The Negro and the Nation Part 7

One who reads Whittier to-day may be allowed to wish that he had known the sunny as well as the shady side of Southern life; and that, as in a later poem he softened his fierce criticism on Webster, so he had celebrated the virtues and graces of his white countrymen below the Potomac and the Ohio, as well as the wrongs of his black countrymen.

Lowell, usually a scholarly poet, spoke to the common people n.o.bly for peace and freedom in the Biglow Papers. In 1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_ was started under his editors.h.i.+p, the organ at once of the highest literary ability of New England, and of p.r.o.nounced anti-slavery and Republican sentiment. After he gave up the editors.h.i.+p in 1862, he wrote at intervals of a few years the second series of Biglow Papers, and his "Commemoration Ode" was the n.o.blest literary monument of the triumph of Union and freedom.

Longfellow's main vocation was away from the turmoils of the hour. He interpreted to America the art, the culture, the legends of Europe and the Middle Ages; he found the poetry in the early soil of America, as in "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." He was not deaf to the wrongs of the slave, and gave to them some touching poems. But his finest contribution to the national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the s.h.i.+p." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the s.h.i.+p-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the s.h.i.+p, christened "The Union"--emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on the sea of life; then,--

Thou, too, sail on, O s.h.i.+p of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

We know what Master laid thy keel, What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale!

In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the sh.o.r.e, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee,--are all with thee!

CHAPTER XVII

DRED SCOTT AND LECOMPTON

Under Buchanan's administration, 1857-61, three events befell which were like wedges riving farther and farther apart the national unity. They were the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, the Lecompton const.i.tution in Kansas, and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry.

President Buchanan declared in his inaugural that the people of a Territory had a right to shape their inst.i.tutions in their own way, but as to how far that right extended before they organized as a State, the United States Supreme Court was the proper arbiter. Two days after the inaugural, the Supreme Court announced its decision, in a case made up expressly to test the status of slavery in the Territories. Suit was brought before it to obtain freedom for Dred Scott, who being held as a slave in Missouri had been taken by his master to reside for a time in Illinois, and afterward at Fort Snelling in unorganized territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, and so free under the Missouri compromise. It was claimed that by being taken upon free soil, in State or Territory, he became free. The court, in an elaborate opinion delivered by Chief-Justice Taney, dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction, on the ground that no person of slave descent or African blood could be a citizen of the United States or be ent.i.tled to sue in its courts. The court affirmed that the sweeping language of the Declaration, that "all men are born free," had no application to negroes, because at that time they were generally regarded "as so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The case being thus thrown out of court, all further discussion of its merits was superfluous--a mere _obiter dictum_, without legal force. Nevertheless, the court through its chief-justice went on to p.r.o.nounce upon the plaintiff's claim and declare it baseless; on the ground that inasmuch as a slave was lawful property, and the Const.i.tution decreed that no man should be deprived of his property without due process of law, therefore an act of Congress declaring in effect that when carried beyond a certain line a slave was lost to his master, was unconst.i.tutional and void. Thus the court set aside as invalid the exclusion of slavery from the Territories by Congress. As to the effect of a slave's residence in a free State by his master's act, followed by a return to a slave State,--the court held that this question belonged properly to the Missouri courts, which had decided against the slave's claim.

Two of the justices, McLean and Curtis (Northern Whigs), dissented emphatically from the decision. Justice Curtis pointed out, as to the alleged incapacity of the negro for citizens.h.i.+p at the era of the Const.i.tution, that at that period free negroes had the right of suffrage in five of the thirteen States. As to the argument against depriving a man of his property, the contention of the Republicans was that slaves were property, not by the common usage of mankind, but only by local law, and that when a slaveholder moved into a Territory he did not carry with him that local law by which alone a man could be held as a chattel.

But the authoritative voice of the highest court in the land had proclaimed these amazing propositions,--that the guarantee of freedom to the Northwest, which the nation had accepted for a third of a century, was invalid, and that no person with negro blood had any civil rights as a citizen of the United States.

