Part 45 (1/2)

”WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD THERE IS NO REMISSION OF SINS.”

He had laid the Blood Offering on G.o.d's altar counting his own life as of no account in the reckoning and from that hour he had been a fugitive from justice, hiding in the woods. He had escaped arrest only by the accidental a.s.sembling of a mob of a hundred and fifty disorderly fools who had stolen his own goods before they had been dispersed.

Instead of the heroic acclaim to which the deed ent.i.tled him, his own flesh and blood had cursed him, one of his sons had been shot and another was lying in prison a jibbering lunatic.

Would future generations agree with the men who had met in his own town and denounced his deed as cruel, gruesome and revolting?

His stolid mind refused to believe it. Through hours of agonizing prayer the new plan, based squarely on the vision that sent him to Pottawattomie, began to fix itself in his soul.

This time he would chose his disciples from the elect. Only men tried in the fires of Action could be trusted. Of five men he was sure. His son, Owen, he knew could be depended on without the shadow of turning. Yet Oliver was the second disciple chosen. He had forgiven the boy for the fight over the pistol and had taken pains to regain his complete submission. John Henry Kagi was the third chosen disciple, a young newspaper reporter of excellent mind and trained pen. He had been captured by United States troops in Kansas as a guerrilla raider and was imprisoned first at Lecompton and then at Tec.u.mseh. The fourth disciple selected was Aaron Dwight Stevens, an ex-convict from the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth. Stevens was by far the most daring and interesting figure in the group. His knowledge of military tactics was destined to make him an invaluable aide. The uncanny in Brown's spirit had appealed to his imagination from the day he made his escape from the penitentiary and met the old man. The fifth disciple chosen was John E. Cook, a man destined to play the most important role in the new divine mission with the poorest qualification for the task. Born of a well-to-do family in Haddon, Connecticut, he had studied law in Brooklyn and New York. He dropped his studies against the protest of his people in 1855, and, driven by the spirit of adventure, found his way into Kansas and at last led his band of twenty guerrillas into John Brown's camp. Brown's attention was riveted on him from the day they met. He was a man of pleasing personality and the finest rifle shot in Kansas. He was genial; he was always generous; He was brave to the point of recklessness; and he was impulsive, indiscreet and utterly reckless when once bent on a purpose. His sister had married Willard, the Governor of Indiana.

Brown's new plan required a large sum of money. With the prestige his fighting in Kansas had given him, he believed the Abolition philanthropists of the East would give this sum. He left his disciples to drill and returned East to get the money.

In Boston his success was genuine, although the large amount which he asked was slow in coming.

The old man succeeded in deceiving his New England friends completely as to the Pottawattomie murders. On this event he early became a cheerful, consistent and successful liar. This trait of his character had been fully developed in his youth. Everywhere he was acclaimed by the pious as, ”Captain Brown, the old partisan hero of Kansas warfare.”

His magnetic, uncanny personality rarely failed to capture the dreamer and the sentimentalist. Sanborn, Howe, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, George L. Stearns and Gerrit Smith became his devoted followers. He even made Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison his friends.

Garrison met him at Theodore Parker's. The two men were one on destroying Slavery: Garrison, the pacifist; Brown, the man who believed in bloodshed as the only possible solution of all the great issues of National life. Brown quoted the Old Testament; Garrison, the New.

He captured the imagination of Th.o.r.eau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He was raising funds for another armed attack on Slavery in Kansas. The sentimentalists asked no questions. And if hard-headed business men tried to pry too closely into his plans, they found him a past master in the art of keeping his own counsel.

He struck a snag when he appealed to the National Kansas Committee for a gift of rifles and an appropriation of five thousand dollars. They voted the rifles on conditions. But a violent opposition developed against giving five thousand dollars to a man about whose real mind they knew so little.

H. B. Hurd, the Chairman of the Committee, had suspected the purpose back of his pretended scheme for operations in Kansas. He put to Brown the pointblank question and demanded a straight answer.

”If you get these guns and the money you desire, will you invade Missouri or any slave territory?”

The old man's reply was characteristic. He spoke with a quiet scorn.

”I am no adventurer. You all know me. You are acquainted with my history. You know what I have done in Kansas. I do not expose my plans. No one knows them but myself, except perhaps one. I will not be interrogated. If you wish to give me anything, I want you to give it freely. I have no other purpose but to serve the cause of Liberty.”

His answer was not illuminating. It contained nothing the Committee wished to know. The statement that they knew him was a figure of speech.

They had read partisan reports of his fighting and his suffering in Kansas--through his own letters, princ.i.p.ally. How much truth these letters contained was something they wished very much to find out. He had given no light.

He declared that they knew what he had done in Kansas. This was the one point on which they needed most light.

The biggest event in the history of Kansas was the deed on the Pottawattomie. In the fierce political campaign that was in progress its effects had been neutralized by denials. Brown had denied his guilt on every occasion.

Yet as they studied his strange personality more than one member of the Committee began to suspect him as the only man in the West capable of the act.

The Committee refused to vote the rifles and compromised on the money by making a qualification that would make the gift of no service.

They voted the appropriation, ”in aid of Captain John Brown in any _defensive_ measures that may become necessary.” He was authorized to draw five hundred dollars when he needed it for this purpose.

The failure rankled in the old man's heart and he once more poured out the vials of his wrath on all politicians,--North and South.

For months he became an incessant and restless wanderer throughout New York and the New England States.