Lee turned sadly to his friend.
"Colonel Washington, the thing we have dreaded has come. The first blow has been struck. The Blood Feud has been raised."
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.