When, forty years later, a law of Congress establis.h.i.+ng an equitable income tax was declared unconst.i.tutional by the Supreme Court, and a Democratic national convention protested against that decision, the Republican papers of the day denounced the protest as hardly less than treason. But the Republicans of an earlier day were not so reverential toward the Supreme Court as an infallible authority. Could the court as a finality outlaw the negro from the common rights of man, and prevent Congress from establis.h.i.+ng freedom in the national domain? Not so thought the men who led the Republican party and the sentiment of the North. The New York Legislature, for example, promptly enacted that African descent should not disqualify from State citizens.h.i.+p; that any slave brought into the State by his master became free, and any attempt to hold him was a penal offense. It pa.s.sed a resolution declaring that the Supreme Court had lost the confidence and respect of the people.

Lincoln said in his dry way that the Republican party did not propose to declare Dred Scott a free man (by the way, he was soon manumitted by his former master's daughter)--but neither did they propose to accept the court's decision as a political rule binding the voters, or Congress, or the President; and they intended so to oppose it as to have it reversed if possible, and a new judicial rule established. Seward was very outspoken. He said a year later, in the Senate, "The people of the United States never can and never will accept principles so unconst.i.tutional, so abhorrent. Never, never! Let the court recede.

Whether it recede or not, we shall reorganize the court, and thus reform its political sentiment and practices, and bring them in harmony with the Const.i.tution and the laws of Nature."

The court's decision, _obiter dictum_ and all, extended only to the power of Congress over the Territories. What a Territorial Legislature might do by way of excluding slavery had not been pa.s.sed on; and Douglas thus found room for his doctrine of "popular sovereignty." But as to just what that meant, he was adroitly non-committal, till the more adroit Lincoln in the joint debate in 1858 drew from him the statement that a Territorial Legislature might by "unfriendly legislation"

practically exclude slavery--a committal which ended his favor from the South.

But meanwhile attention was focused on a different and more concrete question. Buchanan began his administration with an effort to pacify Kansas, by sending a new governor, Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, with strong pledges from the President that the people should have fair dealing. But the situation was badly complicated. The Legislature had provided for a convention to frame a State Const.i.tution. This was to be elected on the basis of a census taken by the county officials. But the Free State men having never recognized this Territorial Legislature, and having kept up the form of a State government of their own, there were no officials to take the census and register the votes in fifteen out of the thirty-four counties, and the registration was confined to the part of the Territory lying convenient for invasion from Missouri. Under these circ.u.mstances the Free State party resisted all Governor Walker's appeals to take part in the election, and the convention was chosen by a small vote. It met at Lecompton, and drew up a const.i.tution. One article provided for the exclusion of free negroes, and another forbade any amendment for seven years. One section affirmed owners.h.i.+p of slaves as an inviolable right of property, and forbade any adverse legislation; and this section alone of the Const.i.tution was submitted to the popular vote. A vote of the people was ordered, as between "const.i.tution with slavery" and "const.i.tution without slavery." The Free State men scouted the whole proceeding, and refused to vote. So, by the form of a popular election, the "const.i.tution with slavery" was adopted.

The administration now gave its whole strength to the admission by Congress of Kansas with the Lecompton const.i.tution. The same election that made Buchanan President had made the House as well as the Senate Democratic. But it was no longer the disciplined and docile Democracy of old. The proposal to admit a State under a const.i.tution of which only a single article had been submitted to even the form of a popular vote, was too obnoxious for any but the most unflinching partisans. It was impossible to a leader whose watchword was "popular sovereignty."

