Knowing how the man liked to add uh… flair to the way he executed slavers, I think he would also have really liked a chainsaw. Or a woodchipper.
I’d give sherman some napalm and agent orange. Defoliate and burn the south otra vez.
Honestly, I don’t think that would change much. Not for John Brown, anyway.
John Brown’s attempted slave revolt would have lasted a little longer, maybe succeeded in freeing a few hundred slaves, and would definitely get a lot more people killed (including those slaves). But it would still ultimately fail and get put down … especially once the ammo and explosives run out.
Politically, the raid would have much the same effect that it already did, only stronger. Maybe the Civil War would start slightly sooner?
The biggest impact would be technologically. I’m assuming all the explosives were detonated at some point, so there’s not enough left of them to study. But the empty P90s and their shell casings would be captured, studied, and to some degree reverse engineered. Not in time to make a difference in the Civil War – it would take time to reverse engineer such advanced guns and even more time to develop prototypes using some of that technology with contemporary materials. And, most importantly, select fire weapons just aren’t practical with black powder. Even after extensive reverse engineering, nobody would be able to copy the technology of these captured guns effectively until the invention of smokeless powder in the 1890s. (Even if they manage to capture some unfired ammunition, I don’t think they’re good enough at chemistry yet to figure out what smokeless powder is made of, let alone figure out how to make more of it. The plastics, also, will likely be beyond their ability to reverse engineer – even if they can figure out the chemical composition, they probably can’t figure out how to replicate it yet.) At the turn of the century, though, these time-traveled guns suddenly do make a big and profound impact on firearms technology. Now that smokeless powder makes the design practical again, a lot of newly developed guns are going to be looking at the design of the (by that point well-known) P90 for inspiration. You’ll have a few crude, but direct copies that are an early 1900s attempt to build a P90, yes, but more interestingly, you’re going to see P90 design elements in all sorts of places you wouldn’t expect – semi-auto rifles, pistols, heavy machine guns, etc, etc. All based on a P90, scaled up or down as needed. And the main lasting legacy of this time travel escapade will be that starting in the early 1900s, a lot of the early automatic and semi-automatic firearms designs will bear a strong resemblance to the P90, especially in the internal operating mechanisms.
Now, these P90-based designs will likely be a bit superior to the real designs of the early 1900s… Or it could result in various militaries adopting things like submachine guns semi-auto rifles sooner, in time to field them extensively in WWI. Which means this new technology could begin to have a substantial impact on history, particularly around the WWI era, when those otherwise wouldn’t be common. Exactly what that impact would be is extremely difficult to predict. It depends which countries adopt the superior designs and how much. And since by that time, pretty much every country would have had the opportunity to do so, it could be any of them, all of them, or none of them. So it becomes impossible to speculate what impact that might or might not have on the course and outcome of WWI. And any change to that quickly snowballs into an alternate history fever dream, and who knows what might have happened. By that point, the Butterfly Effect is in full swing.
John Brown’s attempted slave revolt would have lasted a little longer, maybe succeeded in freeing a few hundred slaves, and would definitely get a lot more people killed (including those slaves). But it would still ultimately fail and get put down … especially once the ammo and explosives run out.
tbf, John Brown’s proposed slave revolt did have a plan for rapid expansion of the revolt. This is less a cure-all and more a kick-start.
They had a plan, yes… But the flaw in that plan wasn’t that they lacked firepower. I think the main problem was of communication. In order for the slave revolt to spread, enslaved people have to find out about it. And in that time period, word travels slowly … especially when slave owners have a vested interest in preventing their slaves from learning about it.
And, anyway, John Brown’s attempted slave revolt wasn’t the only slave revolt in US history. There were others, some of them much larger and more widespread. But all of those were also put down and crushed sooner or later. So, I think, even if John Brown’s revolt had become more widespread, it would still be ultimately doomed to failure.
They actually had pre-planned the uprising by word of mouth significantly before the actual strike. The raid on Harpers Ferry was to gain the weapons they would need. The issue is, since Brown’s core force never arrived, the slaves (correctly) assumed that the rebellion was snuffed out, and so did not rise up at all.
You may be right about the rebellion still being doomed, just wanted to emphasize that there was a plan that was not completely insane and unreasonable!
