The daily newspaper of 1859 spoke only in the language of crowds. They were, in fact, so many mob orators haranguing their subscribers. They wrote down to the standards of the mob. They were molders of public opinion and they were always the creatures of public opinion. They wrote for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations, with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them. There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd as God-inspired truth.
We no longer needed to seek for the mob in the streets. We had it at the breakfast table, in the office, in the counting room. The process of crowd thinking became the habit of daily life.
John Brown hastened to use this engine of propaganda. From his comfortable room in the jail at Charlestown there poured a daily stream of letters which found their way into print.
A perfect specimen of his art was the concluding paragraph of a letter to his friend and fellow conspirator, George L. Stearns of Boston.
"I have asked to be spared from having any mock or hypocritical prayers made over me when I am publicly murdered; and that my only religious attendants be poor, little, dirty, ragged, bareheaded and barefooted slave boys and girls, led by old, gray-headed slave mothers,"
This message he knew would reach the heart of every Abolitionist of the North, of every reader of Uncle Tom's Cabin. On the day of his transfiguration on the scaffold he would deliver the final word that would sweep these millions into the whirlpool of the Blood Feud.
To his wife and children he wrote a message which hammered again his fixed idea into a dogma of faith:
"John Rogers wrote to his children, 'Abhor the arrant whore of Rome.' John Brown writes to his children to abhor with undying hatred also the 'sum of all villainies,' slavery."
Not only did these daily letters find their way into the hands of millions through the press, but the newspapers maintained a staff of reporters at Charlestown to catch every whisper from the prisoner. So brilliantly did these reports visualize his daily life that the crowds who read them could hear the clanking of the chains as he walked and the groans that came from his wounded body.
Thousands of letters began to pour into the office of the Governor of Virginia, threatening, imploring, pleading for his life. The leading politicians of all parties of the North were at length swept into this howling mob by the press. To every plea the Governor of the Commonwealth replied: