After the failed insurrection attempt at Harper's Ferry led by Captain John Brown, the conservative, liberal and abolitionist press, the politicians, and the church, either denounced the event as an act of treason or dismissed it as the wild action of a madman and religious fanatic. Enter Henry David Thoreau, outraged, determined to make sure that the truth not be suppressed and history not be, yet again, falsified. In his "Plea for Captain John Brown," read in Concord, Mass., Thoreau defends John Brown as a noble man, a responsible father, a principled human being, and his actions as necessary, courageous and humanizing. In short order, without mincing words, Thoreau delivers blow after blow, laying bare the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the church; the self-serving, petty interests of the press and owners of the press who know which side their bread is buttered on; the righteous indignation of the liberals who are incapable of imagining a man obeying a higher moral calling than they and therefore call him insane, who cannot acknowledge violence against the oppressor as a liberating and humanizing force and therefore denounce all violence as brutish and criminal; and the evil duplicity of the politicians who do not represent the scores of thousands of slaves, let alone the people, but rather who serve only the economic interests of those who profit from an economy steeped in oppression and based on exploitation.