Part 25 (2/2)

A look of weariness came over the stern face with its deep-cut lines.

”It's a waste of words to talk to politicians.”

John, Jr. was grasping at the next resolution which was one surpa.s.sing belief. He rubbed his ears to see if he were really hearing correctly.

This resolution denounced the charge that they were Radicals at all. It denounced the attempt of any man to interfere by violence with slaves or Slavery where protected by the supreme law of the land. It repudiated as stale and ridiculous the charge of Abolitionism against them. And declared that such an accusation is without a shadow of truth to support it.

Charles Stearns, the representative of the New England Society, leaped to his feet and denounced the platform in withering tones. He fairly shrieked his final sentence:

”All honest anti-slavery men, here and elsewhere, will spit on your platform!”

He paused and faced the leaders who had drafted it.

”And all pro-slavery men must forever despise the base sycophants who originated it!”

John Brown, Jr., applauded. The crowd laughed.

Old John Brown had paid no further heed to the proceedings of the Convention. His eyelids were drawn half down. Only pin points of glittering light remained.

The resolutions were adopted by an overwhelming majority.

In the East, Horace Greeley in the _Tribune_ reluctantly accepted the platform: ”Why free blacks should be excluded it is difficult to understand; but if Slavery can be kept out by compromise of that sort, we shall not complain. An error of this character may be corrected; but let Slavery obtain a foothold there and it is not so easily removed.”

Brown's hopes were to be still further dashed by the persistence with which the leaders of this Convention followed up the program of establis.h.i.+ng a white man's country on the free plains of the West.

When the Convention met at Topeka on the twenty-third of October, to form a Const.i.tution, the determination to exclude all negroes from Kansas was again sustained. The majority were finally badgered into submitting the issue to a separate vote of the people. On the fifteenth of December, the Northern settlers voted on it and the question _was_ settled.

Negroes were excluded by a three-fourths majority.

Three-fourths of the Free State settlers were in favor of a white man's country and the heaviest vote against the admission of negroes was polled in Lawrence and Topeka, where the Radicals had from the first made the most noise.

The Northern men who had come to Kansas merely to oppose the extension of Slavery were in a hopeless minority in their own party. The American voters still had too much common sense to be led into a position to provoke civil war.

John Brown spent long hours in prayer after the final vote on the negro issue had been counted. He denounced the leaders in politics in Kansas as trimmers, time servers, sycophants and liars. He walked beneath the star-sown skies through the night. He wrestled with his G.o.d for a vision.

There must be a way to Action.

He rose from prayer at dawn after a sleepless night and called for his sons, Owen, Oliver, Frederick and Salmon, to get ready for a journey. He had received a first hint of the will of G.o.d. He believed it might lead to the way.

He organized a surveyor's party and disguised himself as a United States Surveyor. He had brought to Kansas a complete outfit for surveying land.

He instructed Owen and Frederick to act as chain carriers, Salmon as axeman and Oliver as marker. He reached the little Southern settlement on the Pottawattomie Creek the fifteenth of May.

He planted his compa.s.s on the bank of the creek near the Doyles' house and proceeded to run a base line.

The father and three boys were in the fields at work beyond the hill.

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