Well-Intentioned Extremist/YMMV

YMMV (Real Life): John Brown
 * It's worth noting that a double standard is often in play in the interpretation of the life of John Brown. The sources that are most critical of Brown's violent uprising against slavery, are often the ones most accepting of the South's violent uprising to (at least in part) preserve slavery. Most contemporary accounts and interviews show him as a sane individual, if one who was convinced that violence would be necessary to rid America of slavery (which, lets remember, it was), and it was only in the decades following the American Civil War that he began to get the reputation of crazy-beared fanaticism.
 * But not everyone agrees that the violence was necessary. At least some countries got rid of it without any civil war. In any case it does not change the main point.
 * There is absolutely no proof that the South would have abandoned slavery...the very fact of the Confederacy's tenacity in the ACW suggests that it would have taken *at least* two generations. Also, there is a tendency for people who defend the Confederacy to be racists. I am *not* accusing any troper of this, but if we are going to acknowledge the existence of Confederate-sympathetic viewpoints, then this fact needs to be acknowledged as well.