Part 2

At the regular trial Brown's counsel requested a postponement on account of the prisoner's health. But Dr. Mason, his physician, attested the physical ability of his patient to undergo the strain. The State was spending almost a thousand dollars a day for military guards and other items. When Brown's counsel presented telegrams from his relatives asking for delay until they could forward proofs of his insanity, Brown said, "I will say, if the court will allow me, that I look on this as a miserable artifice and trick of those who ought to take a different course in regard to me if they take any at all. I view it with contempt more than otherwise. I am perfectly unconscious of insanity and I reject, so far as I am capable, any attempts to interfere in my behalf on that score."

On the last day of the trial, October 31st, after six hours of argument by Hunter, Chilton and Griswold, the jury delivered the following verdict: "Guilty of treason, and of conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel; and of murder in the first degree." On Wednesday, November the 2nd, he was brought into court to receive his sentence. The County Clerk, Robert H. Brown, asked: "Have you anything to say why sentence should not be passed on you?" Brown, leaning on a cane, slowly arose from his chair and with plaintive emphasis addressed Judge Parker as follows:

"I have, may it please the court, a few words to say. In the first place I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I certainly intended to have made a clean thing of that matter as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection. I have another objection and that is that it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved, for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case,--had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great; or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, sister, brother, wife or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This court acknowledges as I suppose the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose is the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things, whatsoever I would that men should do to me I should do even unto them. It teaches me further to 'Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always admitted freely I have done, in behalf of His despised poor was not wrong but right. 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 enactments, I submit. So let it be done.

"Let me say one word further. 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. I never had any design against the life of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason or excite slaves to rebellion or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so but always discouraged any idea of the kind.

"Let me say a word in regard to the statements made by some of those connected with me. I hear it has been stated by some of them that I induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regards their weakness. There is not one of them but joined me of his own accord and the greater part of them at their own expense. A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me and that was for the purpose I have stated. Now I am done."

Brown's statement was not exactly sustained by the facts. Why had he collected the Sharpe's rifles, the pikes, the kegs of powder, many thousands of caps and much warlike material at the Kennedy farm? Why did he and other armed men, break into the United States Armory and Arsenal, make portholes in the engine house, shoot and kill citizens and surround their own imprisoned persons with prominent men as hostages? But everybody in the court house believed the old man when he said that he did everything with a solitary motive, the liberation of the slaves.

Judge Parker could, under his oath, do nothing else than to sentence him to be hung. He fixed the date for Friday, the second of December. Brown's counsel appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia. Its five judges unanimously sustained the action of the Jefferson county court.

Brown was hung on the bright and beautiful morning of December 2nd at 11:15 o'clock. At his request Andrew Hunter wrote his will. He then visited his fellow prisoners who were all executed at a later date. He rode to his death between Sheriff Campbell and Captain Avis in a furniture wagon drawn by two white horses. He did not ride seated on his coffin as some of his chief eulogists have affirmed. The wagon was escorted to the scaffold by State military companies. No citizens were allowed near to the jail. Hence he did not kiss any negro baby as he emerged from his prison, as Mr. Whittier has described in a poem on the event and as artists have memorialized in paintings. The utter absurdity of such an incident occurring under such surroundings any Virginian will see. Avis, Campbell and Hunter publicly denied it. But the story will doubtless have immortality. In one of the companies of soldiers walked the actor John Wilkes Booth, the infamous assassin of Abraham Lincoln. At the head of the Lexington cadets walked Professor Thomas Jefferson Jackson, who became an able Confederate General and is best known to the world as "Stonewall Jackson." As the party neared the gallows Brown gazed on the glorious panorama of mountain and landscape scenery. Then he said: "This is a beautiful country." He wore a black slouch hat with the front tipped up. Reaching the scaffold the numerous State troops formed into a hollow square. Brown mounted the platform without trepidation. Standing on the drop he said to the sheriff and his assistants: "Gentlemen! I thank you for your kindness to me. I am ready at any time. Do not keep me waiting." The drop fell and in ten minutes Dr. Mason pronounced him dead. That evening Mrs. Brown and her friends received the casket at Harper's Ferry and accompanied it to the old home at North Elba, N. Y. His funeral, as reported by the metropolitan papers, took place there six days after his execution. An immense concourse was in attendance. The conspicuous and brilliant orator, Wendell Phillips, delivered the address. He closed it with these words: "In this cottage he girded himself and went forth to battle. Fuller success than his heart ever dreamed of God had granted him. He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and the poor. Men believe more firmly in virtue now that such a man has lived." Personally I remained in Virginia.

On the day that Brown was hung =Martyr Services=, as they were called, were held in many Northern localities. At Concord, Dr. Edmund Sears read a poem in which are these stanzas:

"Not any spot, six feet by two Will hold a man like thee: John Brown will tramp the shaking earth From Blue Ridge to the sea Till the strong angel comes at length And opes each dungeon door: And God's Great Charter holds and waves O'er all the humble poor.

