"I can leave to God the time and manner of my death, for I believe now that the sealing of my testimony before God and man with my blood will do far more to further the cause to which I have earnestly devoted myself than anything I have done in my life . . . I am quite cheerful concerning my approaching end, since I am convinced I am worth infinitely more on the gallows than I could be anywhere else."
On his way from the prison to the scaffold he handed to a guard a paper on which were written his last words.
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."
Emerson, Parker, and the Abolition press of the North eulogized
Brown and his followers.
His raid was made another pretence for uniting the South.
The American Anti-Slavery Society in its calendar of events designated 1859 as "The John Brown Year."
John Brown was immortalized in a song written and sung first in 1861, and thereafter by the Union army wherever it marched. On the spot where he was hanged a Massachusetts regiment (1862) sung:
"John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on," etc.
The significance of John Brown's attack, small as it was in the point of numbers engaged in it, lies in the fact that it is the only one of its character openly made on slavery in the history of the United States, and in the further fact that it was at the threshold of Secession—War, ending in universal emancipation.
(97) Hist. of the U. S. (Rhodes), vol. ii., p. 393.