Part 8 (1/2)
This was the last touch of the apotheosis; John Brown became to the popular imagination the forerunner and martyr of the cause of Union and freedom.
At the North, one immediate and lasting effect of the tragedy was to intensify the conviction of the essential wrong of slavery. However mistaken was Brown's way of attack, it was felt that nothing short of an organized system of injustice and cruelty could have inspired such a man to such an attempt. The very logic of facts, which compelled Virginia in self-defense to hang him, showed the character of the inst.i.tution which needed such defense. Yes, it was necessary to hang him,--but what was the system that made necessary the sacrifice of such a life?
But Andrew's words ”whatever may be thought of John Brown's acts”--call for further consideration. What were his acts, and what were their consequences? A part of the answer was seen in the bodies of men of Harper's Ferry, lying in the streets, peaceful men with wives and children, slain for resisting an armed invasion of their quiet little village. The first man to fall was a negro porter of a railway train, who, failing to halt when challenged by one of Brown's sentinels, was shot. The second man killed was a citizen standing in his own doorway.
The third was a graduate of West Point who, hearing of trouble, came riding into town with his gun, and was shot as he pa.s.sed the armory.
Among the letters that came to Brown in prison was one from the widow of one of the Pottawatomie victims, with these words: ”You can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out in the yard, and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You can't say you did it to free our slaves; we had none and never expected to own one; but it only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children.”
Brown's first plan, of drawing off the slaves to a mountain fortress,--peaceable only in semblance, and involving inevitable fighting,--he exchanged at last for a form of attack which was an instant challenge to battle. In a conference with Frederick Dougla.s.s, on the eve of the event, Dougla.s.s vainly urged the earlier plan, but found Brown resolved on ”striking a blow which should instantly rouse the country.” On the day of his death, Brown penned these sentences and handed them to one of his guards: ”I, John Brown, am now 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.” But no man so directly and deliberately aimed to settle the difficulty by bloodshed as he. It is thus that men make G.o.d responsible for what themselves are doing.
The Civil War when it came brought enough of suffering and horror. But it was mild and merciful compared to what a slave insurrection might have been. And it was essentially a slave insurrection that Brown aimed at. The great ma.s.s of the Northern people would have recoiled with abhorrence from a servile revolt. But who could wonder if the Southern people did not believe this, when they saw honors heaped on a man who died for inciting such an insurrection? How could they nicely distinguish between approval of a man's acts and praise for the man himself? If the North had one thinker who set forth its highest ideals, its n.o.blest aims, that man was Emerson. Yet Emerson pa.s.sed Brown's acts almost unblamed, and named his execution together with that on Calvary.
Not all the disclaimers of politicians, the resolves of conventions, could rea.s.sure the South, after that day of mourning with which Northern towns solemnized John Brown's death. What wonder that an ardent Southerner like Toombs, speaking to his const.i.tuents a few months later, called on them to ”meet the enemy at the door-sill.” And what wonder that the Southern people were inclined as never before to look upon the Northern people as their foes?
The more deeply we study human life, the more do we realize that as to individual responsibility ”to understand is to forgive.” Half a century after the event, we may well have forgiveness--not of charity, but of justice--for John Brown, and for the Governor who signed his death-warrant; we can sympathize with those who honored and wept for him, and with those who shuddered at his deed. But, for the truth of history and for the guidance of the future, we must consider not only the intentions of men, but the intrinsic character of their deeds; not only John Brown himself, but John Brown's acts. And in that long series of deeds of violence and wrong which wrought mutual hatred and fratricidal war between the two sections of a people, that midnight attack on the peaceful Virginia village must bear its heavy condemnation. Hitherto aggression had been almost entirely from the South; this was a counter-stroke, and told with dire force against the hope of a peaceable and righteous settlement.
