All uncertainty at an end to his execution, John Brown set his hand to
finish the work of his life in a supreme triumph. He entered upon the
task with religious joy. The old Puritan had always been an habitual
writer of letters. The authorities of Virginia allowed him to write
daily to his friends and relatives. He quickly took advantage of this
power. The sword of Washington which he grasped on that fatal Sunday
night had proven a feeble weapon. He seized a pen destined to slay a
million human beings.
His soul on fire with the fixed idea that he had been ordained by God to
drench a nation in blood, he joyfully began the task of creating the mob
mind.
No man in history had a keener appreciation of the power of the daily
press in the propaganda of crowd ideas. The daily newspaper had just
blossomed into its full radiance in the modern world. No invention in
the history of the race has equaled the cylinder printing press as an
engine for creating crowd movements.
The daily newspaper of 1859 spoke only in the language of crowds. They
were, in fact, so many mob orators haranguing their subscribers. They
wrote down to the standards of the mob. They were molders of public
opinion and they were always the creatures of public opinion. They wrote
for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand
of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations,
with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too
busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them.
There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed
the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd as God-inspired truth.
We no longer needed to seek for the mob in the streets. We had it at the
breakfast table, in the office, in the counting room. The process of
crowd thinking became the habit of daily life.
John Brown hastened to use this engine of propaganda. From his
comfortable room in the jail at Charlestown there poured a daily stream
of letters which found their way into print.
A perfect specimen of his art was the concluding paragraph of a letter
to his friend and fellow conspirator, George L. Stearns of Boston.
"I have asked to be _spared_ from having any _mock or hypocritical
prayers made over me_ when I am publicly _murdered_; and that my only
_religious attendants_ be poor, _little, dirty, ragged, bareheaded
and barefooted slave boys and girls_, led by old, _gray-headed slave
mothers_,"
This message he knew would reach the heart of every Abolitionist of
the North, of every reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. On the day of his
transfiguration on the scaffold he would deliver the final word that
would sweep these millions into the whirlpool of the Blood Feud.
To his wife and children he wrote a message which hammered again his
fixed idea into a dogma of faith:
"John Rogers wrote to his children, 'Abhor the arrant whore of Rome.'
John Brown writes to his children to abhor with _undying hatred_ also
the 'sum of all villainies,' slavery."
Not only did these daily letters find their way into the hands of
millions through the press, but the newspapers maintained a staff of
reporters at Charlestown to catch every whisper from the prisoner. So
brilliantly did these reports visualize his daily life that the crowds
who read them could hear the clanking of the chains as he walked and the
groans that came from his wounded body.
Thousands of letters began to pour into the office of the Governor of
Virginia, threatening, imploring, pleading for his life. The leading
politicians of all parties of the North were at length swept into this
howling mob by the press. To every plea the Governor of the Commonwealth
replied:
"Southern Society is built on Reverence for Law. The Law has been
outraged by this man. It shall be vindicated, though the heavens fall."
In this stand he was immovable and the South backed him to a man. For
exciting servile insurrection the King of Great Britain was held up
to everlasting scorn by our fathers who wrote the Declaration of
Independence. For this crime among others we rebelled and established
the American Republic. Should John Brown be canonized for the same
infamy? The Southern people asked this question in dumb amazement at the
clamor from the North.
And so the Day of Transfiguration on the scaffold dawned.
Judge Thomas Russell and his good wife journeyed all the way from Boston
to minister to the wants of their strange guest. There was in the
distinguished jurist's mind a question which he must ask Brown before
the rope should strangle him forever. His martyrdom had cleared every
doubt and cloud from the mind of his friend save one. His fascinating
letters, filled with the praise of God and the glory of a martyr's
cause, had exalted him.
The judge had heard his speech in court on the day he was sentenced to
death and had believed that each word was inspired. But the old man, who
was now to die in glory, had spent a week in Judge Russell's house in
Boston hiding from a deputy sheriff in whose hands was a warrant for
plain murder--one of the foulest murders in the records of crime. The
judge was a student of character, as well as Abolitionist.