Douglas broke squarely with the administration, and acted with the Republicans against the bill. He came in close touch with their leaders, and his open accession to their party seemed probable. Meanwhile in the Democratic party he had a small following in Congress and a large following among the people. The struggle in Congress over the Lecompton bill was obstinate. Senator Crittenden of Kentucky,--belonging nominally to the remnant of the American party, which sheltered some of the moderate Southerners, and himself one of their best leaders--proposed a bill submitting the entire Const.i.tution to a direct popular vote. This was defeated in the Senate, but pa.s.sed by the House, with the support of the Republicans. A committee of conference sought for some agreement, and found a singular one: a bill proposed by and named from Mr. English, a Douglas Democrat from Illinois. It provided that the Const.i.tution should be submitted to a popular vote; if accepted, Kansas was at once to become a State and receive an immense land grant; if rejected, it was to remain a Territory until it had the population requisite for one representative in the House,--93,340,--and get no land grant. The combination of a bribe and a threat gave an almost grotesque air to the proposition. Party lines were broken in the vote; Douglas and a part of his a.s.sociates joined with the bulk of the Republicans in opposing the bill; but enough of both sides saw in it the best they could get, to win a majority in both houses, and the English bill became law, in April, 1858.

In the previous summer, the a.s.surances of Governor Walker and the advice of sagacious politicians like Henry Wilson had induced the Free State men to give up their separate organization and take part in the election of the Territorial Legislature. They carried the election by two to one.

But again fraud was attempted. From a hamlet with eleven houses was sent in a return of 1624 votes,--the names, it was found, copied in alphabetical order from a Cincinnati directory; and from another district an equally dishonest return was made; and the two would have changed the majority in the Legislature. This catastrophe was averted by the firmness of Walker, who threw out the fraudulent returns. In this he was vainly opposed by the Territorial chief justice, a servile partisan.

After this the President turned against Walker and in the following December drove him into resignation. He protested in an indignant letter that the President had betrayed and deserted him, and that his policy had saved the Territory from civil war and brought the entire people together for the first time in a peaceable election.

Indeed the troubles of Kansas were practically ended. The people rejected the Lecompton const.i.tution and its land grant by a heavy majority. They framed and ratified a Const.i.tution of their own at Wyandotte, and came into the Union as a free State when secession had left the Republicans in full control of Congress in the winter of 1860-1.

The accession of Kansas to the Free States was full of significance. It was fresh evidence that in the actual settlement of the new country the inevitable preponderance lay with free labor. Its industrial advantage could not be overborne by a hostile national administration, nor by the inroads of aggressive and lawless neighbors. The management of their affairs by the Free State settlers was a great vindication of the methods of peace. The guerrilla warfare undertaken by Brown and his party had won no real advantage. The decisive triumph came from the habitual self-control of the Free State men, their steady refusal to resist the Federal authority, and the sympathy they thus won from the peaceful North, turning at last the scales of Congressional authority in their favor. Thus far, peace and freedom moved hand in hand.

The tide in the country was running strongly with the Republicans. The alliance with Douglas failed, because his price was the Senators.h.i.+p from Illinois, and the Republicans of that State were "willing to take him on probation, but not to make him the head of the church." They named Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the Senators.h.i.+p, and these two men held a series of joint debates which fixed the attention of the country; with the result that Lincoln won the popular majority, but Douglas the Legislature and the Senators.h.i.+p. In the country at large, the Republicans made such gains, in this election of 1858, that they won the control of the National House. The Whigs were defunct, the Americans were a dwindling fraction; the "Const.i.tutional Union" party held a number who sought peace above all things; but the great ma.s.s divided between the Republicans and the Democrats. Douglas, the most dextrous of rope-dancers, had regained his place as the foremost man in his old party. The Republicans held firmly to their const.i.tutional principles; but the depth of the antagonism of the two industrial systems grew ever more apparent. Lincoln had declared: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other." Seward, too, had said: "The United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation." Between the two systems there was an "irrepressible conflict." But he added that he desired and expected the triumph of freedom "not otherwise than through the action of the several States, co-operating with the Federal Government, and all acting in conformity with their respective const.i.tutions." Yet over these utterances of Lincoln and Seward some conservatives in the party shook their heads, as liable to be misinterpreted and to needlessly alarm the South. But men more radical than Lincoln and Seward were coming to the front. Sumner was silenced for the time, but among the leaders of Ma.s.sachusetts now appeared John A. Andrew, her future war Governor, large-brained and large-hearted. In this year, 1858, at the State convention of which he was president, he said, "I believe in the Republican party because I believe that slavery, the servitude of humanity, has no business to exist anywhere; because it has no business to exist and no right to be supported where the sun s.h.i.+nes or gra.s.s grows or water runs."

