History of the United States, v.2, by James Ford Rhodes, 1910 [c1892].

Chapter 10, Part 2: The Fugitive Slave Law through John Brown and His Work

The Fugitive Slave law was this year brought prominently before the public mind. The difficulty in capturing fugitives, the doubt about a decision, the expense and risk of conveying the adjudged slave from communities whose sympathy was aroused in his behalf, had the effect of making rare the pursuit of a runaway negro. The South held it a grievous wrong that fugitives could seldom be regained save at a greater cost than the negro's worth, but the opinion was now settling down that no remedy existed for the evil. Attempts were made in New York and Pennsylvania to crystallize the public sentiment into personal-liberty laws; and although the proposed measures failed of enactment, they had strong supporters. In Massachusetts, a bill which went far beyond the existing personal-liberty law, and specifically forbade the rendition of fugitive slaves, was only defeated in the House of Representatives by a majority of three. 2

Great excitement was caused in Philadelphia regarding an alleged fugitive who had been arrested. A tumult was raised in the street near the court-house, and an immense crowd assisted at every stage of the proceedings. Never had that community been so stirred up over a runaway negro.
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2 The Liberator, April 2d, 8th, 15th; New York Times, April 15th.

It is possible that an attempt at rescue would have been made, had not the commissioner found a technical defect in the proof and discharged the prisoner.1

One of the most notable prosecutions under the Fugitive Slave act took place in Cleveland, Ohio, in the months of April and May. Cleveland was the business and political centre of the Western Reserve, and nowhere in the country outside of Massachusetts was the anti-slavery sentiment so strong as in this district. The population was made up of Connecticut and Massachusetts people, and the puritanical love of liberty, law, and order existed in a marked degree, while the narrowness of spirit common to provincial communities of New England had been broadened by the necessity of adopting larger methods in the freer atmosphere of the West.

Oberlin was a conspicuous place in this district, and an important station on the Underground Railroad.2 Oberlin College had fame abroad, not for deep learning and wide culture, but for its radical methods. The feature of co-education of boys and girls was adopted without reserve. Of the twelve hundred students who yearly resorted there, five hundred were, as the catalogue called them, ladies.3 If the college did not make profound scholars, it sent forth into the world earnest men and women.

In 1859, Oberlin College was especially known as a centre of strong anti-slavery opinions and deep religious convictions.
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1 New York Tribune and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, cited by the Liberator, April 15th; New York Times, April 8th.
2 Oberlin, by Fairchild, p. 114. The authorities of a neighboring township, sneering at the anti-slavery zeal which distinguished Oberlin, showed this feeling in an unmistakable manner. The guide-board on the Middle Ridge Road, six miles from Oberlin, indicated its direction, "not by the ordinary index finger, but by the full-length figure of a fugitive running with all his might to reach the place."—Ibid., p. 117.
3 In the catalogue for 1858-59, for which I am indebted to Mr. Root, the librarian, the number is set down as 736 "gentlemen" and 513 "ladies."

Actuated by those sentiments, the reception given to the higher-law doctrine as a rule of action towards the Fugitive Slave act was zealous and complete. By its friends, Oberlin was called a highly moral and severely religious town, "an asylum for the oppressed of all God's creation, without distinction of color." 1 By its enemies it was stigmatized as a hot-bed of abolitionism, and as "that old buzzards' nest where the negroes who arrive over the Underground Railroad are regarded as dear children." 2

In September, 1858, a slave-catcher whose manner and appearance called to mind Haley in "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"3 while at Oberlin seeking some of his own escaped slaves, lighted upon a negro by the name of John, who had, more than two years previously, fled from a Kentucky neighbor. After having procured the necessary papers and the assistance of the proper officers, fearing that there might be trouble if the arrest were attempted in the village, Jennings, the slave-catcher, had the negro decoyed a short distance from Oberlin, where he was seized and taken to Wellington, a village nine miles distant and a station on the railroad to Columbus. Here it was proposed to take the fugitive for examination before a United States commissioner.

The long stay of Jennings in Oberlin had already excited suspicion as to the nature of his visit. The news of this capture quickly spread, and the people of Oberlin were ready to act in the manner that, according to their view, the occasion demanded. A large crowd of men, many of whom were armed, proceeded rapidly to Wellington, and took the negro from his captors without firing a shot or harming a person. The negro was promptly driven off in a wagon and escaped effectually from the clutches of his claimant.

Thirty-seven men were indicted under the provisions of the
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1 Remark of Spalding, attorney for defence, Oberlin-Wellington rescuers' trial, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 77.
2 Remark of Bliss, attorney for prosecution, ibid., p. 166.
3 Cleveland Herald, April 7th, 1859.

act of 1850 for the rescue of the fugitive. Among them was a superintendent of a sabbath-school, a professor, and several students of Oberlin College. Never had a more respectable body of prisoners appeared at the bar than the gentlemen who were now arraigned in the United States District Court at Cleveland; nor did they lack defenders. Four eminent attorneys of Cleveland volunteered for the defence. Sympathy and interest combined to induce them to give their services without a fee. All of them had political aspirations, and three were eager for the next Republican nomination to Congress in this district, where that nomination was equivalent to election. The sympathy of the community was so completely with the prisoners that the path to political preferment lay through efforts on their behalf. On the other hand, there was no lack of energy on the part of the prosecution, who had the sympathy of the judge, and the active countenance of the administration at Washington. The district attorney associated with himself an able lawyer, and professional pride actuated them to extraordinary efforts.

The first person tried was Simeon Bushnell. A struck jury was demanded. Twelve worthy citizens from different parts of the judicial district were the panel: all were Democrats. Some of them, indeed, were representative men of their communities, who reverenced the Constitution of the United States, and believed that all laws made in pursuance thereof should be rigidly executed; yet they had warm feelings, and were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused.

The scene in the court-room was worthy of memory. A judge who had a high idea of the dignity of his office; attorneys who were fighting for reputation; the prisoner, a man of unsullied character; a remarkable jury composed of men whom only a sense of duty could have induced to leave their homes and business; the court-room crowded with intelligent people, whose sympathy was warm for the prisoner— all combined to make this trial an important episode in the anti-slavery struggle of the decade before the war.

The law was plain, the evidence clear, and the verdict of the jury, as might have been expected, was "guilty." The interesting pleas of the attorneys were heard by a crowd of men and women who filled the court-room to overflowing. The attorney for the prosecution sneered at the fact that when the Oberlin people went to Wellington for the rescue of the negro, they proclaimed that they were acting under the higher law. Riddle, who spoke first for the defence, and who, the forthcoming year, was elected to Congress from the Cleveland district, boldly declared: "I am a votary of that higher law;" and when he said, "If a fugitive comes to me in his flight from slavery and is in need of . . . rest and comfort and protection, and means of further flight, so help me the great God in my extremest need, he shall have them all," the court-room resounded with the most enthusiastic applause.1

Spalding, who also spoke for the defence, and was elected to Congress from the Cleveland district in 1862, maintained that Bushnell was in danger of losing his liberty for nothing else than "obeying the injunction of Jesus Christ, 'Whatsoever ye would men should do to you, do ye even so to them.'" 2 It was with some reason that the district attorney grimly asked: "Are we in a court of justice, or are we in a political hustings?" And when, yielding to passion, he abused the Republican press of Cleveland and the audience of the court-room, he had further evidence of the prevailing sentiment in unmistakable hisses. 3

Until the end of the Bushnell trial, each man under indictment had been released on his own recognizance; but now, as the result of an outrageous decision of the judge and consequent wrangling between the attorneys, the Oberlin people determined not to enter recognizance or give their word of honor to the marshal that they would appear in the court-room when wanted, and they were therefore taken
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1 Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 56.
2 Ibid., pp. 82, 83.
3 Ibid., p. 63.

to jail. It was a self-imposed martyrdom; but the fact could not be ignored that these respectable people were in prison, and the preaching on Sunday of Professor Peck from the jail-yard produced a remarkable sensation.

The court proceedings were called political trials, but when contrasted with state-cases in Europe, except in England, and when compared with English political trials before this century, it is impossible for the historian to draw a stern picture of governmental tyranny. The men in jail were regarded by the community as heroes; the judge and district attorney, whose impolitic course had led them to accept imprisonment, were objects of execration.

The second person tried was Charles Langston, whose color and race naturally evoked sympathy. The technical points in his favor were made the most of by his attorneys, but the jury, a fresh panel, found him guilty.

Bushnell was sentenced to pay a fine of six hundred dollars and costs, and to be imprisoned in the county jail for sixty days. Before Langston was sentenced, availing himself of the usual privilege, he made an eloquent speech. It was a pathetic description of the disabilities under which the negro labored, of the prejudices against himself on account of his color shared by judge, prosecutors, and jury, and from which even his able and honest counsel were not free. It was indisputable, he maintained, that he had not been tried by his peers. The audience that filled the courtroom listened to these remarks which by turns produced sensation and gained applause. When Langston finished, the room rang with loud and prolonged demonstrations of approval. Langston's sentence was a fine of one hundred dollars and costs, and imprisonment for twenty days.

The impression produced by these trials deepened. Meetings of sympathy were held all over the Western Reserve, and on May 24th an immense mass-convention assembled at Cleveland, and heartily cheered the orators of the day as they denounced slavery and the fugitive law. Governor Chase made a discreet speech. While he was strongly antislavery in feeling, he urged upon his audience that the great remedy for the evils they felt lay in the people themselves, at the ballot-box.1 The Oberlin and Wellington delegations, headed by their bands, marched to the jail, and were addressed from the jail-yard by Langston, Professor Peck, and other prisoners. 2

In the meantime, the grand jury of Lorain county—the county in which Oberlin and Wellington are situated—had indicted, under a statute passed in 1857,3 the men who had captured the fugitive, for kidnapping and attempting to carry out of the State in an unlawful manner the negro John, and they were arrested. After lengthy negotiations, a compromise was made by which the Lorain county authorities agreed to dismiss the suits against the alleged kidnappers. The United States were to enter a nolle prosequi in the remaining rescue cases. The Oberlin prisoners were released; a hundred guns were fired in Cleveland in their honor, and Oberlin gave them an enthusiastic reception. A few days later Bushnell, having served out his sentence, was given, on his return home, the welcome of a conquering hero.4

The sentiment excited by these events is worthy of study, for they made a profound impression on the people of the Western Reserve, and had a material influence on the Republican party of the State. At their convention, held in June, they demanded the repeal of the Fugitive Slave act.5 Nor was the influence confined to Ohio, for in all the Western States the proceedings were watched with great interest; and New England was, of course, concerned in the result of action that might fitly be ascribed to her influence.6 These manifestations were not from sympathy with the negro
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1 New York Times, May 31st.
2 Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 257.
3 Laws of Ohio, vol. liv. p. 186.
4 See Oberlin-Wellington Rescue.
5 Cleveland Herald, June 3d.
6 See the Liberator of 1859, pp. 66, 73, 84, 88, 90.

