaughter of proslavery settlers along a creek in the Kansas Territory. A few years later his raid on Harpers Ferry instilled fear deep in the hearts of the proponents of slavery. He lit the powder keg that eventually blew North and South apart. However, Hang John Brown is much more than a biography about this critical figure in American history. It is a tale from the perspective of those who hated Brown and wanted him silenced. Hang John Brown is a work about the momentous final years of John Brown's life and the quest of a flawed fictional character named Zephaniah Jacobs to kill Brown.
Zephaniah Jacobs, a Kansas homesteader, a believer in slavery, has a vision. His dream, divined by his psychic son, sets him on a mission to kill John Brown before the order of God's nation will be torn asunder by a cataclysmic war. He sets off on an action packed chase to Manassas to fulfill his destiny, prevent the war and kill Brown.
John Brown and Zephaniah Jacobs are characters from the same stock: both have created large families like the patriarchs of the Old Testament they revere, both seek inspiration for their lives in the Bible and both feel they have been told by God to wreak vengeance in His name. But Brown seeks to eliminate slavery, while Zephaniah Jacobs seeks to save it. The dueling storylines parry as John Brown commits heinous murders, escapes Kansas and crosses the country freeing slaves and preparing for his raid on Harpers Ferry. Meanwhile Zephaniah and his family ride east and cross paths with deception, disloyalty and massacres, but also faith, love, loyalty, spiritual mysteries and birth.