Probably most readers of to-day will wonder at the degree of admiration and praise which Brown received. It must be ascribed in part to some quality in his personality, which cast a kind of glamour on some of those who met him, and inspired such highly idealized portraiture as Emerson's. But there remains the extraordinary fact that men like Theodore Parker and Gerritt Smith and Dr. S. G. Howe gave countenance and aid to Brown's project. Before history's bar, their responsibility seems heavier than his; they, educated, intelligent, trained in public service; he an untaught, ill-balanced visionary, who at least staked his life on his faith. Their complicity in his plot ill.u.s.trates how in some moral enthusiasts the hostility to slavery had distorted their perception of reality. Such men saw the Southern communities through the medium of a single inst.i.tution, itself half-understood. They saw, so to speak, only the suffering slave and his oppressor. They failed to see or forgot the general life of household and neighborhood, with its common, kindly, human traits. They did not recognize that Harper's Ferry was made up of much the same kind of people, at bottom, as Concord. They did not realize that a slave insurrection meant a universal social conflagration. Indeed, Brown's original scheme of a general flight of slaves to a mountain stronghold had a fallacious appearance of avoiding a violent insurrection, and it was with the background of this plan that Brown, a wounded prisoner with death impending, appealed to the Northern imagination as a hero and martyr.
But this glorification of him wrought a momentous effect in the South.
It is best described by those who witnessed it. John S. Wise, son of the Governor who signed Brown's death-warrant, writes in his graphic reminiscences, _The End of an Era_: ”While these scenes were being enacted”--the trial and execution of Brown and the Northern comments--”a great change of feeling took place in Virginia toward the people of the North and toward the Union itself. Virginians began to look upon the people of the North as hating them, and willing to see them a.s.sa.s.sinated at midnight by their own slaves, led by Northern emissaries; as flinging away all pretense of regard for laws protecting the slave-owner; as demanding of them the immediate freeing of their slaves, or that they prepare against further attacks like Brown's, backed by the moral and pecuniary support of the North. During the year 1860 the Virginians began to organize and arm themselves against such emergencies.”
The spirit of proscription against all anti-slavery men broke out afresh. At Berea, Kentucky, a little group of anti-slavery churches and schools had been growing for six years, championed by the stalwart Ca.s.sius M. Clay, and with the benignant and peaceful John G. Fee as their leader. A month after Brown's foray a band of armed hors.e.m.e.n summoned twelve of their men to leave the State. Governor Magoffin said he could not protect them, and with their families they went into exile--stout-heartedly chanting at their departure the 37th Psalm: ”Fret not thyself because of evil-doers.”
In the South itself there had been developing recently an antagonism to the slave power. Its strength lay not in the moral opposition to slavery, which indeed always existed, but was quiet and apparently cowed; but rather in the growing cla.s.s of city residents,--merchants and professional men,--whose interests and feelings were often antagonistic to the large planters. The hostility to slavery on economic grounds, and in the white man's interest, found pa.s.sionate expression in Helper's _Impending Crisis_, and in a milder form was spreading widely. But at the menace of invasion and servile insurrection all cla.s.ses drew together. Especially the women of the South became suddenly and intensely interested in the political situation. The suggestion of personal peril appealed to them, and to the men who were their natural defenders. The situation is well described in Prof. J. W. Burgess's _The Civil War and the Const.i.tution_,--a generally impartial book, written with personal appreciation of the Southern standpoint: ”No man who is acquainted with the change of feeling which occurred in the South between the 16th of October, 1859, and the 16th of November of the same year can regard the Harper's Ferry villainy as anything other than one of the chiefest crimes of our history. It established and re-established the control of the great radical slaveholders over the non-slaveholders, the little slaveholders, and the more liberal of the larger slaveholders, which had already begun to be loosened. It created anew a solidarity of interest between them all, which was felt by all with an intensity which overbore every other sentiment. It gave thus to the great radical slaveholders the willing physical material for the construction of armies and navies and for the prosecution of war.”