John, who was known to be a stupid and worthless fellow. A humane feeling for the oppressed race was, indeed, aroused by the manly bearing of Langston, but the overshadowing cause of these outbursts of sentiment arose from the fact that the execution of the fugitive law was a badge of the dominion of the slave power over the North; and the majority of the people of Ohio were ready to resolve that they would no longer be the servants of the Southern oligarchy. This feeling found fit expression in the words of Governor Chase, who, better than any other Republican, represented the sentiment of Ohio.1 While the compromise that put a stop to the further prosecution of the prisoners was properly regarded a victory for the Oberlin people, yet the conviction and imprisonment of Bushnell and Langston demonstrated that the federal law most obnoxious to the inhabitants of the Western Reserve could be executed among them, and proved the law-abiding character of the people.

A far different course of events may be noted at the South. In August, 1858, the slaver Echo, bound for Cuba, with more than three hundred African negroes on board, was captured by a United States vessel and taken to Charleston, South Carolina. An arrangement was made by the President with the Colonization Society for the transportation of the negroes to Africa. The federal authorities made an endeavor to prosecute the crew of the Echo. At first the grand jury found no bill against them; but on a later consideration they were indicted for piracy under the United States statute of 1820. They were tried in the United States Circuit Court at Charleston, and the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty. Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, admitted in the Senate that the sentiment of his State was against the execution of the laws referring to the slave-trade, and the Charleston Mercury thought the action of the jury reasonable, because it would have been "inconsistent, cruel, and hypocritical in them to condemn men to death for
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1 See his speech, New York Times, May 31st

bringing slaves into a community where they are bought and sold every day." 1

A more flagrant violation of United States law is seen in the case of the yacht Wanderer. She landed over three hundred negroes, direct from Africa, at Brunswick, Georgia. They were sent up the river and sold, being distributed throughout the State, and some of them were taken as far as Memphis. Measures were instituted by the attorney-general and the federal authorities in Georgia to punish the offenders; the owner and the captain of the yacht and others were indicted, but a jury could not be found to convict them.2 It is undeniable that many negroes were smuggled into the South and sold as slaves, in spite of the United States statutes, which were as stringent as words could make them. There are men in every community whose cupidity will tempt them to evade the law, and the temptation was now very great. A succession of good crops, with a large demand for cotton at a high price, had made the South very prosperous. Labor was scarce, and the only source open for a supply was Africa. Slaves in the United States were selling at exorbitant prices, for their value had risen one hundred per cent, in fifteen years. "The very negro," said Senator Hammond, "who, as a prime laborer, would have brought four hundred dollars in 1828, would now, with thirty more years upon him, sell for eight hundred
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1 De Bow's Review, vol. xxvii. p. 362; Remarks of Senator Hammond, May 23d, 1860. See the Liberator, December 24th and 31st, 1858, and the New York Times, April 19th, 1859; the President's Message, December, 1858.
2 J. S. Black to the President, Senate Documents 2d Session 35th Congress, vol. vii.; the President's Message, December 19th, 1859; the debate in the Senate, May 21st and 23d, 1860; the Savannah Republican, cited by New York Tribune, Dec. 17th and 24th, 1858; the Tribune, March 14th, 1859; the Washington Union, cited by New York Times, December 24th, 1858; the New York Times, April 19th and May 6th, 1859; the Liberator, January 14th, 1859; Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society for the year ending May 1st, I860, p. 22.

dollars." 1 In Africa, negroes were ridiculously cheap, and, could the slave-trader escape the clutches of the law, the profit was enormous.2 Public sentiment winked at the infraction of the law; Southern officials, though clothed with federal authority, were lax in its enforcement, and a United States judge of South Carolina came to the support of the offenders by a preposterous decision. 3

The governmental investigation of this illicit traffic was perfunctory. When a large number of slavers for the Cuban slave-trade were fitted out in New York city, and suffered to depart unmolested,4 it is easy to believe that Southern officials closed their eyes to the smuggling of negroes into their districts. The assurance of the President that no Africans, except those on the Wanderer, had been imported into the South cannot be accepted as historic truth.5 A reported statement of Douglas in a private conversation, although the conversation is only vouched by anonymous authority, is so fully characteristic, and the discussion was one so naturally suggested by attendant circumstances, that we may believe it is in substance correctly related; and, while the facts may not be accepted as absolute, the impression conveyed is fully warranted. Douglas stated that no doubt could exist that the African slave-trade had been carried on for some time; he confidently believed that fifteen thousand Africans were brought into the country last year, which was a greater number than had been imported in any year when the traffic
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1 Speeches and Letters, p. 345.
2 De Bow's Review, vol. xxv. pp. 166, 392,493; vol. xxvi. p. 649.
3 New York Courier and Enquirer and Boston Atlas, cited by the Liberator, January 14th; Debate between Senators Wilson and Hammond, May 33d, 1860; Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 1st, 1860, p. 28.
4 Von Hoist, vol. vi. p. 323; Rise and Pall ot the Slave Power, vol. ii. p.618; Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 1st, 1860, p. 24; De Bow's Review, vol. xxii. p. 430; vol. xxiii. p. 53.
5 See President's Message, December 19th, 1859; also Harper's Monthly, October, 1859, p. 695.

was legal. He had seen "with his own eyes three hundred of those recently imported miserable beings in a slave-pen at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and also large numbers at Memphis, Tennessee."1 That Douglas considered it a vital question is evident from a statement he made in a letter replying to an inquiry whether his name would be presented to the Charleston convention as a candidate for the presidential nomination. "I could not accept the nomination," he wrote, "if the revival of the African slave-trade is to become a principle of the Democratic party." 2

Thinking that this declaration was not sufficiently emphatic, he later wrote a letter devoted almost exclusively to this question. Believing that the perpetual prohibition of the African slave-trade after 1808 was an obligation growing out of an essential compromise of the Constitution, he wrote: "I am irreconcilably opposed to the revival of the African slave-trade in any form and under any circumstances."'

These expressions were called forth by the growing sentiment of the South. The subject is freely discussed in
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1 "A Native Southerner " to the New York Tribune, writing from Washington, August 20th. The Tribune, August 26th, editorially remarks of the statement of Douglas: "We presume that this is perfectly true; at any rate, we must believe that Mr. Douglas has ample means of knowing whereof he affirms." "A Native Southerner," alluding to the conversation he had reported, writes to the Tribune, August 24th: "I owe an apology to the gentleman who gave me the details of that conversation for making it public, as I have since been informed it was strictly a private and confidential conversation, and was imparted to me with no idea that it would go any further; and it certainly should not, had secrecy been enjoined on me." For a number of instances of importation of Africans, see Report ot the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 1st, 1860, p. 21 et seq. As to the dereliction of duty of the United States government regarding the suppression of the slave-trade, and the reported action of England remonstrating against the reopening of the slave-trade between the United States and Africa, see New York Tribune, August 26th.
2 Letter to J. S. Dorr, June 22d, Life of Douglas, Flint, p. 168.
3 Letter to Peyton, August 2d, New York Times, August 16th.

De Bow's Review of 1857 and 1858. In August, 1858, it was the opinion of the editor that a very large party in the cotton States, large enough in some of them to control sentiment and policy, believed that a limited revival of the African slave-trade was indispensable to the South in order to maintain her political position.1 In January, 1859, the editor could complacently say: "No cause has ever grown with greater rapidity than has that of the advocates of the slave-trade."2 The Southern convention which met at Vicksburg in May demonstrated that De Bow had not failed to read aright the signs of the times. It was a fine body of men, morally and intellectually, who came together to deliberate on the interests of their section.3 After a thorough discussion of the question, they resolved that "all laws, State or federal, prohibiting the African slave-trade, ought to be repealed." The vote was 40 to 19, each State casting its electoral vote. Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas voted for the resolution, while Tennessee and Florida voted against it, and South Carolina was divided.4

The contrast between the way in which obnoxious federal laws were enforced in the Western Reserve of Ohio and, on the other hand, in South Carolina and Georgia, is significant. Although, under Pierce and Buchanan, the execution of a law that bore hard upon the anti-slavery sentiment of a community was more rigorous than the execution of a law offensive to pro-slavery feeling, yet had the administration been so disposed it could not have enforced its will against the dominant sentiment of the South, for its own officers were faithful to their own States rather than to the nation they represented. While mobs in the South did not attend the attempted execution of the laws against
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1 De Bow's Review, vol. xxv. p. 166.
2 Ibid., vol. xxvi. p. 51. For Southern sentiment see also Wilson's remarks in Senate, May 23d, 1860; and the Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 30th, 1860, p. 15.
3 De Bow's Review, vol. xxvi. p. 713.
4 Ibid., vol. xxvii. p. 99.

the slave-trade, as had happened at the North in certain Fugitive-Slave-law cases, the Southern people had a quiet and determined way of asserting their demands. Opposition would have been dangerous; and opposition was not made. When it came to action on the slavery question, a Southern community moved as one man; the dissenters were terrified into silence. At the North opinion was always divided.

The Republican convention of Ohio and the Vicksburg Southern convention may be regarded as representing the extreme political sentiments of the North and the South. Their official declarations are characteristic of the emotions inspired by freedom and by slavery. One demanded the repeal of a federal law repugnant to justice and mercy; the other demanded the abrogation of United States statutes that were an expression of the sublime humanity of the century.

Jefferson Davis spoke, July 6th, to the Democratic State convention of Mississippi. We certainly should strive, he said, for the repeal of the 1820 act, which makes the slave-trade a piracy; but he considered it impracticable to attempt the abrogation of the law of 1818 that prohibited the traffic. Yet, as a matter of right, legislation regarding the importation of Africans ought to be left to the States. Assuming that to be the case, he did not believe it the interest of Mississippi to have more negroes; but the conclusion for Mississippi is not applicable to Texas, New Mexico, or to future acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande. Ten years ago, men might have been found at the South who asserted that slavery was wrong, but such has been the progress of "truth and sound philosophy" that now "there is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or the legal right of the institution of African slavery, as it exists in our country." He affirmed and elaborated his ideas of Southern rights in the territories. The umpire, the Supreme Court, he averred, "has decided the issue in our favor; and though
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1 Supplementary to the Act of 1807. See vol. i. p. 29; Du Bois, Suppression of the Slave Trade, p. 118.

placemen may evade, and fanatics rail, the judgment stands the rule of right, and claims the respect and obedience of every citizen of the United States." He thought the acquisition of Cuba eminently desirable, and in addition to the usual reasons for it he urged another—" the importance of the island of Cuba to the Southern States if formed into a separate confederacy." This was not a mere theoretical consideration, for, he declared, "in the contingency of the election of a President on the platform of Mr. Seward's Rochester speech, let the Union be dissolved." 1

In the letter of June, Douglas not only made clear his position regarding the African slave-trade, but he averred that if the doctrine that ascribed to Congress the power of establishing slavery in the territories should be foisted into the Democratic creed, he could not accept the nomination for President from the Charleston convention.2 It is worth while calling attention to the fact that whatever ambiguity and inconsistency there may have been in the utterances of Douglas previous to the Lecompton dispute, his expressions after his revolt against the President were unequivocal. He did not resort to silence, a not uncommon refuge of politicians when divisions in their own party are manifest, but he made occasions to enunciate his principles, for he deemed their acceptance necessary to the welfare of the country. In this portion of his career, history must concede that Douglas was actuated by a bold and sincere patriotism. Southern politicians like Clingman, anxious to see the breach in the party repaired, were amazed that after the adjournment of Congress, Douglas would not let the question rest, but must appear as a controversialist in the columns of Harper's Magazine. 3 His article entitled "Popular Sovereignty in the Territories" appeared in the September number. It was a heavy and labored essay, far different from the
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1 This speech was published in the New York Tribune of August 31st 2 Letter to Dorr, Life of Douglas, Flint, p. 168.
3 Speeches and Writings of Clingman, p. 450.

quality of his speeches, which were commonly bright and pungent.