One of the sensations of the time was a book, dated 1857, which showed a rift in the solid South. It was _The Impending Crisis_, by Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian by long descent, birth, and residence; the son of "a merciful slave-holder"; writing at the age of twenty-seven.

His standpoint was that of the non-slave-holding Southern white. "Yankee wives"--so he begins--"have written the most popular anti-slavery literature of the day. Against this I have nothing to say; it is all well enough for women to give the pictures of slavery; men should give the facts." His method is largely the comparison of the industrial progress of the two sections, and his chief a.r.s.enal is the United States census. North and South started, he says, with the establishment of the government and the North's abolition of slavery, with advantage in soil, climate, rivers, harbors, minerals, forests, etc., on the side of the South, but in sixty years she has been completely outstripped. He brackets Virginia and New York; at the start, Virginia had twice the population of New York; now New York's population doubles Virginia's.

Virginia's exports have been about stationary at $3,000,000; New York's have risen from $2,500,000 to $87,000,000. New York almost trebles Virginia in valuation, even including slaves. So he compares North Carolina and Ma.s.sachusetts; the empty port of Beaufort and the teeming one of Boston; the northern State with a production from manufactures, mines, and mechanic arts double the whole cotton crop of the South. So he compares South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Again: Sail down the Ohio, and you will find the lands on the right bank worth double and treble those on the left bank,--slavery makes all the difference. The hay crop of the free States is worth more in dollars and cents than all the cotton, tobacco, rice, hay, and hemp, in the slave States. The marble and free-stone quarries in New England yield more wealth than all the subterranean deposits in the slave States. And so for many pages he goes on piling Pelion upon Ossa with his figures. He pictures the South's economic dependence: "In infancy we are swaddled in Northern muslin; in childhood we are humored with Northern gewgaws; in youth, we are instructed out of Northern books; at the age of maturity, we sow our wild oats on Northern soil.... In the decline of life we remedy our sight with Northern spectacles, and support our infirmities with Northern canes; in old age we are drugged with Northern physic; and finally, when we die, our inanimate bodies, shrouded in Northern cambric, are stretched upon the bier, borne to the grave in a Northern carriage, entombed with Northern spade, and memorized with a Northern slab!"

Land in the Northern States averages $28.07 an acre in value, and in the Southern States it is $5.34. The difference measures the robbery committed on a community of 10,000,000 by the 350,000 slave-holders.

These "chevaliers of the lash" he arraigns with a rhetoric compared to which Sumner's and Phillip's words were pale. The slave-holders are worse, he declares, than thieves, for they steal from all. They are worse than common murderers, for they issue to themselves licenses to murder; the slave who resists may be killed. He is for no half-measures,--he avows himself a free-soiler, an emanc.i.p.ationist, an abolitionist, a colonizationist. "The liberation of five millions of 'poor white trash,' from the second degree of slavery, and of three millions of miserable kidnapped negroes from the first degree, cannot be accomplished too soon." The process is simple and easy; emanc.i.p.ation will be followed by such an instant rise in all values and in general prosperity that the slave-owners themselves will be recouped. Let each of these, he says, give to each slave his freedom and $60 in money; half that sum will transport him to Liberia, whither all should go. He foresees the tempest which his book will arouse. "What are you going to do about it? Something dreadful as a matter of course? Perhaps you will dissolve the Union. Do it, if you dare! Our motto, and we would have you understand it, is the abolition of slavery and the perpetuation of the American Union. If by any means you do succeed in your treasonable attempt to take the South out of the Union to-day, we will bring her back to-morrow,--if she goes away with you, she will return without you." In his closing paragraph he predicts the election to the Presidency in 1860 of some anti-slavery Southerner, of the type of Ca.s.sius M. Clay, or James G. Birney, and in 1864, of a Northerner like Seward or Sumner. And he thus concludes: "Furthermore, if in these or in any other similar cases the oligarchy do not quietly submit to the will of a const.i.tutional majority of the people, as expressed at the ballot-box, the first battle between freedom and slavery will be fought at home--and may G.o.d defend the right!"

