The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South Part 21

"But ain't dey got nuttin ter eat fer dem dat's here?"

"You come ter de big meetin' ter-morrow night an' hear sumfin dat's good fer yo' soul."

"I'll be dar," Sam promised. But he hoped to find something at the meeting that was good for his stomach as well as his soul.

CHAPTER XI

The negroes in New York and Brooklyn were not the only people in the North falling under the influence of the strange man who answered to the name of John Brown. There was something magnetic about him that drew all sorts and conditions of men.

The statesmen who still used reason as the guiding principle of life had no use for him. Henry Wilson, the new Senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, met him and was repelled by the something that drew others. Governor Andrew was puzzled by his strange personality.

The secret of his power lay in a mystic appeal to the Puritan conscience. He had been from childhood afflicted with this conscience in its most malignant form. He knew instinctively its process of action.

The Puritan had settled New England and fixed the principles both of economic and political life. The civilization he set up was compact and commercial. He organized it in towns and towns.h.i.+ps. The Meeting House was the center, the source of all power and authority. No dwelling could be built further than two miles from a church and attendance on wors.h.i.+p was made compulsory by law.

The South, against whose life Brown was organizing his militant crusade, was agricultural, scattered, individual. Individualism was a pa.s.sion with the Southerner, liberty his battle cry. He scorned the "authority"

of the church and wors.h.i.+pped G.o.d according to the dictates of his own conscience. The Court House, not the Meeting House, was his forum, and he rode there through miles of virgin forests to dispute with his neighbor.

The mental processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A mora.s.s of Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not only resist and attack the world; he should _hate_ it. He early learned to love the pleasure of hating. He hated himself if no more promising victim loomed on the horizon. He early became the foremost Persecutor and Vice-Crusader of the new world. He made witch-hunting one of the sports of New England.

When not busy with some form of the witch hunt, the Puritan found an outlet for his repressed instincts in the ferocity with which he fought the Indians or worked to achieve the conquest of Nature and lay up worldly goods for himself and his children. Prosperity, therefore, became the second principle of his religion, next to vice crusading.

When he succeeded in business, he praised G.o.d for his tender mercies.

His goods and chattels became the visible evidence of His love. The only holiday he established or permitted was the day on which he publicly thanked G.o.d for the goods which He had delivered. Through him the New England Puritan Thanksgiving Day became a national festival and through him a religious reverence for worldly success has become a national ideal.

The inner life of the Puritan was soul-fear. Driven by fear and repression he attacked his rock-ribbed country, its thin soil, its savage enemies and his own fellow compet.i.tors with fury.

And he succeeded.

The odds against him sharpened his powers, made keen his mind, toughened his muscles.

The Southern planter, on the other hand, represented the sharpest contrast to this mental and physical att.i.tude toward life. He came of the stock of the English Squire. And if he came from Scotland he found this English ideal already established and accepted it as his own.

The joy of living, not the horror of life, was the mainspring of his action and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. The Southerner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full of spiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did not agonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove it from his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyal to his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised trade. He disliked hard work.

To this hour in the country's life his ideal had dominated the nation.

The Puritan Abolitionists now challenged this ideal for a fight to the finish. Slavery was protected by the Const.i.tution. All right, they burn the Const.i.tution and denounce it as a Covenant with Death, an agreement with h.e.l.l. They begin a propaganda to incite servile insurrection in the South. They denounce the Southern Slave owner as a fiend. Even the greatest writers of the North caught the contagion of this mania.

Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson used their pens to blacken the name of the Southern people. From platform, pulpit and forum, through pamphlet, magazine, weekly and daily newspapers the stream of abuse poured forth in ever-increasing volume.

That the proud Southerner would resent the injustice of this wholesale indictment was inevitable. Their habit of mind, their born instinct of leaders.h.i.+p, their love of independence, their hatred of dictation, their sense of historic achievement in the building of the republic would resent it. Their critics had not only been Slave holders themselves as long as it paid commercially, but their skippers were now sailing the seas in violation of Southern laws prohibiting the slave trade. Our early Slave traders were nearly all Puritans. When one of their s.h.i.+ps came into port, the minister met her at the wharf, knelt in prayer and thanked Almighty G.o.d for one more cargo of heathen saved from h.e.l.l.

Brown's whole plan of attack was based on the certainty of resentment from the South. He set out to provoke his opponents. This purpose was now the inspiration of every act of his life.