While, from his point of view, the doctrine that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories was as false as the one that Congress must protect it, his argument in the main was directed against the position the Southern Democrats had taken under the lead of Davis. Opening with an allusion to the irrepressible-conflict declaration of Seward and the "house divided against itself" of Lincoln, he maintained, in the course of the article, that if the Southern proposition were true, the idea of the irrepressible conflict would be realized, and it would not be an idle dream that the United States might become "entirely a slave-holding nation." He went into a long historical argument to show that his principle of popular sovereignty was as ancient as Jefferson, and believed in by the fathers of the Constitution; and he defended the compromise measures and the Kansas-Nebraska act with the main purpose of showing that the present doctrine of the Southern Democrats was an innovation in the Democratic creed.

The appearance of an article in the most popular magazine on the vital question agitating the public mind, by the foremost man of the country, was a political event; and the more remarkable as it was then a thing almost unknown for distinguished public men to write in the magazines. Attorney-General Black undertook to answer Douglas in an article published in the organ of the administration at Washington.1 Douglas replied and a pamphlet controversy followed. The discussion excited attention; but events now moved with such rapidity that the issues discussed were soon neglected, and the controversy left no lasting impression.

Between the administration and the Douglas Democrats at the East it was a war of pamphlets; in California it was war to the death. In Senator Broderick, the leader of the
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1 This article appeared anonymously in the Washington Constitution of September 10th.

anti-Lecomptonites, we see a man whose rise to a conspicuous position was only made possible by the peculiar conditions of American life. He was of obscure origin, and the year of his birth was doubtful.1 His father had been a stone-cutter at Washington. When Broderick, in the Senate, replied to Hammond's sneer at the manual laborers of the North, he pointed to the capitals which crowned the pilasters of the Senate chamber as his father's handiwork. The son of an artisan, he had himself been a mechanic, and he felt no shame in replying thus to the aristocrat of South Carolina, who could see nothing but degradation in work by the hands. His youth was passed in New York city. When he became a man, his business was keeping a grog-shop. He was a Tammany leader of the roughs, and foreman of a fire-engine company in the days before steam fire-engines, when volunteer firemen in New York were a potent political force. Notwithstanding such antecedents, his habits were correct, his morals good, his integrity unquestioned. Better than the society of firemen and Tammany braves did he love the quiet of his room, where, among his books, he sought to remedy the defects of early training. Political disappointment drove him in 1849 to California. He was a member of the convention that framed the constitution of that State, and he afterwards served in the legislature.

The Democratic party in California, owing principally to the strife for patronage and influence, was divided into two factions. Gwin was already the leader of one; Broderick became the leader of the other. When the Lecompton dispute occurred, Gwin, Southern in birth and feeling, and his followers, who were called the chivalry, naturally gravitated to the side of the administration. Broderick, the son of an Irishman, hating aristocracy, marshalled his adherents, who were for the most part Irish and German laborers, called mudsills, under the anti-Lecompton banner. The struggle was intensified by a quarrel regarding the disposition of
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1 Variously given as 1818 and 1819.

the federal patronage under President Buchanan. Gwin, in return for Broderick's assistance in his second election as senator, sold to his former opponent the patronage of the State; but this, even before the Lecompton dispute, Buchanan would not deliver.

In Washington, Broderick stood high. The purity of his life and his scrupulous honesty, associated with pride, energy, and ambition, commanded respect from men of both sections and of all parties. Fearless and frank, the serious and reflective cast of mind of this man, alone in the world, without relatives or family, was an added charm for those who knew best his early circumstances. One cannot but wonder whether, had fortune bestowed upon him opportunities for education in an environment of refining influences, his career might not have been an unalloyed benefaction to his country.

In California, his reputation was that of a managing politician who knew how to put to use the lessons he had learned from the Tammany organization. Yet, though surrounded by corruption and willing to bribe others, he would not himself touch the spoils. Believing that if he entered into the game of politics in California, he must employ the tricks in vogue, he played one opponent against another in a discreditable way; yet he remained faithful to his word, and was always better than the men who surrounded him. In a society reeking with foulness, his personal morals were unscathed.

The fiercest conflict between the two factions in California was at hand. Broderick was advised to go to Europe to avoid an apparently hopeless contest with malignant enemies. But, although his senatorship was not at stake, he would not shirk from the responsibility that leadership thrust upon him. On leaving the East he was much depressed. Shortly before sailing for San Francisco he said to Forney: "I feel, my dear friend, that we shall never meet again. I go home to die. I shall be challenged, I shall fight, and I shall be killed."

The campaign in California was unsurpassed for bitterness. Men in that State were not accustomed to mince their words; to them, common courtesy in a political conflict seemed strangely out of place. The most violent abuse, the most insolent vituperation, were the best of arguments. On such a canvass Broderick entered, trying at first to be decent and to demean himself according to the fashion of the East. It soon appeared that the Lecompton men would give no quarter and were determined to crush their most powerful enemy. Judge Terry, of the California Supreme Court, had referred to Broderick in an insulting manner, and this Broderick had resented in an expression of like tenor. An insignificant person, hearing Broderick's words, challenged the senator to fight. He replied June 29th, that until the canvass was over he would neither notice an insult nor fight a duel. Although suffering from a prostrating disease, Broderick engaged in the campaign with ardor. Knowing that his enemies were hounding him to death, he no longer spared them. His denunciation of Gwin was bitter in the extreme. He said his colleague was "dripping with corruption." Though no orator, Broderick had a blunt and effective way of putting things, and it was a stinging blow to the chivalry and their leader when he told the whole story of the senatorial bargain, and described Gwin as cringing to him for support.

The election took place September 7th. The defeat of Broderick's party was overwhelming. On the day after election, Terry resigned his position as judge and sent a challenge to Broderick on account of the mildly offensive words used in June. The senator hesitated, but finally accepted the challenge. The duel took place September 13th, ten miles from San Francisco. By Terry's winning the toss, his duelling pistols were used. Terry was a Texan, a dead shot, accustomed to affairs of honor; his pistols were set with hair triggers. By intention or accident, Broderick got the one more delicate on the trigger. He was ill, weak, and consequently nervous, but stood his ground with the courage of a martyr. The duel was at ten paces. After the combatants should say they were ready, the word would be given, " Fire—one—two." The pistols were not to be raised until the word "fire." When that was pronounced, Broderick raised his pistol, but, owing to the delicacy of the trigger, it went off prematurely, and the ball entered the ground about four paces in advance of him. A second later Terry, taking deliberate aim, shot him through the breast. In two days Broderick was dead and California in mourning. His funeral at San Francisco was imposing. Ten thousand people were mourners. Colonel Baker, the most eloquent orator of the State, with the dead body coffined before him, delivered the funeral oration, paying a noble tribute to the man who was his friend.

"Fellow-citizens," Baker said, "the man that lies before you was your senator. From the moment of his election his character has been maligned, his motives attacked, his courage impeached, his patriotism assailed. It has been a system tending to one end. And the end is here. What was his crime? Review his history—consider his public acts—weigh his private character—and before the grave encloses him forever, judge between him and his enemies. As a man to be judged in his private relations, who was his superior? It was his boast—and, amidst the general license of a new country, it was a proud one—that his most scrutinizing enemy could fix no single act of immorality upon him. Temperate, decorous, self-restrained, he had passed through all the excitements of California unstained. No man could charge him with broken faith or violated trust. Of habits simple and inexpensive, he had no lust of gain. He overreached no man's weakness in a bargain, and withheld no man his just dues. Never in the history of the State has there been a citizen who has borne public relations more stainless in all respects than he. But it is not by this standard that he is to be judged. He was a public man, and his memory demands a public judgment. What was his public crime? The answer is in his own words: 'They have killed me because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt administration.'" The orator made a manly protest against the duello. "The code of honor," said he, "is a delusion and a snare; it palters with the hope of a true courage, and binds it at the feet of crafty and cruel skill. ... It substitutes cold and deliberate preparation for courageous and manly impulse; ... it makes the mere 'trick of the weapon' superior to the noblest cause and the truest courage."

The funeral oration was pathetic and caused profound emotion; at its close orator and people wept in sympathy. It was calculated to stir up men's hearts, and it impressed in glowing words the conviction that Broderick had been hunted to the death by his antagonists. Baker, in 1861, met an heroic end at the battle of Ball's Bluff; but before he fell, the martyrdom of Broderick had borne fruit. It produced a mighty revolution in public opinion. The "chivalry," the Southern party, lost forever their power in the State. In the legislature elected the next year, the Douglas Democrats and Republicans together had a large majority, and when the Southern States began to secede, they passed a resolution pledging that California would remain faithful to the Union. Although Terry's life was prolonged thirty years, he never lived down what people called the deliberate murder of Broderick. At length, having grossly assaulted Justice Field, of the United States Supreme Court, he met his death from the shot of the marshal who, on account of threats uttered by Terry, had been assigned to the protection of the judge.

The death of Broderick created a profound sensation in the East. All knew that he was a victim to the wrath of the slavery propaganda. A journalist at Washington, who both reflected and guided public opinion, looked upon his loss as a public calamity. In New York city he was mourned as a citizen, and appropriate obsequies were held to pay him the last tribute of respect and affection.
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1 My authorities for this account are the San Francisco journals of the day, copious extracts from which are copied into the New York Tribune and Herald; the editorial articles in each journal; a tribute by Broderick's friend, George Wilkes, cited by the Tribune of October 19th; H. H. Bancroft, vol. xviii. chaps, xxiii. and xxiv., and vol. xxiv. pp. 251 and 272; Royce's California, p. 495; Forney's Anecdotes of Public Men, vol. i. p. 27; Pike's First Blows of the Civil War, p. 446. "Editor's Easy Chair" Harper's Magazine, January, 1860. In the account of the duel, I follow mainly the sworn testimony before the coroner's jury.

The most noticeable political campaign of the year east of the Mississippi River was in Ohio. That State, unlike most of the others, had an exciting election every year, for the governor and congressmen were elected in alternate years. Moreover, the State and congressional elections came in October, anticipating by one month most of the contests, so that, next to Pennsylvania, Ohio was the most important State of the Union as indicating the direction of popular sentiment. Though generally Republican, hard struggles for mastery were frequent.

