Only those who lived in that time can know the feeling which filled the
hearts of those who beheld in John Brown the agent of the divine purpose
of destroying slavery. Men are no longer so sure of God's hand in their
affairs as they once were, but I think we are surer that He does not
authorize evil that good may come, and that we can well believe the
murders which Brown did as an act of war in Kansas had not His
sanction. In the mad skurry which followed the incident of Harper's
Ferry in 1859 some things were easily shuffled out of sight. Probably
very few of those who applauded or palliated Brown's attempt knew that
he had taken men from their wives and children and made his partisans
chop them down that their death might strike terror into the pro-slavery
invaders, while he forbore from some strange policy to slaughter them
with his own hand. His record was not searched to this dreadful fact in
my knowledge, either by the Democrats who tried to inculpate the
Republicans for his invasion of Virginia or by the Republicans who more
or less disowned him. What his best friends could say and what most of
them believed, was that he had been maddened by the murder of his sons
in Kansas, and that his wild attempt was traceable to the wrongs he had
suffered. His own dignity as he lay wounded and captive in the
engine-house at Harper's Ferry, where the volunteer counsel for the
prosecution flocked upon him from every quarter, and questioned him and
cross-questioned him, did the rest, and a sort of cult grew up which
venerated him before his death. I myself was of that cult, as certain
fervent verses would testify if I here refused to do so. They were not
such very bad verses, as verses, though they were technically faulty in
places, but in the light which Mr. Oswald Villard's history of John
Brown has finally cast upon that lurid passage of his life I perceive
that they were mistaken. He was not bloodier than most heroes, but he
was not a martyr, except as he was willing to sacrifice himself along
with others for a holy cause, and he was a saint only of the Old
Testament sort of Samuel who hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. But
from first to last he was of the inevitable, and the Virginians could no
more have saved themselves from putting him to death than he could have
saved himself from venturing his life to free their slaves. Out of that
business it seems to me now that they came with greater honor than their
Northern friends and allies. The South has enough wrongs against the
negroes to answer for in the past and in the present, but we cannot lay
wholly to its charge the fate of the slave's champion; he was of the
make of its own sons in his appeal to violence, and apparently the South
understood him better than the North. There was then no evil too great
for us to think or say of the Virginians, and yet after they could free
him from the politicians, mainly Northern, who infested him in the first
days of his captivity, to make political capital or newspaper copy out
of him, the Virginians tried him fairly, as those unfair things called
trials go, and they remained with a sort of respect for him which
probably puzzled them. Long after, twenty-five years after, when I was
in an ancient Virginia capital it was my privilege to meet some of
Governor Wise's family; and I noted in them this sort of retrospective
respect for Brown; they were now of Republican politics, and I found
that I was not nearly Black Republican enough for them. But in the
closing months of the year 1859 there was no man so abhorred and
execrated by the so-called Black Republicans as Governor Wise.
Without going to the files of our own newspaper I cannot now say just
how we treated the Harper's Ferry incident from first to last, but I am
safe in saying that it was according to the temperament of each writer.
Our chief, who wrote very well when he could detach his interest from
the practical politics so absorbing in the capital of a state like Ohio,
may have struck the key-note of our opinion in an able leader, and then
left each of us to follow with such music as responded in us. My vague
remembrance of the result is the daily succession of most penetrating,
most amusing comments from my senior. The event offered him the
opportunity of his life for that cold irony he excelled in and which he
knew how to use so effectively in behalf of a good cause; I do not
believe it was ever employed in a bad one. The main contribution to the
literature of the event from his junior that I can distinctly recall was
that ode or that hymn to John Brown, for which I cannot yet be ashamed
or sorry, however I must rue the facts that have forever spoilt my
rapture in it. I have the sense of a pretty constant passing from the
room where I was studying the exchanges for material, and trying to get
my senior's laugh for something I had written, or staying for him to
read me the article he had just begun or finished. It was a great time,
though it was a dreadful time, so thick with forecast, if we had only
known it, of the dreadfuler time to follow.