A group of six typical Northern minds had fallen completely under his power: Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Rev. Theodore Parker, Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, George L. Stearns and the Rev. Hon. Gerrit Smith.

Gerrit Smith was many times a millionaire, one of the great land owners of the country, a former partner in business with John Jacob Astor, the elder, and at this time a philanthropist by profession. He had built a church at Peterboro, New York, and had preached a number of years. In his growing zeal as an Abolitionist he had entered politics and had just been elected to Congress from his district.

He was a man of gentle, humane impulses and looked out upon the world with the kindliest fatherly eyes. It was one of the curious freaks of fate that he should fall under the influence of Brown. The stern old Puritan was his ant.i.thesis in every line of face and mental make-up.

Smith was the preacher, the theorist, and the dreamer.

Brown had become the man of Action.

And by Action he meant exactly what the modern Social anarchist means by _direct action_. The plan he had developed was to come to "close quarters" with Slavery. He had organized the Band of Gileadites to kill every officer of the law who attempted to enforce the provisions of the Const.i.tution of the United States relating to Slavery. His eyes were now fixed on the Territory of Kansas.

There could be no doubt about the abnormality of the mind of the man who had const.i.tuted himself the Chosen Instrument of Almighty G.o.d to destroy chattel Slavery in the South.

He was pacing the floor of the parlor of the New Astor House awaiting the arrival of his friend, Congressman Gerrit Smith, for a conference before the meeting scheduled for eight o'clock. It was a characteristic of Brown that he couldn't sit still. He paced the floor.

The way he walked marked him with distinction, if not eccentricity. He walked always with a quick, springing step. He didn't swing his foot. It worked on springs. And the spring in it had a furtive action not unlike the movement of a leopard. His muscles, in spite of his fifty-four years, were strong and sinewy. He was five feet ten inches in height.

His head was remarkable for its small size. The brain s.p.a.ce was limited and the hair grew low on his forehead, as if a hark back to the primitive man out of which humanity grew. His chin protruded into an aggressive threat. His mouth was not only stern, it was as inexorable as an oath.

His hair was turning gray and he wore it trimmed close to his small skull. His nose was an aggressive Roman type. The expression of his face was shrewd and serious, with a touch always of cunning.

A visitor at his house at North Elba whispered one day to one of his sons:

"Your father looks like an eagle."

The boy hesitated and replied in deep seriousness:

"Yes, or some other carnivorous bird."

The thing above all others that gave him the look of a bird of prey was his bluish-gray eye. An eye that was never still and always shone with a glitter. The only time this strange light was not noticeable was during the moments when he drew the lids down half-way. He was in the habit of holding his eyes half shut in times of deep thinking. At these moments if he raised his head, his eyes glowed two pin points of light.

No matter what the impression he made, either of attraction or repulsion, his personality was a serious proposition. No man looked once only. And no man ever attempted undue familiarity or ridicule. His life to this time had been a series of tragic failures in everything he had undertaken. A study of his intense Puritan face revealed at once his fundamental character. A soul at war with the world. A soul at war with himself. He was the incarnation of repressed emotions and desires. He had married twice and his fierce pa.s.sions had made him the father of twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs of unbalanced mentality.

The grip of his mind on the individuals who allowed themselves to be drawn within the circle of his influence became absolute.

He was a man of earnest and constant prayer to his G.o.d. The G.o.d he wors.h.i.+pped was one whose face was not yet revealed to the crowd that hung on his strangely halting words. He spoke in mystic symbols. His mysticism was always the source of his power over the religious leaders who had gathered about him. They had not stopped to a.n.a.lyze the meaning of this appeal. They looked once into his s.h.i.+ning blue-gray eyes and became his followers. He never stopped to reason.

He spoke with authority.

He claimed a divine commission for action and they did not pause to examine his credentials. He had failed at every enterprise he had undertaken. And then he suddenly discovered his power over the Puritan imagination.

To Brown's mind, from the day of his devotion to the fixed idea of destroying Slavery in the South, "Action" had but one meaning--bloodshed. He knew that revolutionary ideas are matters of belief. He a.s.serted beliefs. The elect believed. The d.a.m.ned refused to believe.

Long before Smith had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to his feet and put himself in an att.i.tude of defense.

He gazed at his friend a moment and rubbed his eyes in a dazed way before he could come back to earth.

In a moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to its tremendous import--primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who was his jungle father.

Smith did not know that he was to preside at the meeting until Brown told him. He consented without a moment's hesitation.