CHAPTER XXXI
On the surface only was the Great Deed a failure. Not a single pike had been thrust into a white man's breast by his slave. Not a single torch had been applied to a Southern home. His chosen Captains never passed the sentinel peak into Fauquier county. The Black Bees had not swarmed. But the keen ear of the old man had heard the rumble of the swarming of twenty million white hornets in the North.
The moment he had lifted his head a prisoner in the hands of his courteous captor, he foresaw the power which the role of martyrdom would give to his cause. Instantly he assumed the part and played it with genius to the last breath of his indomitable body.
He had stained the soil of Virginia with the blood of innocent and unoffending citizens. He had raised the Blood Feud at the right moment, a few months before a Presidential campaign. He had raised it at the right spot in a mountain gorge that looked southward to the Capitol at Washington and northward to the beating hearts of the millions, who had been prepared for this event by the long years of the Abolition Crusade which had culminated in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
A wave of horror for a moment swept the nation, North and South. Frederick Douglas fled to Europe. Sanborn, the treasurer and manager of the conspiracy, hurried across the border into Canada. Howe and Stearns hid. Theodore Parker was already in Europe.
Poor, old, gentle, generous Gerrit Smith collapsed and was led to the insane asylum at Ithaca, New York.
Two men alone of the conspirators realized the tremendous thing that had been done—John Brown in jail at Charlestown, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the militant preacher of Massachusetts.
To Brown, life had been an unbroken horror. His tragic Puritan soul had ever faced it with scorn—scorn for himself and the world. He was used to failure and disaster. They had been his meat and drink. Bankruptcy, imprisonment, flight from justice and the death of half his children had been mere incidents of life.
He had cast scarcely a glance at his dying sons in the Engine House. He had not tried to minister to them. His hand was tightly gripped on his carbine.
His grim soul now rose to its first long flight of religious ecstasy. He saw that the Southerner's reverence for Law and Order would make his execution inevitable. His dark spirit shouted for joy. His own blood, if he could succeed in playing the role of martyr, would raise the Blood Feud to its highest power. No statesman, no leader, no poet, no seer could calm the spirit of the archaic beast in man, which this martyrdom would raise if skillfully played. He was sure he could play the role with success.
The one man in the North who saw with clear vision the thing which
Brown's failure had done was the Worcester clergyman.
Higginson was a preacher by accident. He was a born soldier. From the first meeting with Brown his fighting spirit had answered his cry for blood with a shout of approval. Higginson not only refused to run, but also groaned with shame at the fears of his fellow conspirators. His first utterance was characteristic of his spirit.
"I am overwhelmed with remorse that the men who gave him money and arms could not have been by his side when he fell."
He stood his ground in Worcester and dared arrest. He did not proclaim his guilt from the housetop. But his friends and neighbors knew and he walked the streets with head erect.
He did more. He joined with John W. LeBarnes and immediately organized a plot to liberate Brown by force. He raised the money and engaged George H. Hoyt to go to Harper's Ferry, ostensibly to appear as his attorney at the trial, in reality to act as a spy, discover the strength of the jail and find whether it could be stormed and taken by a company of determined men.
At his first interview with Brown the spy revealed his purpose.
"I have come from Boston to rescue you," he whispered.
The old man's face was convulsed with anger. He spoke in the tones of final command which had always closed argument with friend or foe.
"Never will I consent to such a scheme."
"But listen—"
"You listen to me, young man. The bare mention of this thing again and I shall refuse to see or speak to you. Do you accept my decision, sir?"
Hoyt agreed at once. Only in this way could he keep in touch with the man whom he had come to save.
"The last thing on this earth I would ask," Brown continued sternly, "is to be taken from this jail except by the State of Virginia when I shall ascend the scaffold."
Hoyt looked longingly at the old-fashioned fireplace in his prison room.
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 pass. 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 associates 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 emancipate the slaves in Virginia, under the leadership 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 succumbed 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. God 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.