The book raised a tempest of denunciation. The more it was denounced the more it was read. It was easily "the best-selling book" of the time. The concrete reply of the party criticised was first to drive Helper out of North Carolina. Next his book was condemned in a resolution proposed at the opening of Congress in 1859-60, and aimed especially at John Sherman, of Ohio, the Republican candidate for speaker, who had signed a qualified recommendation of the book. After a long contest the Republicans dropped Sherman for Pennington, of New Jersey, whom they elected. _The Impending Crisis_ was a portent and an impulse of the coming catastrophe.

CHAPTER XVIII

JOHN BROWN

About this time there was a revival of activity in the slave trade between Africa and Cuba. The American Government had always acted half-heartedly in its co-operation with the British Government for the suppression of this traffic. Now it happened that some British cruisers in the West Indies stopped and examined some vessels under the American flag, suspected of being slavers. This was resented by the American Government, which sent war s.h.i.+ps to the scene and took the British Government to task. In Congress both parties joined in denunciation of British aggression. The right of search, exercised by England for the reclamation of her seamen from American vessels, had been one of the grounds of war in 1812. It had been left unmentioned in the treaty of peace, but England had silently relinquished the practice. Now, at the demand of the United States, she expressly relinquished the right of search in the case of supposed slave s.h.i.+ps under the American flag, unless the result should justify the suspicion. Thus the honor of the Stars and Stripes was vindicated,--and the flag was made a great convenience to slavers. The administration, however, bestirred itself toward doing its own share in the work of sea-police, and several slave s.h.i.+ps were captured. The crew of one of these were acquitted, by a Charleston jury, against the clearest evidence. There was some open talk in the Southern papers of legalizing the traffic. But the trade was destined to a discouraging check a year or two later, when President Lincoln signed the first death warrant of the captain of a slaver.

After the Kansas troubles had subsided, John Brown sought some way to make a direct attack on slavery. For many years he had brooded on the matter, in the light of his reading of the Old Testament, and he felt himself called to a.s.sail it as the Jewish heroes a.s.sailed the enemies of Jehovah and his people. As early as 1847 he had disclosed to Frederick Dougla.s.s, during a visit to Brown's home in Springfield, Ma.s.s., a plan for freeing the slaves. He did not contemplate a general insurrection and slaughter. But he proposed to establish a fugitive refuge in the chain of mountains stretching from the border of New York toward the Gulf. "These mountains," he said, "are the basis of my plan. G.o.d has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emanc.i.p.ation of the negro race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense will be equal to one hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding-places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time.... The true object to be sought is, first of all, to destroy the money-value of slave property; and that can only be done by rendering such property insecure. My plan, then, is to take at first about twenty-five picked men, and begin on a small scale; supply them arms and ammunition, and post them in squads of five on a line of twenty-five miles. The most persuasive and judicious of them shall then go down to the fields from time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and selecting the most restless and daring."

