Comments are rolling in on my WSJ article about Harpers Ferry, John Brown, and Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem about it all.

This one came by e-mail:

Hmm, how to weigh Stephen Vincent Benét? The same as anyone else that romanticizes a violent terrorist.

This one is posted on the WSJ site:

John Brown you made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of America’s slaves! RIP brave sir!!!!!

Both are right, both are wrong — John Brown is one of the most compelling and complicated men in American history. That’s why Benét wrote about him, that’s why we keep arguing about him a century and a half later.