Whatever may be thought of John Brown's acts, John Brown himself was right.
The Rev. Theodore Parker, who believed in slave insurrections and their horrors, wrote:
Let the American State hang his body and the American Church damn his soul. Still, the blessing of such as are ready to perish will fall on him, and the universal justice of the Infinitely Perfect God will make him welcome home. The road to heaven is as short from the gallows as from the throne.
Mr. Emerson said:
That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.
Into a carnival of rhetoric so picturesque, Mr. John James Ingalls could not fail to enter the lists and compete for the prize. Poising his shining lance he delivered this thrust:
But the three men of this era who will loom forever against the remotest horizon of time, as the pyramids above the voiceless desert, or the mountain peaks above the subordinate plains, are Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Old John Brown of Osawatomie.
Victor Hugo said:
The punishment of John Brown may consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it will certainly shatter the American Democracy. You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.