CHAPTER XIX
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Every American may be presumed to be familiar with the external facts of Abraham Lincoln's early life,--the rude cabin, the s.h.i.+ftless father, the dead mother's place filled by the tender step-mother; the brief schooling, the hungry reading of the few books by the fire-light; the hard farm-work, with a turn now of rail-splitting, now of flat-boating; the country sports and rough good-fellows.h.i.+p; the upward steps as store-clerk and lawyer. But the interior qualities that made up his character and built his fortune will bear further study.
He was composed of traits which seemed to contradict each other. In a sense this is true of everyone. Dr. Holmes says (in substance): ”The vehicle in which each one of us crosses life's narrow isthmus between two oceans is not a one-seated sulky, but an omnibus.” Sometimes, as depicted in that wonderful parable, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, one inmate ejects the others. But in Lincoln the various elements were wrought as years pa.s.sed by into harmony.
He was prized among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. The vein of humor in him was rich and deep; it helped him through the hard places.
When as President he announced to his cabinet the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, he first refreshed himself by reading to them a chapter from Artemus Ward.
His early growth was in rough soil, and some of the mud stuck to him,--his jests were sometimes broad. But if coa.r.s.e in speech he was pure in life, and neither the rancor of political hate nor the research of unsparing biographers ever charged him with an unchaste act.
Along with this rollicking fun he had a vein of deepest melancholy. In part it was temperamental. The malarial country sometimes bred a strain of habitual depression. His mother was the natural daughter of a Virginia planter, and had the sadness sometimes wrought by such pre-natal conditions; it was said she was never seen to smile. Lincoln's early years had hards.h.i.+ps and trials, over many of which he triumphed, and triumphed laughing; but there were others for which there was neither victory nor mirth. Some of his early letters of intimate friends.h.i.+p (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,--it was an open secret,--he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates.
Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest heart he was a pa.s.sionate idealist, and by circ.u.mstances he was long shut out from the natural satisfaction of ideality. His partner Herndon said of him, ”His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”
Out of these experiences he brought a great power of patience and a great power of sympathy. These armed him for his work. He became invincible against the perversities and follies of men, and the blows of fate. He ripened into a tenderness such as prompted him, when burdened with cares beyond measure, to give a sympathetic hearing to every mother who came to the President with the story of her boy's trouble.
To take another brace of qualities, he was at once a powerful fighter and an habitual peace-maker. His long, gaunt, sinewy frame, and his tough courage, made him a formidable antagonist, but it was hard to provoke him to combat. Lamon,--whose biography is a treasury of good stories, sometimes lacking in discretion, but giving an invaluable realistic picture,--relates an encounter with the village bully, Jack Armstrong. The ”boys” at last teased Lincoln into a wrestling match, and when his victory in the good-natured encounter provoked Jack to unfair play, Abe shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Then he made peace with him, drew out the better quality in him; and the two reigned ”like friendly Caesars” over the village crowd, Abe tempering Jack's playfulness when it got too rough, and winning the boys to kindly ways.
In that day and region, men were very frank about their religious beliefs and disbeliefs. The skepticism or unbelief which lies unspoken in the hearts of a mult.i.tude of men,--silent perhaps out of regard to public opinion, perhaps from consideration for mother or wife--found free and frequent utterance in the West, long before Robert Ingersoll gave it eloquent voice. Lincoln, though we have called him an idealist at heart, habitually guided himself by logic, by hard sense, and by such evidence as pa.s.ses in a court of law. He was one of the cla.s.s to whom books like Tom Paine's _Age of Reason_ appealed strongly. In early life he wrote a treatise against Christianity. A politic friend to whom he showed his ma.n.u.script put it in the stove, but the writer was not changed in his opinions. To Christianity as a supernatural revelation he never became a convert, but the belief in ”a Power that makes for righteousness” grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength.
With deepening experiences, the awe and mystery of life weighed heavily on him. When travelling on circuit, his days spent in law-cases, diversified with sociability and funny stories, he would sometimes be seen in the early morning brooding by the fire-place with hands outspread, and murmuring his favorite verses,--a soliloquy on the mournfulness and mystery of life: ”Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!”