It was substantially this plan to which Brown now returned, and he sought aid among those men at the East who had backed the Free State cause in Kansas. He was not known to them, as he has been presented to the reader, as the chief actor in the Pottawatomie ma.s.sacre, but as a bold guerrilla chief, who had lost a son in the Kansas strife. Even so, he was a recognized dissenter from the peace policy which had finally won success for freedom in the Territory. But there were men in the anti-slavery ranks who were impatient of the whole policy of peace, and the impressive personality of Brown won some of these to active support of his project. Among them were Theodore Parker, Gerritt Smith, Dr. S.

G. Howe, George L. Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Franklin B.

Sanborn, who formed a secret committee to forward this plan. They were not informed of its details, but knew its general scope. To a considerable number Brown was known as a hero of past fights and not averse to fresh ones. He visited Concord, where he spoke at a public meeting, and made a great impression on Emerson, Alcott, and Th.o.r.eau.

Alcott made a pen-picture of him. "I think him equal to anything he dares,--the man to do the deed, if it must be done, and with the martyr's temper and purpose. Nature obviously was deeply intent in the making of him. He is of imposing appearance personally,--tall, with square shoulders and standing; eyes of deep gray, and couchant, as if ready to spring at the least rustling, dauntless yet kindly; his hair shooting backward from low down on his forehead; nose trenchant and Romanesque; set lips, his voice suppressed yet metallic, suggesting deep reserves; decided mouth; the countenance and frame charged with power throughout."

Emerson, from his own observation and from hearsay, drew his spiritual portrait: "For himself, Brown is so transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed,--the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own. Many of us have seen him, and everyone who has heard him speak has been impressed alike by his simple, artless goodness and his sublime courage. He joins that perfect Puritan faith which brought his ancestor to Plymouth Rock, with his grandfather's ardor in the Revolution. He believes in two articles--two instruments, shall I say?--the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this expression in a conversation here concerning them: 'Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pa.s.s away by a violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this country.'... He grew up a religious and manly person, in severe poverty; a fair specimen of the best stock of New England, having that force of thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness.... Thus was formed a romantic character, absolutely without any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly and reproachfully, but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle as a child, in the house. And as happens usually to men of romantic character, his fortunes were romantic."

But the romance in this portrait is due quite as much to the imagination of the artist as to the character of the subject. Emerson seems to have entirely overlooked in his estimate of Brown that he had no rational idea of the moral obligations of the citizen to the civil government and to the peace of society; and that his conscience in its apparent simplicity was really in dire confusion. The sentence he quotes from Brown's conversation has its practical commentary in Brown's acts. He was as ready to take the sword, to redress what he considered a breach of the Golden Rule or the Declaration of Independence, as if mankind had not for thousands of years and with infinite cost been building up inst.i.tutions for the peaceful settlement of difficulties. In Kansas he saw in the political struggle simply an issue to be tried out by force between good men and bad men; and he made himself executioner of a group of men he considered bad, thereby plunging into a series of murders utterly repugnant to his natural humanity. He afterward justified the deed, without avowing his own part in it, which was not fully known till twenty years later. After Harper's Ferry, the _Springfield Republican_ (which judged him very favorably), speaking partly from personal knowledge gained during his residence in Springfield, said: "He is so const.i.tuted that when he gets possessed of an idea he carries it out with unflinching fidelity to all its logical consequences, as they seem to him, hesitating at no absurdity and deterred by no unpleasant consequences to himself personally. He is a Presbyterian in his faith, and feels that it is for this very purpose that G.o.d has reared him up."

When a man is so possessed by the conviction that he is G.o.d's instrument as to set himself outside of ordinary human morality, he is presumably on the verge of s.h.i.+pwreck. The _Republican_, while emphasizing the popular estimate of John Brown as "a hero," coupled with this the characterization of him as "a misguided and insane man."

The project he was now pressing--the establishment of a mountain refuge for fugitive slaves, working toward the depreciation of slave property, and the ultimate extinction of the system--had a certain superficial plausibility; and it seemed to avoid the inhumanity of general insurrection. But it was at the best hardly more than a boy's romance, and at the last moment Brown abandoned it for a still more impracticable plan.