The Republican candidate for governor was William Dennison, of Columbus. The Democrats nominated Judge Ranney, of Cleveland. Ranney wielded a good and powerful influence in his community; but as he lived in districts at first strongly Whig and afterwards Republican, he was rarely elected to office, although frequently a candidate, and the only national reputation he gained was that of a great lawyer. But in his own State he was known to be more than an able advocate; he was a profound jurist. The bent of his mind was legal, and, surmounting the obstacles of poverty and lack of opportunities, he acquired a partial education in school and college. When, in course of time, he came to the lawyer's office and the law library, he there mastered the principles which were the basis of his science. As a member of the Ohio constitutional convention, he had a great share in making the organic law; as judge of the Ohio Supreme Court, he interpreted it in a series of decisions which for sound doctrine, clearness of thought and expression, are probably not surpassed in the court records of any State. In his own community, he was esteemed for his honesty and purity of life. He loved to settle disputes outside of the courts. He was the champion of the poor and of those who lacked social distinction, yet he comprehended the rights of property as well as the rights of man.1

This canvass was different from most of the other exciting campaigns of Ohio in that the candidates for the governorship met one another several times in joint debate. As a speaker and reasoner, Ranney was much superior to Dennison; but Dennison had the better cause, and the one to which Ohio opinion was strongly tending. The Democrats of Ohio, with the exception of the office-holders, were followers of Douglas, whose principles Ranney expounded with vigor. But Ranney hated slavery worse than did his leader. He maintained that under the operation of popular sovereignty, all the territories were certain to come into the Union as free States. The shadow of the Oberlin persecution being over the canvass, the exact measure of obedience to the Fugitive Slave law entered into the discussion. Dennison was apparently affected by the speeches of Lincoln the previous year, and took a position calculated to attract the Fillmoreans of 1856. 2

Lincoln and Douglas were also brought into the canvass. Though not meeting in joint discussion, their speeches were to a certain extent a continuation of the debates of 1858. Lincoln came out as a party leader more prominently than in the preceding year.3 He asserted at Columbus that the most imminent danger threatening the purpose of the Republican organization was the "insidious Douglas popular sovereignty." 4 In this speech he utterly demolished as a
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1 See Western Magazine of History, vol. ii. p. 205.
2 See debate at Cleveland, September 15th, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Herald.
3 See also Lincoln's letter to Colfax, Nicolay and Hay, vol. ii. p. 178. 4 Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 242.

logical and constitutional argument the doctrine which Douglas so earnestly advocated. But that doctrine, like many other political principles, was stronger in practical working than in theory. When Ranney stated at Cleveland that Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico would undoubtedly be free, he stated the well-matured conviction of people best informed. It was true that the legislature of New Mexico had passed an act to provide for the protection of slaves, but no slaves were in the territory, and none were expected; the enactment was simply for political effect and to further the fortunes of a few adventurers.1 Nor did the South expect to derive any benefit from this action.2 It was idle to talk of sending slaves to the barren wastes and rocky regions of New Mexico, when not enough negroes could be had to cultivate the cotton fields and rice and sugar plantations of the South. It is clear that under the operation of natural forces, if the executive administration were fair and inclined to freedom, every territory would remain free and become a free State. A great many people held this opinion in 1859. There were, indeed, Republicans who thought they had no issue left.3 If the Southern States had remained in the Union, congressional prohibition of slavery in the territories after the election of Lincoln would at first have been impossible, for the Republicans would have been in a minority in Congress.

The action of the New Mexico legislature was, however, a good argument for Republicans to use with anti-slavery men against the proposition that popular sovereignty would effectually prevent the extension of slavery. But Lincoln used a better one in his Cincinnati speech when he intimated that
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1 Arizona and New Mexico, H. H. Bancroft, p. 683. In spite of the efforts of the slave-holders, said Seward at Lawrence, Kansas, September 26th, 1860, they have got "freedom in Kansas, and practically in New Mexico, in Utah, and California."—Seward's Works, vol. iv. p. 392.
2 See De Bow's Review, vol. xxvi. p. 601.
3 See New York Times, July 29th; Pike's First Blows of the Civil War, p. 445.

it would be preposterous for those wishing to prevent the spread of slavery to enlist under the Douglas banner, for Douglas had never said that slavery was wrong, but asserted rather that he did not care whether it was "voted up or voted down." 1 In truth, Douglas, both at Columbus and Cincinnati, had rejoiced as much at the action of New Mexico in establishing slavery on paper as at the action of Kansas in repealing the slave code foisted upon her by the first legislature.2 The strong partisan arguments of Lincoln in his two Ohio speeches were justifiable from his point of view, and in the light of after-events may probably be so regarded. He showed greater self-confidence than he had displayed in his Illinois speeches. He was obviously complimented to have his name linked with Seward's as an expounder of Republican doctrine, and he impressed upon his hearers the absolute need of a national party that should oppose the extension of slavery by action of Congress. In the Columbus speech he addressed himself to the Harper's Magazine article, finding little difficulty in pointing out material facts of history which Douglas had overlooked or suppressed. But in the Cincinnati speech Lincoln himself twisted our constitutional history, though we may be sure it was from lack of correct information and not with the intention to deceive.

Dennison was elected governor of Ohio by thirteen thousand majority; the Democrats were defeated in Pennsylvania, and the Republicans carried Iowa.

While the Republicans of the October States were rejoicing at their success, and those of the November States were preparing for the last electoral contest of the year, John Brown startled the country by making a violent attack on
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1 Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 257.
2 These speeches of Douglas were published in the New York Times, September 9th and 13th. The one at Columbus was telegraphed entire, an unusual thing in those days, and it was considered a remarkable newspaper feat.

slavery in Virginia. On Monday, October 17th, the news came that a large body of abolitionists and negroes had captured the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, had taken possession of the bridge which crosses the Potomac, fortifying it with cannon, had cut telegraph wires, stopped trains, killed several men, and had seized many prominent citizens who were held as hostages. It was also reported that the slaves in the neighborhood had risen and that the surrounding country was in a high state of alarm, expecting all the horrors of a servile revolt. Later in the day more correct information was obtained. It became known that Captain Brown was the leader and that his force did not exceed twenty-two men. On the following morning the welcome intelligence came that the Virginia militia and the United States troops had suppressed the insurrection, and that most of the insurgents had been killed or taken prisoners.

This event, which struck the country with amazement and distracted public attention from all other concerns, was not the result of a sudden impulse, but had been long in preparation. More than twenty years before, John Brown had told his family that the purpose of his life was to make war on slavery by force and arms. He asked his children if they were willing to join him and do all in their power to "break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of his teeth;" and when they signified assent, he administered to them a solemn oath of secrecy and devotion.' Brown's family was large; their unquestioned obedience and the consecration of their lives to his service call to mind the story of the patriarchs. He had long been satisfied that the "milk-and
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1 Sanborn, p. 39. Letter of Sanborn to the Nation, December 20th, 1890, communicating a letter of John Brown, Jr. This letter was drawn out by an article in the Andover Review for Dec, 1890, by Wendell P. Garrison, which questioned whether the Harper's Ferry scheme or one similar to it had long been entertained. See also Garrison in the Andover Review for January, 1891, p. 59.

water principles" of the abolitionists, as he called their belief in moral suasion, would effect nothing. Happening to be in Boston in May, 1859, he became an attentive listener to the speeches made at the New England anti-slavery convention. At its close he passed judgment on their method by saying: "These men are all talk; what is needed is action—action!" Nor, in his opinion, could anything be expected from the Republicans, for they were opposed to meddling with slavery in the States where it existed.1

The Kansas experience of Brown had convinced him that he could get followers in any undertaking, no matter how desperate. It had also brought him into contact with men of means and influence, who were willing to back him in his peculiar crusade against slavery. Not the least astonishing thing in this strange history is the manner of men whom he induced to aid him in the conspiracy against the laws of their common country. Gerrit Smith, the rich philanthropist; Theodore Parker, the noted preacher; Dr. S. G. Howe, an enthusiast in the cause of suffering humanity; Thomas W. Higginson, the pastor of a free church at Worcester; Stearns, a successful business man of Boston; Sanborn, fresh from college, ready to give his income and sacrifice his small property for the cause—these were Brown's trusted friends. That he could attach to himself men of such differing aims, holding such positions in society, and make out of them fellow conspirators, is proof of the strong personal magnetism he exerted on sympathetic natures. John A. Andrew, a man of parts who afterwards distinguished himself as the war governor of Massachusetts, once casually met Brown, and, though seeing him but a few minutes, "was very much impressed by him," and thought him "a very magnetic person." 2
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1 Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 279; Testimony of William F. M. Amy before the Mason Committee; Sanborn, p. 421; Life of Garrison, vol. iii. p. 488.
2 Testimony of John A. Andrew before the Mason Committee, p. 192.

Brown's occupation in Kansas seemingly gone, he deemed the time had come to strike a blow in another quarter. Leaving a little company of followers in Iowa, to whom little by little he had imparted his plans, and who were devoting the leisure of the winter to military drill, he came East in January, 1858, seeking the sinews of war. Wishing a full and complete conference with his friends, he asked Parker, Higginson, Stearns, and Sanborn to meet him at Peterboro', New York, the home of Gerrit Smith. Sanborn only could make the journey; he reached the house of the philanthropist on the evening of February 22d. After dinner Brown disclosed his plan. With a small body of trusty men he proposed to occupy a place in the mountains of Virginia, whence he would make incursions down into the cultivated districts to liberate slaves. As they were freed he would arm them. He would subsist on the enemy, fortify himself against attack, and by his mode of operation make slavery insecure in the country in which he should first raise the standard of revolt, so that masters would sell their remaining slaves and send them away. Then operations might be indefinitely extended until his name should become a terror all through the South, and the tenure of property in man precarious. At the same time, his success would attract from the North and from Canada recruits, eager to take part in this movement for the destruction of slavery. As his adherents might increase to a great number, he had prepared a scheme of provisional government which he submitted to his friends. At the worst, he would have a retreat open to the North. Arms were already provided for his enterprise, and with eight hundred dollars in money he could begin operations in May.1

As Brown unfolded his plan to the little council, amazement sat on every brow. To attempt so great an enterprise with means so small seemed unspeakable folly. His friends
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1 Sanborn, p. 439; Life of Frederick Douglass, pp. 279, 420; Mason Report.

discussed the project and criticised it in detail, but every obstacle had been foreseen by Brown, and to each objection he had a ready answer and a plausible argument. When the hopelessness of defying the slave power and making war upon the State of Virginia with so small a band was urged, he replied: "If God be for us, who can be against us?"1 The council sat until after midnight. The discussion was renewed the next day. The enthusiasm and confidence of Brown almost persuaded his friends; at any rate, they saw it would be vain to oppose him, and it seemed equally clear he must be renounced or assisted. At last, when apart from the rest of the company, Gerrit Smith said to Sanborn: "You see how it is; our dear old friend has made up his mind to this cause, and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him. I will raise so many hundred dollars for him; you must lay the case before your friends in Massachusetts, and perhaps they will do the same. I see no other way." This was in accordance with Sanborn's own view, and he returned at once to Boston to perform his part in the undertaking. A letter from Brown to Sanborn, shortly after, gives us a glimpse of his inmost thoughts. The words are such as could only come from "a regular old Cromwellian dug up from two centuries."2 "I have only had this one opportunity in a life of nearly sixty years," Brown wrote; "and could I be continued ten times as long again, I might not again have another equal opportunity. God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance of such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards. ... I expect nothing but to 'endure hardness;' but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson." 3

When Sanborn apprised Theodore Parker of the project,
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1 Sanborn, p. 439.
2 Wendell Phillips at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, November 1st, 1859.
3 Sanborn, p. 444.

the latter became anxious to see Brown, who, on that suggestion, made a visit secretly to Boston. There, in a room of the American House, the Massachusetts friends and the old Puritan plotted together. Brown deserved that name as well by lineage as by character. He was a direct descendant of Peter Brown, one of the Pilgrims who had come over in the Mayflower, and both of his grandfathers had fought in the Revolutionary War.

