He knew that he could remain in Worcester with impunity. The strength of a revolution lies in the fact that its first bloodletting releases the instincts of the animal in man hitherto restrained by law. He knew that Brown's cry of Liberty for the slave would become for millions the cloak to hide the archaic impulse to kill. He knew that while the purpose of civilization is to restrain and control these instincts of the beast in man—it was too late for the forces of Law and Order to rally in the North. The first outbursts of indignation against Brown would quickly pass. They would be futile.
He read them with a smile. The New York Herald said: "He has met with a fate which he courted, but his death and the punishment of all his criminal associates will be as a feather in the balance against the mischievous consequences which will probably follow from the rekindling of the slavery excitement in the South."
The Tribune took the lead in dismissing the act as the deed of a madman. The Hartford Evening News declared:
"Brown is a poor, demented, old man. The calamity would never have occurred had there been no lawless and criminal invasion of Kansas."
But the most significant utterance in the North came from the Pacifist leader of Abolition, William Lloyd Garrison, himself. Higginson read it with a cry of joy.
The Liberator's words of comment were brief but significant of the coming mob mind:
"The particulars of a misguided, wild, and apparently insane, through disinterested and well-intended effort by insurrection, to emancipate the slaves in Virginia, under the leadership of Captain John, alias 'Osawatomie' Brown, may be found on our third page. Our views of war and bloodshed even in the best of causes, are too well known to need, repeating here; but let no one who glories in the revolutionary struggle of 1776, deny the right of slaves to imitate the example of our fathers."
Even the leader of the movement for Abolition by peaceful means had succumbed to the poison of the smell of human blood.
Higginson knew that the process of a revolution was always in the order of Ideas, Leaders, The Mob, The Tread of Armies. For thirty years Garrison and the Abolition Crusaders had spread the Ideas. The Inspired Leader had at last appeared. His right arm had struck the first blow. He could hear the roar of the coming mob whose impulse to murder had been roused. It would call their ancestral soul. The answer was a certainty. He could see no necessity for Brown's blood to be spilled in martyrdom.
The old man, walking with burning eyes toward his trial, knew better. His vision was clear. God had revealed His full purpose at last. He would climb a Virginia gallows and drag millions down, from that scaffold into the grave with him.