On the morning of October 17, 1859, the little town of Harper's Ferry, on the upper Potomac, awoke to the amazing discovery that in the night the buildings of the United States armory had been seized and held by a company of armed men, white and black; that they had gathered in a number of prisoners, including some prominent citizens; and that their design was to free the slaves. Brown had struck his blow. With eighteen faithful a.s.sociates, including three of his sons, he had lurked near the town till all was ready; then in the night he had marched in and seized the armory, and brought in as prisoners some of the neighboring planters who were told they were held as hostages. Other citizens were captured almost without resistance in the early morning hours, till the prisoners were twice the number of their captors. But there was no rising of the negroes. Brown, after his first easy success, stayed still as if paralyzed. Either he had no further plan, or his judgment and will failed him at the crisis. His complete failure to improve his first advantage--whether the weakness lay in his plan or the execution--indicated the radical unsoundness which underlay his impressive exterior. The town rallied its forces, surrounded the armory, and a fight was kept up through the afternoon. At night Colonel Robert E. Lee with a force of troops arrived from Was.h.i.+ngton, and the next morning they easily stormed the armory, which had lost half its garrison, including two of Brown's sons, and Brown and the rest of his party were made prisoners.

The country was in a state of profound peace; Kansas had fallen out of mind; the Presidential election was a year away; and even political discussion was languid. The news of the raid came as an utter surprise.

Brown was unknown to the general public, and beyond the patent fact of an attempted slave insurrection there was at first general bewilderment as to the meaning of the event. Brown's secret committee,--ignorant of his exact plan, most of them having had but little to do with him, and none of them expecting the blow when it fell,--were in no haste to enlighten the public, or acknowledge their responsibility. But Brown became his own interpreter. The ubiquitous _New York Herald_ reporter was instantly on the ground, and never were interviews more eagerly read and more impressive in their effect than Brown's replies to his various examiners. A prisoner, wounded, in the shadow of a felon's death, the old man bore himself with perfect courage and composure. Asked on what principle he justified his acts, he replied: "Upon the Golden Rule. I pity the poor in bondage, that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of G.o.d." The Virginians recognized his sincerity and integrity. The Governor of the State, Henry A. Wise--an extreme Southerner in his politics--visited Brown, and said publicly: "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, fort.i.tude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners, and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful, and intelligent."

For Brown and his a.s.sociates there could be but one conclusion to the business. They were put on trial for treason and murder. They had a fair trial, and indeed the case admitted of no doubt. They were sentenced to be hanged, and the sentence was carried out, within six weeks of their act.

At the North, Brown was widely honored as a hero and a martyr. No one defended his act,--a slave insurrection, in whatever form, found no public justification. Probably a considerable majority of the community, including all the more conservative political elements, condemned the man and his deed, and perhaps justified his execution. But wherever anti-slavery feeling was strong, and with a mult.i.tude who, apart from such feeling, were sensitive to striking qualities of manhood, there was great admiration and sympathy for Brown and sorrow for his fate. John A.

Andrew spoke a common feeling when he said: "Whatever may be thought of John Brown's acts, John Brown himself was right." Emerson eulogized him in daring words. If, he said, John Brown is hung, he will glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross. On the day of his death the church bells were tolled in many a Northern town. Said the _Springfield Republican_ the next morning: "There need be no tears for him. Few men die so happily, so satisfied with time, place, and circ.u.mstance, as did he.... A Christian man hung by Christians for acting upon his convictions of duty,--a brave man hung for a chivalrous and self-sacrificing deed of humanity,--a philanthropist hung for seeking the liberty of oppressed men. No outcry about violated law can cover up the essential enormity of a deed like this."

Never was a man dealt with more generously by posthumous fame. In the Civil War, two lines of verse, fitted to a stirring melody, became the marching song of the Union armies:

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave His soul is marching on!