He wrote from Boston to his son, giving the result of his visit: "My call here has met with a most hearty response, so that I feel assured of at least tolerable success. I ought to be thankful for this. All has been effected by a quiet meeting of a few choice friends, it being scarcely known that I have been in the city." 1

A fund of one thousand dollars was raised. In many of their communications, the conspirators used a cipher. Brown assumed the name of Hawkins. When begging his daughter to consent that her husband should accompany him, he called his followers scholars and their work would be going to school.2 The enterprise was also spoken of as the wool business, and Sanborn wrote that Hawkins "has found in Canada several good men for shepherds, and, if not embarrassed by want of means, expects to turn his flock loose about the 15th of May."3 After Parker's failing health had driven him to Europe, he asked in a letter from Rome: "Tell me how our little speculation in wool goes on, and what dividend accrues therefrom."4

But the immediate execution of the plan was checked by an untoward circumstance. Brown had previously made the acquaintance of Forbes, a European adventurer, had engaged him as drill-master on account of his military experience, and had injudiciously confided to him his purpose of attacking slavery in one of the border States. Being unable to draw money from the friends of Brown, Forbes
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1 Sanborn, p. 440.
2 Ibid., p. 441.
3 Ibid., p. 457; see also p. 447.
4 Life of Parker, Frothingham, p. 462.

divulged to Senators Seward and Wilson at Washington that Brown had an unlawful object in view, for which he was going to use rifles belonging to the Massachusetts State Kansas committee. Wilson immediately wrote to Dr. Howe, protesting against any such employment to be made of the arms, and advising that they be taken from the custody of Brown. Stearns, the chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas committee, then warned Brown that no use must be made of the arms other than for the defence of Kansas. A few days later Smith, Parker, Howe, Stearns, and Sanborn held a meeting at the Revere House, Boston, and decided that the attack on slavery in Virginia must be postponed. They also determined that Brown ought to go at once to Kansas.1

He appeared in the territory in June. Having heretofore been smooth-shaven, his long white beard now served as a disguise to many who had known him in other days.2 Although peace had been nominally restored in Kansas, the most terrible deed of blood the territory had known was perpetrated in the spring of 1858. Hamilton, a Georgian leader of a pro-slavery band, soured at the triumph of the free-State party, had made a black-list of persons whom he deemed deserving of death on account of their exertions for the free-State cause. Near Marais des Cygnes, he had in a raid taken a number of prisoners. Selecting eleven, he had them drawn up in a line, and, without trial or ceremony, shot in cold blood. Five fell dead and five were wounded.3 When Brown reached Kansas, the country resounded with the horror of this massacre, but opportunity for retaliation did not occur until late in the year. Hearing that a negro, his wife, two children, and another negro were to be sold and sent away from a Missouri plantation, Brown, with a
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1 Sanborn, p. 456 et seq.; testimony of Seward, Wilson, and Howe before the Mason committee.
2 Life of Captain John Brown, Redpath, p. 199.
3 Spring's Kansas, p. 246; Sanborn, p. 481; Redpath, p. 200.

small company, crossed the Missouri line, liberated the five slaves to whose aid he went, and also set six others free. In the accomplishment of this work, one of the slave-holding party was killed. The governor of Missouri put a price of three thousand dollars on Brown's head and he was pursued; but he defeated one party of pursuers in a fight, eluded others, and, bringing his party of freedmen safely through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan, he saw them on the 12th of March, 1859, ferried across from Detroit to Windsor in Canada.1

The Kansas exploit delighted the friends of Brown, with the exception of Dr. Howe, who disapproved of his taking property from the slave-holders, which he had done to give the fugitives an outfit. During the winter, Howe had accompanied Theodore Parker to Cuba, and on his return had made a stay in South Carolina, where he accepted the hospitality of Wade Hampton and other rich planters. It was some time before he was willing to render Brown any aid. The idea of a slave insurrection, in which such noble mansions as he had visited should be given to the torch and their inmates to the knife, struck him with horror. Parker was away, and Higginson, since the postponement of the plan had not met his approval, thereafter took less interest in it; thus the burden of the financial part of the undertaking fell upon Smith, Stearns, and Sanborn. They, however, made up in zeal what they lacked in number. 2

More than four thousand dollars was contributed in aid of the Virginia enterprise. Most of this sum passed through the hands of the secret committee, and nearly all the donors knew for what purpose the money would be used. Of this amount, Smith contributed seven hundred and fifty dollars, and Stearns one thousand dollars. But although it was known that a foray would be made in Virginia, no one of the committee, except Sanborn, had an intimation that the blow
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1 Sanborn, p. 482 et seq.; Spring's Kansas, p. 252.
2 Sanborn, pp. 491, 493.

might be struck at Harper's Ferry. 1 Brown was secretive, and men like Smith and Stearns did not, for obvious reasons, desire to be apprised of the full details of the project. That Brown was going to make a raid into Virginia was probably not known to more than fifty persons besides his family and armed followers, though a thousand may have had good reason to suspect that he intended to attack slavery by force in some part of the South.' It must be borne in mind that at this time the steadfast friends of Brown refused to credit the charge that he had been concerned in the Pottawatomie executions.2

For arms he had two hundred Sharpe's rifles, two hundred revolvers, and nine hundred and fifty pikes.4 The pikes were to arm the slaves who should fly to his standard. "Give a slave a pike and you make him a man" was one of his maxims.5 The Republican members of the Senate committee that investigated the Harper's Ferry invasion reported that Brown perverted the fire-arms from the purpose for which he had received them. 6 While this is a warrantable inference from the testimony before the committee, later disclosures show that the rifles and revolvers had become the individual property of Stearns; that he was in full sympathy with the Virginia scheme as the Massachusetts friends understood it, and had willingly given the arms to Brown.7

Brown, having decided that he would strike the blow at Harper's Ferry, rented in July two houses on the Kennedy farm, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, four miles from
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1 See Sanborn, p. 450. Sanborn says: Whether Smith " knew that Harper's Ferry was to be attacked is uncertain; for this was communicated only to a few persons except those actually under arms " (p. 545). Smith wrote in 1867: "I had not myself the slightest knowledge nor intimation of Brown's intended invasion of Harper's Ferry."—Life of Smith, Frothingham, p. 254; see also p. 259 et seq.
2 Sanborn, pp. 418, 496.
3 See p. 164.
4 Blair's testimony, Mason Report.
5 Redpath, p. 206.
6 See Report, p. 23.
7 Sanborn, p. 464

the United States armory in the Virginia village. He collected his munitions of war at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The fire-arms were sent by his son from Ohio, and the pikes by the manufacturer from Connecticut, both being shipped to I. Smith & Sons, and so delivered by the railroad company. It was also a place of meeting for the volunteers, and thence the men and materials were quietly conveyed to the Kennedy farm. A notable circumstance in these days of preparation was the conference between Brown and Frederick Douglass in an old stone quarry near Chambersburg. They had long been intimately acquainted, and met at Brown's request to consider the work in hand, of which Douglass had an inkling. Now the old Puritan declared that it was his settled purpose to take Harper's Ferry, for the capture of a place so well known " would serve as notice to the slaves that their friends had come and as a trumpet to rally them to his standard." Douglass combated the design with the strongest of arguments. You not only attack Virginia, he urged, but you attack the federal government, and you will array the whole country against you; furthermore, you are going into a perfect steel-trap; once in, you will never get out alive; you will be surrounded and escape will be impossible. But the cogent reasoning and earnest manner of Douglass failed to shake the purpose of Brown. After he had flatly refused to join the expedition, the old Puritan, giving him a fraternal embrace, said: "Come with me, Douglass; I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them."1 Many of Brown's followers remonstrated with him when the Harper's Ferry plan was disclosed. One of his sons said: "You know how it resulted with Napoleon when he rejected advice in regard to marching with his army to Moscow." But in the end, by persuasion and by
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1 Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 325 et ante; Sanborn, p. 538 et seq.

threatening resignation as their leader, he silenced all objections.1

The Kennedy farm was in an unsuspecting neighborhood. The gathering of the forces, the load of very heavy boxes, excited no suspicion; the presence of so many strangers whose ostensible occupations were but a thin disguise, aroused little curiosity. In August, the Secretary of War received an anonymous letter from Cincinnati, in which the plot was disclosed, the leader's name given, and the proposed point of attack correctly stated; but Floyd only gave it a passing notice and set afoot no investigation. 2

The moment for which Brown had waited twenty years had now come. Everything was ready for the blow. On the cold, dark Sunday night of October 16th, he mustered eighteen followers, five of whom were negroes. After giving them his orders, he said: "Now, gentlemen, let me press this one thing on your minds. You all know how dear life is to you, and how dear your lives are to your friends; and in remembering that, consider that the lives of others are as dear to them as yours are to you. Do not, therefore, take the life of any one if you can possibly avoid it; but if it is necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make sure work of it." 3 With the command, "Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry," they started from the Kennedy farm. Each man was armed with a rifle and revolvers. Men were sent ahead to tear down the telegraph wires on the Maryland side. Soon the whole party arrived at the covered bridge across the Potomac which connected Maryland and Virginia, and was jointly used by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the citizens. This was taken possession of, the watchman made a prisoner, and the bridge left guarded. Reaching the Virginia side, Brown and two followers broke into the United
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1 Sanborn, p. 541.
2 See testimony before the Mason committee.
3 Cook's confession, New York Tribune, November 26th, 1859.

States armory, and, seizing the watchmen, remained there on guard. Other men took the arsenal near by, where the public arms were deposited, and the rifle-works half a mile away on the Shenandoah River. These buildings were all national property, but not under military guard; the men in charge were civic police engaged by the War Department.1

By midnight Brown was master of Harper's Ferry. The lights in the town were put out and the telegraph wires cut. To secure hostages and to make a beginning of conferring freedom on the slaves, he sent out a party to bring in some prominent citizens of the surrounding country with their negroes. To give dramatic force to the exploit, the house of Colonel Lewis Washington, the great-grandson of a brother of George Washington, was visited, and the owner arrested. That which was supposed to be the sword of Frederick the Great, presented by him to the Father of his country, was taken. Brown, in his war of liberation, wanted to bear the sword of him who had gained the country's independence, and to set free, first of all, the slaves of a Washington. The result of this midnight incursion was the arrest of two proprietors, and the bringing into the armory of several slaves. 2

At half-past one in the morning, the mail train from Wheeling to Baltimore arrived and was stopped by the guard on the bridge. The negro porter employed at the station, a freeman, went out to look for the watchman, and, not heeding an order to halt, turned to run back, was shot and mortally wounded. Before sunrise the train was allowed to go forward, but the conductor first assured himself that the bridge was safe by walking across it with Brown. As the train proceeded towards Baltimore, the news of the foray spread far and wide. 3
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1 Mason Report, and testimony; Sanborn, p. 552.
2 Washington's testimony before the Mason committee; Sanborn, p. 553.
3 Mason Report; New York Herald and Tribune; Sanborn, p. 555.

