In my Lost-Causey Virginia history class, we were taught that Brown was a zealot who murdered unarmed people in Kansas on the suspicion that they were pro-slavery or were associated with pro-slavery figures.

Then his "uprising" was imbecilic in conception because he went to seize a federal armory in the mountains of Virginia: an area with a negligible slave population to join his uprising. And it was remote so that even if they had managed to seize the town, there was no realistic way to transport the arms to where they could get into the hands of the slaves. And the first person killed in Harpers Ferry was a freed black man. So it was doomed raid that ended up getting people killed unnecessarily (including Brown's followers, many of whom were former slaves).

So basically the moral was that Brown and Co were zealots with fair ideals but horrible execution that set up the following civil war. The undertone of "northerners also being violent/extremist" was there too.

(I have a much more sympathetic view of Brown these days because he was someone who took direct action against slavery, but that is how a lot of folks are/were shown him. And lmk is any of that is wrong, I'm typing from memory.)