The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South

by Jr. Thomas Dixon

"You come ter de big meetin' ter-morrow night an' hear sumfin dat's good fer yo' soul."

"I'll be dar," Sam promised. But he hoped to find something at the meeting that was good for his stomach as well as his soul.

CHAPTER XI

The negroes in New York and Brooklyn were not the only people in the North falling under the influence of the strange man who answered to the name of John Brown. There was something magnetic about him that drew all sorts and conditions of men.

The statesmen who still used reason as the guiding principle of life had no use for him. Henry Wilson, the new Senator from Massachusetts, met him and was repelled by the something that drew others. Governor Andrew was puzzled by his strange personality.

The secret of his power lay in a mystic appeal to the Puritan conscience. He had been from childhood afflicted with this conscience in its most malignant form. He knew instinctively its process of action.

The Puritan had settled New England and fixed the principles both of economic and political life. The civilization he set up was compact and commercial. He organized it in towns and townships. The Meeting House was the center, the source of all power and authority. No dwelling could be built further than two miles from a church and attendance on worship was made compulsory by law.

The South, against whose life Brown was organizing his militant crusade, was agricultural, scattered, individual. Individualism was a passion with the Southerner, liberty his battle cry. He scorned the "authority" of the church and worshipped God according to the dictates of his own conscience. The Court House, not the Meeting House, was his forum, and he rode there through miles of virgin forests to dispute with his neighbor.

The mental processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass of Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not only resist and attack the world; he should hate it. He early learned to love the pleasure of hating. He hated himself if no more promising victim loomed on the horizon. He early became the foremost Persecutor and Vice-Crusader of the new world. He made witch-hunting one of the sports of New England.

When not busy with some form of the witch hunt, the Puritan found an outlet for his repressed instincts in the ferocity with which he fought the Indians or worked to achieve the conquest of Nature and lay up worldly goods for himself and his children. Prosperity, therefore, became the second principle of his religion, next to vice crusading. When he succeeded in business, he praised God for his tender mercies. His goods and chattels became the visible evidence of His love. The only holiday he established or permitted was the day on which he publicly thanked God for the goods which He had delivered. Through him the New England Puritan Thanksgiving Day became a national festival and through him a religious reverence for worldly success has become a national ideal.