When the people of Harper's Ferry aroused themselves in the morning, they found a hostile force in possession of the strongholds of their town and holding most of the available fire-arms. Men on their way to work, citizens passing through the streets, were taken prisoners. The church bells were rung; the citizens gathered together; such as had squirrel-rifles and shot-guns organized themselves into companies ; the alarm spread, and militia companies from neighboring towns hastened to the scene. Fighting began. Men fell on both sides, among them the mayor of Harper's Ferry and a landed proprietor, a neighbor and friend of Washington, who had gone to the village to attempt his liberation.

For four or five hours after daybreak, Brown might have retreated to the mountains. This he was urged to do by his trustworthy men, but before noon his retreat into Maryland was cut off, and by the middle of the afternoon all the men except those in the armory under Brown's immediate command were killed, captured, or dispersed. At midday Brown withdrew the remnant of his force, with his principal hostages, into the engine-house in the armory yard. The doors and windows were barred, and port-holes were cut through the brick wall. The firing from the outside now became terrible. When the assailants could be seen, their shots were returned by the besieged. One of Brown's sons had been mortally wounded, and the other was instantly killed in the fight of the afternoon.1 Colonel Washington, who was a prisoner in the engine-house, afterwards said: "Brown was the coolest and firmest man I ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm and to sell their lives as dearly as they
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1 Three of Brown's sons were engaged in the raid; one escaped.

could."1 Yet the remorseless spirit which governed the stern Puritan that terrible night on the Pottawatomie had departed. He was humane to his prisoners. Instead of wreaking vengeance on them because his sons were dead and dying by his side, he urged them to seek sheltered corners out of the reach of the flying bullets. Not one of them was harmed. Nor would he allow his men to fire on noncombatants outside. "Don't shoot," he would say; "that man is unarmed." 2

On Monday evening, when Colonel Robert E. Lee, a man who later was destined to win imperishable fame, arrived with a company of United States marines, the force in the engine-house was reduced to Brown himself and his six men, two of whom were wounded. Not wishing to put the lives of the prisoners in jeopardy in the confusion of a midnight assault, Lee delayed operations until daylight Tuesday. Then his summons to surrender having been met with a refusal, his men, using a heavy ladder as a battering-ram, forced an entrance into the engine-house. Brown was cut down by the sword, receiving several wounds on the head, and also bayonet thrusts in the body. He and his followers who remained were quickly taken into custody. Of the nineteen men who had left the Kennedy farm, ten were killed, five taken prisoners, and four had escaped. Two of these were afterwards arrested in Pennsylvania. Of the inhabitants and attacking parties, five were killed and nine wounded. 3

Virginia was in an uproar. While the baser sort would gladly have lynched Brown and treated him like a dog, gentlemen of education and position could not repress the instinct to admire his courage. It had long been a jeer at
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1 Statement to Governor Wise, Speech of Wise at Richmond, Redpath, p. 273.
2 The article of Dangerfield, one of the prisoners, in the Century Magazine, cited by Sanborn, p. 556; Speech of Governor Wise, Redpath, p. 273 ; John Brown, Von Hoist, p. 134.
3 Lee's Report; Sanborn,

the abolitionists that they did not dare to preach their doctrine at the South; now men had come into their midst to bear testimony with the sword against the wrong of slavery. But any regard for Brown's personal qualities was merged into wonder and alarm at the possible extent of the conspiracy, and the desire was great to know who had been his backers in this expedition. Senator Mason arrived at Harper's Ferry the afternoon of Tuesday, October 18th, and put many questions to the old Puritan, who was lying on the floor of the armory office, his hair matted, and his face, hands, and clothes stained with blood. Brown was asked who had sent him here? Who had furnished the money? How many were engaged with him in the movement? When did he begin the organization? and where did he get the arms? To these questions of Mason and Vallandigham, a congressman from Ohio who assisted in this examination, Brown had but one reply : "I will answer freely and faithfully about what concerns myself — I will answer anything I can with honor, but not about others."

This conversation was set down word for word by a New York Herald reporter, and immediately given to the world. It revealed an heroic spirit with an ideal passing comprehension. Such a spirit seemed strangely out of place in a country devoted to material aims and in a century of positive scepticism.

Our object in coming, he said, was " to free the slaves, and only that." When asked by Mason, "How do you justify your acts?" he replied: "I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. ... I think I did right," the old Puritan continued, "and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and all times. I hold that the golden rule, 1 Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you,' applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty." He considered his enterprise "a religious movement" and "the greatest service man can render to God;" he regarded himself "an instrument in the hands of Providence." "I want you to understand, gentlemen," he explained, "that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people oppressed by the slave system just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress and greatly oppressed as we would be done by. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason and the only thing that prompted me to come here. ... I wish to say, furthermore," he afterwards said, "that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. . . . You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet." 1

Governor Wise, who came to Harper's Ferry the day of this conversation, was impressed with the bearing of Brown. In a public speech at Richmond, he said: "They are mistaken who take Brown to be a madman. He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw, cut and thrust, and bleeding and in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude . . . and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity, as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm and truthful and intelligent." 2 Emerson, struck with the intercourse between Wise and Brown, said: "Governor Wise, in the record of his first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man, he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other swiftly; each respects the other. If
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1 New York Herald, October 21st; Sanborn, p. 562.
2 Redpath, p. 278.

opportunity allowed, they would prefer each other's society and desert their former companions." 1

John Brown's dream of many years had been shattered. The result was what any man of judgment would have foreseen. In the light of common-sense, the plan was folly; from a military point of view it was absurd. The natural configuration of the ground, the accessibility of Harper's Ferry to Washington and Baltimore, doomed him in any event to destruction. To attack with eighteen men a village of fourteen hundred people, the State of Virginia, and the United States government seems the work of a madman. Only by taking into account his unquestioning faith in the literal truth of the Bible can any explanation of his actions be suggested, for Brown was in ordinary affairs as sane a man as ever lived, and of no mean ability as a leader in a guerrilla war.

To Emerson he seemed "transparent," a "pure idealist." 2 Gerrit Smith thought of all men in the world, John Brown was "most truly a Christian," and that he did not doubt "the truth of one line of the Bible."3 Like the Puritans of two centuries before, he drew his most impressive lessons from the Old Testament; he loved to dwell upon the wonders God had wrought for Joshua and for Gideon. His plan seemed no greater folly than was the attempt of Joshua to take a walled city by the blowing of trumpets and by shouts of the people; nor was he more foolish than Gideon, who went out to encounter a great army with three hundred men bearing only trumpets and lamps and pitchers. Yet the walls of Jericho had fallen flat at the noise, and Gideon had put to flight, amidst great confusion, Midianites and Amalekites, who were like the grasshoppers for multitude. And as the old Puritan was doing God's work, he felt that God
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1 Lecture on "Courage," November 8th, 1859.
2 Remarks at a meeting for the relief of John Brown's family, Boston, November 18th, 1859.
3 Life of Gerrit Smith, Frothingham, pp. 237, 258.

would not forsake him.1 The evasive replies he gave when pressed to account for his military folly make plain that he held something back which he deemed too sacred to put into categorical answers to an unfriendly examination. To this was likewise due a lack of coherence in his apology.

He did not expect "a general rising of the slaves;" he expected "to gather them up from time to time and set them free." The Southerners could not comprehend that Brown was sincere when he discoursed in this wise. In their view he had "whetted knives of butchery for our mothers, sisters, daughters, and babes."2 To Northern statesmen it was clear that he could attain success only by inciting a servile war and letting passions loose such as had made the tale of San Domingo one over which civilization weeps. Nor is it surprising that practical men could have no other idea when Gerrit Smith, the trusted friend and helper of John Brown, had in the August previous publicly written: "Is it entirely certain that these [slave] insurrections will be put down promptly, and before they can have spread far? . . . Remember that telegraphs and railroads can be rendered useless in an hour. Remember, too, that many who would be glad to face the insurgents would be busy in transporting their wives and daughters to places where they would be safe from that worst fate which husbands and fathers can imagine for their wives and daughters."3

Brown knew the history of San Domingo, and in the career of Toussaint he took delight. When he should strike a signal blow such as the capture of Harper's Ferry, he expected the slaves of Virginia and the free negroes of the North to flock to his standard.4 He brought with him arms for thirteen hundred men, and the stored equipments of the

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1 See letter to Sanborn, p. 457.
2 Governor Wise to Mrs. Child, October 29th, New York Tribune, November 8th.
3 Frothingham, p. 241.
4 Testimony of Realf, Mason committee.

arsenal were sufficient for an army. His provisional constitution shows that he was anxious to avoid the horrors of San Domingo. One article granted to every prisoner a fair and impartial trial, and another provided that" persons convicted of the forcible violation of any female prisoner shall be put to death." 1 But the negroes would not rise. The captured slaves, into whose hands he put the pikes, held them listlessly, making common cause with their masters, and were glad when the fight was over to return to their bondage. 2

The feeling of the South towards John Brown may be imagined; it need not be described. Consider how men of property would now feel at a violent attack of anarchists on their houses and goods, and one will have a partial conception of the horror and indignation that in 1859 prevailed at the South. The sensation at the North was profound. The conspirators were alarmed, for their complicity was suspected and they immediately destroyed all questionable correspondence.3 It was reported that Governor Wise had made a requisition on the governor of New York for Gerrit Smith. His house was guarded, and his friends said that nothing less than a regiment of soldiers would suffice to take him from his home.4 The nervous tension on the philanthropist was so great that his mind gave way, and he was taken to a mad-house.5 Dr. Howe, Stearns, Sanborn, and Frederick Douglass went to Canada; Higginson pursued the even tenor of his way. 6

Yet, in truth, the Southern leaders cared little for the apprehension of these amiable conspirators, who were rightly
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1 Article XLI. See Mason Report, p. 57.
2 Testimony of Washington and Allstadt, Mason committee.
3 Sanborn, p. 514. From this statement Higginson must be excepted.
4 See letter of a New York Herald correspondent from Peterboro, Oct 31st; Frothingham, p. 243.
5 Frothingham, p. 245.
6 Frothingham, p. 243; Wilson's Rise and Fall the Slave Power, vol. ii. p. 605; Sanborn, p 514.

judged to have no political influence. But if they could fasten active support of the enterprise on prominent Republican leaders, an important point would be gained. As the November elections were pending, Northern Democrats were alive to the injury their opponents would sustain could it be shown that Seward, Chase, Sumner, and Hale had in any way been engaged in the conspiracy. There was not the slightest evidence to that effect; but the charge was not effectually silenced until the following year, when the thorough investigation by a Senate committee of the subject showed that these Republican leaders knew no more of John Brown's plan than the rankest Democrats of the South. In the excitement of the moment, however, the charge was made with impudent assertion, and the story invented that Seward and other prominent Republicans had met John Brown at Gerrit Smith's house in the spring of 1859. 1

By way of varying the charge of direct knowledge, it was maintained that Brown had only practically applied Seward's doctrine of the irrepressible conflict. As a significant argument, the New York Herald, on the Wednesday after the Harper's Ferry raid, when the excitement was at the highest, printed Seward's " irrepressible-conflict" speech by the side of the startling news from Virginia. 2 The next day the editor averred that "Seward is the arch-agitator who is responsible for this insurrection,"3 and a few days later argued that he should be prosecuted as a traitor.4 This line of discourse, though for the most part intended to influence the coming elections, was by some men taken seriously.5 Seward, being in Europe, made no reply to these Democratic arguments. The Republican press and speakers met them in a dignified way, taking occasion to reiterate that their party had no intention of interfering with slavery in the States, and condemning the raid at Harper's Ferry,
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1 New York Herald, November 2d and 4th.
2 Ibid., October 19th.
3 Ibid., October 20th.
4 November 1st.
5 See, for example, letter from 29 Wall Street to the Herald of November 2d.

yet at the same time heaping no abuse upon the head of Brown. During the excitement of the first news, when it was supposed that Brown himself had been killed, Greeley best expressed the feeling of sympathetic Republicans.