And then the humble poor may come In that far distant day, And from the felon's nameless grave Will brush the leaves away: And gray old men will point the spot Beneath the pine tree's shade, As children ask with streaming eyes Where old John Brown was laid."

Before he was executed many threatening communications were received by the Virginia State and Jefferson County officers. Large numbers of E. C. Stedman's poem, entitled "John Brown of Ossawattamie," were scattered about Charlestown. One stanza reads as follows:

"But Virginians! Don't do it, for I tell you that the flagon, Filled with blood of Old Brown's offspring, was first poured by Southern hands; And each drop from Old Brown's life veins, like the red gore of the dragon, May spring up, a vengeful Fury, hissing through your slave-worn lands; And Old Brown, Ossowattamie Brown, May trouble you more than ever, When you've nailed his coffin down."

Whether they be from the North or the South, fair-minded men, who are thoroughly conversant with the history of this raid, can hardly cherish any doubt concerning the turpitude of the invasion, the fairness of Brown's trial and the justice of his conviction and execution. He fell under the direction of a misguided conscience. The noble endowment that philosophers call conscience that gives its verdicts as to the moral merit or demerit of actions and affections, was strangely warped in Brown's intense and brave character. The possession of this faculty of conscience is the massive foundation of all human responsibility. Illustrations of the moral enormities that a perverted conscience can perpetrate are manifold along the pages of sacred and secular history.

When Jesus looked down the aisles of the future, He said to His disciples that the men who would finally transfigure them into martyrs would murder them in the belief that they were rendering acceptable service to God.

Paul declared that he regarded himself as meeting the divine approval when he was persecuting and murdering the primitive Christians.

When the officers of the Spanish Inquisition saw the agonies of the victims who refused to renounce their religious creeds they joyfully exclaimed, "Let God be glorified."

Charles the Ninth of France said he was conscientious in ordering the Saint Bartholomew massacre that resulted in the murder in French cities of tens of thousands of Christian Hugenots.

The Bloody Queen, Mary Tudor, said she had a pure conscience when she sent to the scaffold the learned and gentle young Ex-Queen Lady Jane Grey. Thousands of criminals have sheltered their crimes in the temple of Conscience.

The trend of Brown's constant defence was that he obeyed his conscience. His lawless conduct, the death of many of his party and the murder of Virginia citizens gave him very little apparent intellectual unrest. He sowed to the wind and reaped the logical harvest, if it is the appropriate word, the whirlwind.

Brown's high Calvinism bordered on fatalism. Oliver Cromwell never believed more radically in the foreordination of all human actions than did he. When questioned concerning the failure of this invasion he replied: "All of our actions, even all of the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made." When Judge Russell visited him he said: "I know that the very errors by which my scheme was marred were decreed before the world was made. I had no more to do with the course I pursued than a shot leaving a cannon has to do with the spot where it shall fall."

It is when patriotic men read the story of "John Brown's Raid" by the torches of President Lincoln's early election, the Civil War and the Emancipation of all American slaves, that they seem to become blind to the terrible criminal features of the invasion and look only at the national results and the magnificient courage, benevolent motives and supreme self-sacrifice of this martyr. Multitudes of visionary men regard him as a divinely appointed John the Baptist raised up to usher in the day of physical freedom for every slave on American soil and their posterity to the end of time. They claim that in this instance "The End has justified the Means." His raid made the North solid against the slave system and the South as solid against anti-slavery theories and agitators. Before the Brown raid the vote for John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate for President, was 1341000. James Buchanan had 496000 majority. The year after the raid Abraham Lincoln received 1886000 votes for President and had 491000 majority over Stephen A. Douglas, when the South voted for another Democrat. Fremont had 114 votes in the Electoral College. Lincoln had 180. Under his presidency the emancipation of every slave on the national soil took place. The nations of Europe learned for the first time the important lesson that the United States was able to maintain its national unity. This raid beyond question hastened in the Civil War. I have seen Federal regiments marching on to battle enthusiastically singing:

"John Brown's body lies a mould'ring in the grave, But his soul is marching on."

A few weeks after Brown's execution Victor Hugo said, "What the South slew last December was not John Brown but slavery." His statement developed into a colossal historical truth. The great statesman, orator and senator, John J. Ingalls of Kansas, closed an oration with these remarkable words:

"Carlyle says that when any great change in human society is to be wrought God raises up men to whom that change is made to appear as the one thing needful and absolutely indispensable. Scholars, orators, poets, philanthropists, play their parts, but the crisis comes at last through some one who is stigmatized as a fanatic by his contemporaries, and whom the supporters of the systems he assails crucify between theives or gibbet as a felon. The man who is not afraid to die for an idea is the most potential and convincing advocate.

"Already the great intellectual leaders of the movement for the abolition of slavery are dead. The student of the future will exhume their orations, arguments and state papers, as a part of the subterranean history of the epoch. The antiquarian will dig up their remains from the alluvial drift of the period, and construe their relations to the great events in which they were actors. But the three men of this era who will loom forever against the remotest horizon of time, as the pyramids against the voiceless desert, or mountain peaks over the subordinate plains, are Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and old John Brown of Ossowattamie."

