Part 61 (1/2)

Two men could have crawled up its flue at the same time.

His refusal did not stop Higginson's efforts. He appealed to the forlorn wife at North Elba, New York, to go to Harper's Ferry, ask to see her husband and whisper her plan into his ear. He sent the money and got Mrs. Brown as far as Baltimore on her journey when Brown heard of it and stopped her with a peremptory command.

The determined conspirator then worked up the proposition to buy a steam tug which could make 18 knots an hour, steam up the James River to Richmond, kidnap the Governor of the Commonwealth, Henry Wise, and hold him for ransom until Brown was released. The scheme only failed for the lack of money.

Higginson had seen one thing. Brown saw a bigger thing.

Higginson's refusal to flee was based on sound psychology. He knew that from the day John Brown struck his brutal blow at the heart of the South and blood had begun to flow, the Blood Feud would be the biggest living fact in the Nation's history.

He knew that he could remain in Worcester with impunity. The strength of a revolution lies in the fact that its first bloodletting releases the instincts of the animal in man hitherto restrained by law. He knew that Brown's cry of Liberty for the slave would become for millions the cloak to hide the archaic impulse to kill. He knew that while the purpose of civilization is to restrain and control these instincts of the beast in man--it was too late for the forces of Law and Order to rally in the North. The first outbursts of indignation against Brown would quickly pa.s.s. They would be futile.

He read them with a smile. The _New York Herald_ said: ”He has met with a fate which he courted, but his death and the punishment of all his criminal a.s.sociates will be as a feather in the balance against the mischievous consequences which will probably follow from the rekindling of the slavery excitement in the South.”

The _Tribune_ took the lead in dismissing the act as the deed of a madman. The Hartford _Evening News_ declared:

”Brown is a poor, demented, old man. The calamity would never have occurred had there been no lawless and criminal invasion of Kansas.”

But the most significant utterance in the North came from the Pacifist leader of Abolition, William Lloyd Garrison, himself. Higginson read it with a cry of joy.

_The Liberator's_ words of comment were brief but significant of the coming mob mind:

”The particulars of a misguided, wild, and apparently insane, through disinterested and well-intended effort by insurrection, to emanc.i.p.ate the slaves in Virginia, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Captain John, alias 'Osawatomie' Brown, may be found on our third page. Our views of war and bloodshed even in the best of causes, are too well known to need, repeating here; _but let no one who glories in the revolutionary struggle of 1776, deny the right of slaves to imitate the example of our fathers._”

Even the leader of the movement for Abolition by peaceful means had succ.u.mbed to the poison of the smell of human blood.

Higginson knew that the process of a revolution was always in the order of Ideas, Leaders, The Mob, The Tread of Armies. For thirty years Garrison and the Abolition Crusaders had spread the Ideas. The Inspired Leader had at last appeared. His right arm had struck the first blow. He could hear the roar of the coming mob whose impulse to murder had been roused. It would call their ancestral soul. The answer was a certainty.

He could see no necessity for Brown's blood to be spilled in martyrdom.

The old man, walking with burning eyes toward his trial, knew better.

His vision was clear. G.o.d had revealed His full purpose at last. He would climb a Virginia gallows and drag millions down, from that scaffold into the grave with him.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Never in the history of an American commonwealth was a trial conducted with more reverence for Law than the arraignment of John Brown and his followers in the stately old Court House at Charlestown, Virginia.

The people whom he had a.s.saulted with intent to kill, the people against whom he had incited slaves to rise in b.l.o.o.d.y insurrection, the kinsmen of the dead whom his rifles had slain, stood in line on the street and watched him pa.s.s into the building manacled to one of his disciples.

They did not hoot, nor hiss, nor curse. They watched him walk in silence between the tall granite pillars of the House of Justice.

The behavior of this crowd was highwater mark in the development of Southern character. The structure of their society rested on the sanct.i.ty of Law. It was being put to the supreme test.

A Northern crowd under similar conditions, had they followed the principles which John Brown preached, would have torn those prisoners to pieces without the formality of a trial.

It was precisely this trait of character in his enemies on which Brown relied for the martyrdom he so pa.s.sionately desired. When the witnesses at the preliminary hearing had testified to his guilt and the Court had ordered the trial set, he was asked if he had counsel.

He rose from his seat and addressed the nation, not the Court:

”Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken.

I did not ask to have my life spared. The Governor of the State of Virginia tenders me his a.s.surance that I shall have a fair trial, but under no circ.u.mstances whatever will I be able to have a fair trial. If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial. I have no counsel. I am ready for my fate. I do not wish a trial. I have now little further to ask, other than that I may not be foolishly insulted, as cowardly barbarians insult those who fall into their power.”