"There will be enough," he wrote, "to heap execration on the memory of these mistaken men. We leave this work to the fit hands and tongues of those who regard the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence as ' glittering generalities,' believing that the way to universal emancipation lies not through insurrection, war, and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice. We deeply regret this outbreak; but remembering if their fault was grievous, grievously have they answered for it, we will not by one reproachful word disturb the bloody shrouds wherein John Brown and his compatriots are sleeping. They dared and died for what they felt to be right, though in a manner which seems to us fatally wrong. Let their epitaphs remain unwritten until the not distant day when no slave shall clank his chains in the shades of Monticello or by the graves of Mount Vernon."1

The elections were favorable to the Republicans. The John Brown raid undoubtedly had some influence in diminishing their vote, but the effect was not great. "Do not be downhearted about the Old Brown business," Greeley wrote Colfax before the election. "Its present effect is bad, and throws a heavy load on us in this State . .. but the ultimate effect is to be good. ... It will drive on the slave power to new outrages. ... It presses on the 'irrepressible conflict;' and I think the end of slavery in Virginia and the Union is ten years nearer than it seemed a few weeks ago." 2

Brown was taken prisoner October 18th; the preliminary examination was had the 25th. He was immediately indicted by the grand jury, and on Wednesday, the 26th, arraigned
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1 New York Tribune, October 19th.
2 Life of Colfax, Hollister, p. 150.

for trial before the circuit court of Jefferson county, Virginia, which was sitting at Charlestown, ten miles from Harper's Ferry. The reason afterwards given to Brown, by the attorney for the prosecution, for the unusual haste was that the regular term of the court began immediately after the capture of the prisoners; if not tried then, they could not be tried until the spring term.1 But the public sentiment of the community called for a speedy trial, and, with newspapers and people demanding summary vengeance by lynch-law, the authorities were right in any event to take prompt action. 2 Yet it seemed cruel to sympathizers with the old Puritan that the process must go on before he had recovered from his wounds, and while he was obliged from weakness to lie upon a pallet in the court-room.

Wednesday was consumed in getting a jury, and on Thursday the examination of witnesses began. Counsel for Brown were at first assigned by the court; later, lawyers came from Boston and Cleveland and volunteered their services for his defence, while, on the fourth day of the trial, Chilton, an attorney of eminent ability from Washington, appeared. Chilton had been retained by John A. Andrew, of Boston, and Montgomery Blair, of Maryland; he was a native of Virginia, had represented his State in Congress, and now made an able plea for the prisoner on technical grounds.3 The counsel for Brown assigned by the State desired at the commencement to make the defence on the ground of insanity. Brown, raising himself from his pallet, said: "I am perfectly unconscious of insanity, and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempts to interfere in my behalf on that
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1 See paper on the Trial and Execution of John Brown, by General Marcus J. Wright, Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. iv. p. 121.
2 See citations from the Southern press by the Liberator, November 11th; Wright, p. 115.
3 Testimony of John A. Andrew before the Mason committee; Wright, p. 117; see plea of Chilton as published in New York Herald of November 1st.

score." 1 On Monday, October 31st, the fifth day of the trial, the jury, after a deliberation of three quarters of an hour, brought in a verdict of "Guilty of treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel, and murder in the first degree." The trial was fair;2 no other result was possible. Two days afterwards, Brown was brought into court to receive his sentence.3 When asked whether he had anything to say why sentence should not be pronounced upon him, he arose and in a distinct voice said: "I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves. ... I never did intend murder or treason or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection. . . . Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust exactments, I say, let it be done. ... I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected; but I feel no consciousness of guilt."4 The judge then sentenced him to be hanged in public on Friday, the 2d of December. The case was taken to the Court of Appeals by Chilton and a Richmond attorney, but a writ of error to the judgment rendered by the Circuit Court was refused.5

From the end of the trial until the execution took place, Charlestown, though under martial law, was in a state of excitement bordering on frenzy. All Virginia was in alarm,
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1 New York Herald, October 28th.
2 The paper of General Wright was written to establish that fact; see also Greeley's American Conflict, vol. i. p. 294; and John Brown, by Von Hoist, p. 154.
3 New York Herald, November 1st.
4 Ibid., November 3d.
5 New York Tribune, November 21st; testimony of J. A. Andrew, Mason committee.

and Richmond at one time in a panic of fear. The wide belief that an attempt to rescue Brown would be made, the burning of several barns at night in the vicinity of Charlestown, which was construed to be the prelude to an extended slave insurrection, made the people nervous and apprehensive.1 There was no ground for the fear of a rescue, 2 or of a rising of the slaves; though Governor Wise kept a large body of troops constantly on the ground, it is improbable that he shared the fears of the citizens. 3

The replies of Brown in the conversation with Mason, his bearing, and the sincere and pregnant expressions of his letters between the verdict and the execution, showed him a hero, and won him that admiration of choice spirits that is granted only to those who dare much and sacrifice much in the cause of humanity. Most of his letters were published in the Tribune, Liberator, and other newspapers of the North, and their utterances set people to pondering on the cause that this man was willing to die for. "Everything that is said of John Brown," remarked Emerson, " leaves people a little dissatisfied; but as soon as they read his own speeches and letters they are heartily contented—such is the singleness of purpose which justifies him to the head and heart of all."4 To his brother Brown wrote: "I am quite cheerful in view of my approaching end, being fully persuaded that I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.5 ... I count it all joy. 'I have fought the good fight,' and have, as I trust,' finished my course.'" 6
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1 See the files of the New York Herald and Tribune.
2 See Report of Collamer and Doolittle, p. 23.
3 See remarks of Senator Wilson, Senate, December 8th.
4 Speech at Salem, January 6th, 1860.
5 " The saying of this true hero, after his capture, that he was worth more for hanging than for any other purpose, reminds one, by its combination of wit, wisdom, and self-devotion, of Sir Thomas More."—Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, p. 268.
6 November 12th, Sanborn, p. 588.

To his old teacher he wrote: "As I believe most firmly that God reigns, I cannot believe that anything I have done, suffered, or may yet suffer will be lost to the cause of God or humanity. And before I began my work at Harper's Ferry, I felt assured that in the worst event it would certainly pay. . . . I have been a good deal disappointed as it regards myself in not keeping up to my own plans; but I now feel entirely reconciled to that even—for God's plan was infinitely better, no doubt, or I should have kept to my own. Had Samson kept to his determination of not telling Delilah wherein his great strength lay, he would probably have never overturned the house. I did not tell Delilah, but I was induced to act very contrary to my better judgment." 1 Making suggestions to his wife regarding the education of their daughters, he said at the close of a letter to her: "My mind is very tranquil, I may say joyous." 2

To his cousin he expressed himself as content with his fate. "When I think how easily I might be left to spoil all I have done or suffered in the cause of freedom, I hardly dare wish another voyage, even if I had the opportunity." To his younger children, to take from them the thought that the manner of his death would be ignominious, he wrote: "I feel just as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way;3 and on the same day he assured his older children that "a calm peace seems to fill my mind by day and by night." With prophetic soul he added: "As I trust my life has not been thrown away, so I also humbly trust that my death will not be in vain. God can make it to be a thousand times more valuable to his own cause than all the miserable service (at best) that I have rendered it during my life."4 To a clergyman who had sent him sympathizing words he wrote: "I think I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison. He knew if they killed him, it would greatly advance the
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1 November 15th, Sanborn, p. 590.
2 November 22d, ibid., p. 596.
3 November 16th, ibid., p. 593.
4 Ibid., p. 597.

cause of Christ; that was the reason he rejoiced so. On that same ground ' I do rejoice.' . . . Let them hang me; I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for they know not what they do. I have no regret for the transaction for which I am condemned. I went against the laws of men, it is true, but' whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye.'"1 In his letter to Judge Tilden, of Cleveland, he said: "It is a great comfort to feel assured that I am permitted to die for a cause;" * and among the last words to his family, was: " John Brown writes to his children to abhor with undying hatred that sum of all villanies—slavery." 2

The sun rose bright and clear on the morning that the old Puritan was to die. Fears of a rescue still prevailed; cannon were in position before the jail, and several companies of infantry guarded the place. It was nearly eleven o'clock when Brown was taken from his prison. He had handed to one of the guards a paper on which was written : "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."4 Soldiers marched ahead of the wagon in which the old Puritan, seated on his coffin, rode. As his glance went from the sky to the graceful outlines of the blue mountains, he said: "This is a beautiful country." To those who were with him, he declared that he did not dread death, nor had he ever in his life known what it was to experience physical fear. As he got out of the wagon at the gallows, his manner was composed, and he mounted the steps of the platform with a steady tread. Around the scaffold fifteen hundred Virginia troops were drawn up in battle array. Howitzers were placed to command the field, a force of cavalry was posted as sentinels, while scouts and rangers were on duty outside of the enclosure. Citizens were not allowed to approach the scene of execution, and
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1 November 23d, Sanborn, p. 598.
2 November 30th, ibid., p. 615.
3 November 28th, ibid., p. 609.
4 Ibid., p. 620.

strangers had been warned to keep away from Charlestown. Brown made no speech. When he had occasion to say anything to the sheriff, his voice was strangely natural. He stood blindfolded on the platform, the noose was adjusted about his neck. Everything was ready, still the sheriff did not receive the signal. The colonel in command was waiting until the escort of the prisoner had taken its proper place. It was a trying ten minutes, but Brown stood, so wrote Colonel Preston, an officer on duty, " upright as a soldier in position, and motionless. I was close to him and watched him narrowly, to see if I could detect any signs of shrinking or trembling in his person, but there was none." At last the sheriff received the signal, the rope that held up the trap-door was cut, and John Brown was sent into eternity. Solemnity and decorum ruled. Colonel Preston broke the awful silence around him: "So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!"1 It was the undoubted sentiment of every man present.