While I have been saying this I have been trying to think how much or
little our community was shaken by an event that shows so tremendous in
the retrospect, and it seems to me little rather than much. People knew
the event was tremendous, but so had the battles in Kansas been, and so
had the attack on Sumner in the Senate Chamber, and so had the arrests
and rescues of the fugitive slaves. They were of the same texture, the
same web which fate was weaving about us and holding us faster, hour by
hour and day by day while we felt ourselves as free as ever. There must
have been talk pretty constant at first, but dying away without having
really been violent talk, among people who differed most about it. What
I think is that most people were perhaps bewildered, and that waiting in
their daze they did not say so much as people would now imagine their
saying. Or it may be that my memory of the effect is a blur of so many
impressions that it is impossible to detach any from the mass; but I do
not think this probable. The fact probably is that people did not
realize what had happened because they could not, because their long
experience of enmity between the South and North had dulled them too
much for a true sense of what had happened.
But I wrote home to my father my disappointment that his paper had not
had something "violent" about the John Brown raid. My head, which
abstractly passionate and concretely descriptive rhymes had once had
wholly to themselves, was now filled with John Brown when it could be
relieved of a news-editor's duty; I thought of him and him only, except
when I was making those perpetual calls at those pleasant houses where
the young ladies were singing or talking every night. I got some
consolation from one of the delightful German editors whom I seemed to
know in those days. He was a '48 man, and he carried in his leg a ball
which some soldier of the king had planted there one day when my friend
stood behind a barricade in Berlin. He told me, as I read in one of my
old letters home, that he had been teaching his children the stories of
Schiller, the good poet of freedom, of Robert Blum, the martyr of
liberty, and of our John Brown. He says, "My liddle girl, ven I deached
dem to her, she veeped."
But I cannot recall having spoken of Brown with my friend Dr. S., whom I
was so apt to speak with of the changing aspects of the slavery
question, though I remember very well his coldness to my enthusiasm for
the young English poet, Richard Realf, who was so grotesquely Secretary
of State in the Republic Brown had dreamed out, but who had passed from
Canada with his department before the incident at Harper's Ferry, and
was in Texas at the time of it and of the immediately ensuing events.
What affair of state brought him to Columbus after the death of his
leader and comrades I did not understand, and I cannot understand yet
how he could safely be there within easy reach of any United States
marshal, but he was, no doubt, much safer there than in Texas, and he
stayed some days, mainly talking with me about himself as a poet rather
than as a Secretary of State. He interested me, indeed, much more as a
poet, for I already knew him as the author of some Kansas war lyrics,
which I am not sure I should admire so much now as I did then. He was a
charming youth, perhaps my senior by two years, and so about
twenty-four, gentle mannered, sweet voiced, well dressed, and girlishly
beautiful. I knew, as he was prompt and willing to tell me again, that
he had been a protégé of Lady Byron's, and that while in her house he
had fallen in love with a young kinswoman of hers, and was forced to
leave it, for with all his gifts he was the son of an agricultural
laborer, and for that reason no desirable match. Yet Lady Byron seemed
to have remained fond of him; she had helped him to publish a volume of
verse which he had called _Guesses at the Beautiful_ (I envied him the
title), and at parting she had given him a watch for a keepsake and
money to bring him to America. He showed me the watch, and I dare say
the volume of poems, but I am not sure as to this, and I vouch for no
particular of his story, which may very well have been wholly true. In
the long walks and long talks we had together, when he cared more to
speak of his literary than his military life, I cannot make out that he
expected to help further in any attack upon the South. Apparently he
shared the bewilderment which every one was in, but he did not seem to
be afraid or anxious for himself as part of the scheme that had so
bloodily failed. He was not keeping himself secret, and he went on to
Canada as safely as he had come from Texas, if indeed he went to
Canada. While he was briefly with us a hapless girl, of those whom
there is no hope for in this life, killed herself, and Realf went to the
wicked house where she lay dead, out of some useless pathos, since she
_was_ dead. I reported the fact to my friend Dr. S. with a faltering
tendency, I am afraid, to admire Realf for it, and the doctor said,
coldly, Yes, he had better kept away; his motive had already been
scandalously construed. It was this world speaking at its best and
wisest, but I am not sure that it altogether persuaded me.