What think ye of John Brown? Have the widely separated opinions of twenty-five years ago approached or are they even more divergent? Of course, the active thinkers and workers of that day have joined the great majority. A younger and later generation has the conduct of affairs. In the main, those who hated him then hate him now. Those who thought him a martyr then are sure of it now. Perhaps we are still too near the events that made him famous to properly weigh and criticise the evidence; but what we write now, with what has been written, must be the source of future conclusions. As to the South, it is far too early to expect other than the most rancorous feeling towards him. More than many of us are willing to admit, we are the creatures of our surroundings, men, thinking and acting as we have been reared. John Brown put himself in direct opposition to all that made the South distinctive; and, however much I may blame the section for its continued hold on Slavery, I cannot think it strange that the inhabitants looked upon the Liberator with feelings quite the reverse from ours. For those, however, of equal privileges with ourselves, of substantially the same rearing, I have not the same measure of charity. In 1880 one G.W. Brown, M.D., of Rockford, Illinois, formerly the editor of a paper in Kansas, gave himself the trouble to write a pamphlet in which he spares no effort to calumniate the Old Hero. I quote a notice of it from the Boston Journal:
"The writer, Dr. G.W. Brown, in slip-shod and often ungrammatical English assails the memory of Old John Brown, charges him with active participation in various bloody crimes, and abuses his biographers and eulogists. Dr. Brown writes as an eye-witness of many of the things which he describes; but of his credibility we have no means of judging save so far as the bitterness of his tone casts suspicion on his veracity."
Happily we are able to tell just what Brown himself thought of his detractor, and of the paper that he conducted; for in July, 1858, writing to F.G. Sanborn, he says: "I believe all honest, sensible Free State men in Kansas consider George Washington Brown's Herald of Freedom one of the most mischievous, traitorous publications in the whole country."
"A murderous fanatic and midnight assassin" is what the Louisville Journal calls him. Just what the same paper calls Mr. Phillip Thompson, Member of Congress from Kentucky, I cannot state; but from the generally warped nature of its judgment I am not disposed to set much store by its opinion of him of Harper's Ferry.
"Without doubt he suffered the just recompense of his deeds," says one who twenty-five years ago was loud and eloquent in his denunciation of the "taking off." This man has since sat in Congress with hosts of Rebel brigadiers, has shaken by the hand Chalmers of Fort Pillow infamy, has listened to the reconstructed ex-Vice-President of the Confederacy on the floor of the House of Representatives. There is something wrong here, and I leave it to the lawyers to decide where. Brown had no malice against individuals, hence to have hung him for murder was wrong. If he suffered death for treason against the United States, then what a gigantic wrong has been done in admitting to the highest offices those who likewise were treasonable. For myself, I am ready to affirm that if the present status of affairs is right, there was most grievous wrong done Brown. The larger and more extended the treason only adds so much more to the crime. Perhaps had the "reconstruction" following his foray been associated with more ballots, or in other words, had conciliation been necessary to the proper maintenance of a particular party, perhaps, I say, he had been not only pardoned but elected to Congress.
Fate has assigned to John Brown one of the highest niches in the Temple of Fame. Thinking only of the name that must be his through all time, I would not have the past undone; but to-night, after so many days, it is not amiss to ask ourselves "what might have been?" Granting that the death struggle between Slavery and Freedom was to come in 1861, what a part in it must this grand old man have borne! With his terrible earnestness and indomitable will, with his ability to weld as it were, to himself all those who came under his influence, what an avenger he would have been on the tracks of such chivalrous Southerners as Quantrell of Lawrence-burning notoriety, and those who at Fort Pillow and at Plymouth, N.C. carved out for themselves eternal infamy. I cannot think of him as a general commander; but as a leader of scouts, as the head of a band to hang on the skirts of an enemy, he had been invaluable. All this, however was not to be. He was to do his part; but it was as a hastener rather than a participant in the struggle. To please the Southern Herodias his head lay gory in the charger before the contest which he had preached began.
The contest came. We fought and won. The prime cause of all our woes exists only as a page, a dark page of history; but on the margin of that page, and on those of every subsequent page, methinks an unseen hand writes in indelible characters the part sustained by that unconquerable leader.
To this day there are those who have halted and hesitated as to the Right in the War of the Rebellion. To me the question no more admits of doubt than does the distinction between daylight and darkness. In fact we were in darkness, and God said "Let there be light," and immediately the darkness and gloom of oppression disappeared. Shall I, then, hesitatingly say "God knows which was right"? I will say it, but with a different inflection; for not only does He know, but I know, every one who has seen the wonderful change since the contest, knows that God smiled on our cause. With this deep conviction, then, in our hearts is it not meet that we should keep ever green the memory of the man who more than any other, appreciated the exigencies of the hour, who first fell in his devotion to the cause? In these twenty-five years his spirit has been joined by those of Sumner, Greeley, Garrison, Giddings, Phillips, Foster and the many, many thousands who toiled for the wronged of whatever color. Truth, though for a time crushed to earth, has risen again. Freedom reigns indeed in the land of John Brown.
"His soul is marching on."