"Brown died like a man," wrote Francis Lieber, "and Virginia fretted like an old woman. . . . The deed was irrational, but it will be historical. Virginia has come out of it damaged, I think. She has forced upon mankind the idea that slavery must be, in her own opinion, but a rickety thing."2 As reflecting the sentiment of Concord, Louisa Alcott set down in her diary that," The execution of Saint John the Just took place December second;" 3 and Longfellow
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1 In this account of the execution I have in the main followed the letter of Colonel Preston, an officer of the corps of cadets, written from Charlestown, December 2d, 1859, the day of the execution. This letter was made part of General Wright's paper before the American Historical Association. I have drawn some facts from Sanborn and have carefully consulted Redpath and the correspondents of the New York Herald and Tribune. Six companions of Brown, who had been taken prisoners, were afterwards hanged.
2 Private letter, The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 307.
3 Life and Letters of Louisa M. Alcott, p. 105.

confided to his journal: "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one. Even now, as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon."1

Much sympathy was expressed with the old Puritan in many parts of the North. Churches held services of humiliation and prayer at the hour the execution was to take place; in some cities funeral bells were tolled and minute-guns were fired; large meetings were held to lament the martyr, glorify his cause, and aid his family. In both houses of the Massachusetts legislature a motion was made to adjourn on account of the execution. 2 For the most part, these public manifestations were under the auspices of the abolitionists, and of those who inclined to their views. It was recognized by the Garrison abolitionists that inconsistency lay between their homilies against the use of force and their admiration for John Brown; but the touch of nature was too strong for fine-spun theories, and the followers of Garrison were active and earnest in all of these demonstrations. The Liberator had columns of eulogy to a paragraph of deprecation. The American Anti-slavery Society designated a period of its calendar " The John Brown Year," and in its report pages were devoted to the glorification of the old Puritan, while three sentences sufficed for the disapproval of his method.3

The deed of John Brown, which engrossed public attention to such an extent that the death of the most celebrated writer
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1 Life of Longfellow, Samuel Longfellow, vol. ii. p. 347.
2 The motions were, of course, defeated. In the Senate the vote stood 11 to 8, and in the House 141 to 6. For an account of the various demonstrations, see especially the New York Tribune and the Liberator.
3 See especially the Liberator of November 25th. The twenty-seventh annual report of the American Anti-slavery Society was called "The Antislavery History of the John Brown Year;" see particularly p. 130.

of America, Washington Irving, passed comparatively unheeded, 1 gave rise to comments and opinions out of which may be evolved a judgment of what place he will fill in history. The four representative men of the country spoke positively. Jefferson Davis called it "the invasion of a State by a murderous gang of abolitionists," who came " to incite slaves to murder helpless women and children . . . and for which the leader has suffered a felon's death." He asserted that Seward's " irrepressible-conflict" speech contained the germ that may have borne this bloody fruit. 2 Douglas intimated that Brown was a horse-thief,3 and spoke of him as "a notorious man who has recently suffered death for his crimes upon the gallows." It was his "firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper's Ferry crime was the natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican party;" and he asserted that the " house-divided-against-itself" doctrine of Lincoln and the "irrepressible-conflict" principle of Seward tended to produce such acts as the raid of John Brown.4

Before Seward and Lincoln expressed their views, the Harper's Ferry invasion had been the subject of several days' debate in the Senate. The debate arose on the resolution to appoint a committee to investigate the affair, and continued on the resolution of Douglas, which had in view legislation to prevent such attempts in the future. There had been a free interchange of opinions. The Southerners were aggressive; the Republicans judicious but firm; they regretted and disapproved of the act, yet sympathized with
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1 Thoreau, Last Days of John Brown, North Elba, July 4th, 1860; see also New York Herald and Tribune. 2 Senate, December 8th, 1859. 3 The basis of this charge was the fact that Brown, in his Missouri exploit, captured men who pursued him on horseback, and that, though he released the men, he kept the horses and afterwards sold them in Ohio. 4 Senate, January 23d, 1860. See Congressional Globe, 1st Session 36th Congress, pp. 553,554.

the man. The mass of Republicans were nevertheless perplexed, and looked to their leaders for guidance.1 Lincoln spoke at the Cooper Institute, February 27th, 1860, and referred to John Brown in cold, measured, and judicial words: "John Brown's effort was peculiar," said he. "It was not a slave insurrection, it was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair in its philosophy corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people, until he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than in his own execution." 2

Two days later, Seward spoke in the Senate more sympathetically, and in words better calculated to meet with favor from those whose feeling for the man balanced their condemnation of the violent breach of the law. "The gloom of the late tragedy in Virginia," said he, "rested on the Capitol from the day when Congress assembled." Brown "attempted to subvert slavery in Virginia by conspiracy, ambush, invasion, and force. The method we have adopted, of appealing to the reason and judgment of the people, to be pronounced by suffrage, is the only one by which free government can be maintained anywhere, and the only one as yet devised which is in marked harmony with the spirit of the Christian religion. While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown and his associates acted on earnest, though fatally erroneous, convictions, yet all good citizens will nevertheless agree that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion,
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1 An admirable statement of public opinion may be found in the Atlantic Monthly for March, 1860, p. 378, in a criticism by C. E. Norton of Redpath's Life of John Brown.
2 Life of Lincoln, Howells, p. 206.

involving servile war, was an act of sedition and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and life." We lament, the senator continued, "the deaths of so many citizens, slain from an ambush and by surprise." We may regret " the deaths even of the offenders themselves, pitiable, although necessary and just, because they acted under delirium, which blinded their judgments to the real nature of their criminal enterprise."1 That Lincoln and Seward both represented and shaped the dominant opinion of their party is evident from the declaration of the National Republican convention, meeting in the May following, that the Harper's Ferry invasion was "among the gravest of crimes."

Had philosophers and poets remained dumb, these expressions from men of affairs would have ended the chapter, and it might have been left for after-years to question the prosaic judgment of statesmen, rendered in the piping times of peace. But men who lived in the spirit, on whom rested no responsibility for the march of government, who, as Thoreau expressed it, were not obliged to count "the votes of Pennsylvania & Co.," had already spoken. They put into words the feeling of many abolitionists and of many men who regularly voted the Republican ticket. "I wish we might have health enough," said Emerson, "to know virtue when we see it, and not cry with the fools 'madman' when a hero passes;" and this was greeted with prolonged applause by the Boston audience who had gathered to hear his lecture on "Courage."' The same evening he further spoke of Brown as "that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death— the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross;" and this sentiment was responded to with enthusiasm by the immense audience of Tremont Temple. 3
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1 Works, vol. iv. p. 636.
2 The Liberator, November 18th.
3 Memoir of Emerson, Cabot, p. 597; the Liberator, November 11th. This lecture was delivered November 8th. Emerson also delivered two set speeches on John Brown, published in vol. xi. of his Works.

"Some eighteen hundred years ago," said Thoreau, "Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light. ... I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene [the interview of Brown and Senator Mason], no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it, the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown."1

Victor Hugo, the greatest genius living, an exile for the cause of liberty, thus wrote of the event upon which England and France were looking with wonder: "In killing Brown, the Southern States have committed a crime which will take its place among the calamities of history. The rupture of the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown. As to John Brown, he was an apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased his glory and made him a martyr.2 The poet who compassed all history wrote for the old Puritan this epitaph: Pro Christo sicut Christus. 3 A century may, perchance, pass before an historical estimate acceptable to all lovers of liberty and justice can be made of John Brown. What infinite variety of opinions may exist of a man who on the one hand is compared to Socrates and Christ, and on the other hand to Orsini and
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1 A plea for Captain John Brown, read at Concord, October 30th.
2 Cited in the twenty-seventh annual report of the American Antislavery Society, p. 161.
3 Actes et Paroles pendant l'Exil, in which may be found two eloquent tributes to John Brown. "Pour nous, qui preftrons le martyre au succes, John Brown est plus grand que Washington."—Jean Valjean, vol. v. Lea Misérables.

Wilkes Booth! The likeness drawn between the old Puritan and these men who did the work of assassination revolts the muse of history; yet the comparison to Socrates and Christ strikes a discordant note. The apostle of truth and the apostle of peace are immeasurably remote from the man whose work of reform consisted in shedding blood; the teacher who gave the injunction "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," and the philosopher whose long life was one of strict obedience to the laws, are a silent rebuke to the man whose renown was gained by the breach of laws deemed sacred by his country. As time went on, Emerson modified his first exuberant judgment, and, when printing ten years later his lecture on "Courage," omitted the expressions here cited as his opinion of the old Puritan.1

Of the influence of the Harper's Ferry invasion something remains to be said. It does not appear that it gained votes for Lincoln in the presidential contest of 1860; nor did it, as was at first feared, injure the Republican cause. It is a notable circumstance that John A. Andrew, who presided at a John Brown meeting and said that whether the enterprise was wise or foolish, "John Brown himself is right,"2 was elected governor of Massachusetts by the Republicans in 1860 by a very large majority, his vote falling but two thousand behind that of Lincoln. On the other hand, it is certain that if John Brown had never lived, Lincoln would have been elected President, and secession would have ensued; although the Harper's Ferry raid did indeed furnish a count in the indictment of the Southern States against the North,3 and may have been one of the influences impelling Virginia to join the Southern Confederacy.

After the war began, the words full of meaning and the
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1 Life of Emerson, Cabot, p. 597.
2 The Liberator, November 25th.
3 For example, see letter of A. H. Stephens to Lincoln, December 30th, 1860, Letters and speeches, Cleveland, p. 153. Also Be Bow's Review, January and March, 1860.

stirring music of the John Brown song inspired Northern soldiers as they marched to the front; and it was a dramatic incident, and one that excited many emotions, when the Webster regiment, of Massachusetts, whose quartet had composed the words and adapted them to the music of a Methodist hymn, burst out at Charlestown, March 1st, 1862, on the spot where the old Puritan was hanged, with

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on." 1

And who can say that the proclamation of emancipation would have met as hearty a response, that Northern patriots would have fought with as much zeal, and the people sustained Lincoln in the war for the abolition of slavery as faithfully, had not John Brown suffered martyrdom in the same cause on Virginia soil ? 2
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1 The John Brown song originated in the spring of 1861. For an account of its origin and development, see A Famous War Song: A Paper read before the United Service Club, Philadelphia, by James Beale, late of Twelfth Mass. Vol. Regiment, the Webster Regiment (Philadelphia, 1890). "I said to a great gathering in the South in 1881 that I expected to live to see Confederate soldiers or their children erect a monument to John Brown at Harper's Ferry, in token of the liberty which he brought to the white men of the South."—Edward Atkinson, in the Boston Herald of November 1st, 1891.
2 For a consideration of John Brown from another point of view, see Nicolay and Hay, vol. ii. chap. xi. For a reply, see John Brown, edited by F. P. Stearns, which includes the essay of Von Hoist. On the subject generally see Whittier's poem "Brown of Ossawatomie;" Blaine, vol. i. pp. 155, 156; Garrison, vol. iii. p. 493; Thurlow Weed, vol. ii. p. 258; W. P. Garrison, Andover Review, December, 1890, and January, 1891; Life of Bowles, vol. i. p. 251; Political Recollections, Julian, p. 169; S. S. Cox, p. 50.


Source: Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States; from the compromise of 1850 to the final restoration of home rule at the south in 1877, v.2. New York: Macmillan, 1910 [c1892].