Senator Ingalls well knew that Brown had no such intellectual massiveness, or splendid culture, as had Webster, Clay, Jefferson, Sumner, and many other eminent Americans. He referred to the majesty of personal achievements. From this standpoint men like Garabaldi, Morse, Harriman, Edison, Roosevelt and Cook, the Arctic explorer have been great. Brown's life was a perpetual sacrifice for the annihilation of American slavery. Very defective as a military leader he was always ready to do, dare and die to assist in this work. Even today tens of thousands of educated men regard him as a monomaniac concerning the abolition of slavery. For many years, in the state of Kansas, he had permitted his own life, and the life of each of his sons, to be in continual peril that they might assist in placing Kansas in the constellation of free States. Men like Gerrit Smith and John L. Stearns financed his schemes from their wealth. Men like Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George B. Cheever, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker, delivered eulogies on Brown after he had been hung. They most eloquently denounced slavery from pulpits and platforms; but they lived in the limelight of oratorical popularity and flourished amidst luxurious ease. To Brown's immortal credit be it said that he gave domestic security, his humble fortune, his perillous work, the lives of his cherished sons and his own blood and life for the anti-slavery opinions that were anchored in his soul. His prison letters to many friends are full of intrepidity, submission to the divine providence and heroic anticipations of immortal blessedness. Ten minutes before he left his jail cell for the gallows he handed to a prison official a sheet of paper on which he had written these words: "I, John Brown, am 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."

His surpassing bravery and self-sacrificing candor profoundly impressed eminent Virginians. Governor Henry A. Wise said: "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 simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, indomitable; and it is but just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners. He is a fanatic, but firm, and truthful and intelligent." Colonel Lewis W. Washington and Captain John E. P. Dangerfield bore testimony to his courage.

Brown's wonderful moral heroism became resplendent after Judge Richard Parker had sentenced him to death. Many of his letters to his friends, collected and published by Mr. F. B. Sanford, would have done honor to the pen of Paul. He was exultant from the standpoint of a happy spiritual experience and triumphant as he gazed beyond this mortal life. In one of his last letters he wrote these words: "I sleep as peacefully as an infant, or if I am wakeful glorious thoughts come to me entertaining my mind. I do not believe I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, in this prison or on the scaffold. But I should do so if I denied my principles against slavery." Surely he must have been sincere as he faced eternity.

As early as 1820 John Quincy Adams said of the overthrow of American slavery, "The object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects and sublime and beautiful in its issues. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed." John Brown, along illegal and criminal lines, placed before the world such a life and death. He saw clearly what American statesmen of his period saw but dimly. Beyond all question he died as emphatically for the overthrow of slavery as Paul died for the honor of Christianity. Three of his favorite books were the life stories of men of great achievements:--"The Life of Oliver Cromwell," "The Life of Marco Bozarris," and "The Life of William Wallace."

Some years ago, in an oration delivered at Harper's Ferry, the distinguished freedman and orator, the late Frederick Douglass, said: "If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia; not Fort Sumter, but Harper's Ferry and the United States Arsenal; not Major Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic. Until this blow was struck the prospect was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared, the time for compromise was gone, the armed hosts stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union and the clash of arms was at hand."

And let it be remembered that when Brown had told Douglass the details of his proposed invasion at Harper's Ferry, Douglass begged him to abandon his plans and assured him that they would end, as they did, in untold disaster.

The chief authors who have written concerning John Brown and his invasion were not in Virginia during the forty-four days intervening between the raid and his execution. They were destitute of any personal knowledge of the facts. They were bitter enemies of the South and most intense admirers of the intrepid man executed at Charlestown. Their narratives are replete with errors and contain much romance. They are, generally, saturated with misrepresentation of the Virginia people and are burdened with eulogistic apologies for Brown's conduct in Virginia. Because I was on the ground and saw things as they occurred; because I have kept in touch with Brown literature; and because I am in love with the Truth I believe that my story is worthy of public confidence.

I have known Virginians, personally, for over fifty years. My long career, as a minister of Christ, was begun among them. They have not deserved the traduction Brown's eulogists have heaped on them. His unfortunate execution was the logical result of his criminal and bloody raid. The Virginia people have been noble in chivalry, bounteous in hospitality, sublime in kindness of heart and life and models of high social and moral purity.

Spartacus led the way for the destruction of Roman slavery. John Brown performed a similar service for the American slaves. He mingled in his strange character fanaticism and courage--eccentricity and a prophetical insight into future events--a warped conscience and a sublime martyr heroism. But whether in safety or peril, at home or in prison, in battle or on the scaffold, this mysterious man intensely cherished the conviction that Joanna Baillie imbedded into poetry:

"The strength of man sinks in the hour of trial, But there doth live a power that for the battle Girdeth the weak."

FOOTNOTES:

[6:1] For Armory read Arsenal.

[7:1] For Armory read Arsenal.