He asked Brown for his last confidential statement as to these crimes on
the Pottawattomie. There was no hesitation in his bold reply. Standing
beneath the shadow of the gallows, the white hand of Death on his
stooped shoulders, one foot on earth and the other pressing the shores
of eternity, he lied as brazenly as he had lied a hundred times before.
He assured his friend and his wife that he had nothing to do with those
killings.
Mrs. Russell, weeping, kissed him.
And Brown said calmly: "Now, go."
As he ascended the scaffold he handed to one who stood near his final
message, the supreme utterance over which he had prayed day and night to
his God. Despatched from the scaffold, and sealed by his blood, he knew
that its magic words would spread by contagion the Red Thought.
His face shone with the glory of his hope as his feet climbed the
scaffold steps. On the scrap of paper he had written:
"I, JOHN BROWN, AM NOW QUITE CERTAIN THAT THE CRIMES OF THIS GUILTY LAND
WILL NEVER BE PURGED AWAY BUT WITH BLOOD."
The trap fell, his darkened soul swung into eternity and the deed
was done. He had raised the Blood Feud to the nth power. His message
thrilled the world.
Bells were tolling in the North while crowds of weeping men and women
knelt in prayer to his God. Had they but lifted the veil and looked,
they would have seen the face of a fiend. But their eyes were now
blinded with the madness which had driven him to his death.
In Cleveland, Melodeon Hall was draped in mourning at a meeting where
thousands wept and cursed and prayed. Mammoth gatherings were held in
New York, in Rochester and Syracuse. In Boston a crowd, so dense they
were lifted from their feet by the pressure of thousands behind,
clamoring for entrance, rushed into Tremont Temple.
William Lloyd Garrison, the Pacifist, declared the meeting was called to
witness John Brown's resurrection. He flung the last shred of principle
to the winds and joined the mob of the Blood Feud without reservation.
"As a peace man--an ultra peace man--I am prepared to say: 'Success to
every Slave Insurrection in the South and in every Slave Country!'"
Wendell Phillips, believing Judge Russell's report of Brown's denial of
the Pottawattomie murders, declared to the thousands who crowded Cooper
Union that John Brown was a Saint--that he was not on the Pottawattomie
Creek on that fateful night, that he was not within twenty-five miles of
the spot!
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ignorant of the truth of Pottawattomie, hailed
Brown as "the new Saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led
by love of men into conflict and death--the new Saint who has achieved
his martyrdom and will make the gallows glorious as the cross."
One great spirit among the anti-slavery forces refused to be swept in
the current of insanity. Abraham Lincoln at Troy, Kansas, said on the
day of Brown's death:
"Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a State. We cannot
object, even though he agreed with us in thinking Slavery wrong. That
cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him
nothing that he might _think_ himself right."
Lincoln's voice was drowned in the roar of the mob.
John Brown from the scaffold had set in motion forces of mind beyond
control. Never before had men so little grasped the present, so stupidly
ignored the past, so poorly divined the future. Reason had been hurled
from her throne. Man had ceased to think.
Had Lieutenant Green's sword pierced Brown's heart he would have
died the death of a mad dog. His imprisonment, his carefully staged
martyrdom, his message of blood, and final, just execution by Law
created the mob mind which destroyed reverence for Law.
As he swung from the gallows and his body swayed for a moment between
heaven and earth Colonel Preston, standing beside the steps, solemnly
cried:
"So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union!
All such foes of the human race!"
Yet even as the trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State
of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a
dirge for their martyr hero.
A criminal paranoiac had become the leader of twenty millions of people.
The mob mind had caught the disease of his insanity and a nation began
to go mad.
Robert E. Lee, in command of the forces of Law and Order, watched the
swaying ghostly figure with a sense of deep foreboding for the future.