"Southern Society is built on Reverence for Law. The Law has been outraged by this man. It shall be vindicated, though the heavens fall."
In this stand he was immovable and the South backed him to a man. For exciting servile insurrection the King of Great Britain was held up to everlasting scorn by our fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. For this crime among others we rebelled and established the American Republic. Should John Brown be canonized for the same infamy? The Southern people asked this question in dumb amazement at the clamor from the North.
And so the Day of Transfiguration on the scaffold dawned.
Judge Thomas Russell and his good wife journeyed all the way from Boston to minister to the wants of their strange guest. There was in the distinguished jurist's mind a question which he must ask Brown before the rope should strangle him forever. His martyrdom had cleared every doubt and cloud from the mind of his friend save one. His fascinating letters, filled with the praise of God and the glory of a martyr's cause, had exalted him.
The judge had heard his speech in court on the day he was sentenced to death and had believed that each word was inspired. But the old man, who was now to die in glory, had spent a week in Judge Russell's house in Boston hiding from a deputy sheriff in whose hands was a warrant for plain murder—one of the foulest murders in the records of crime. The judge was a student of character, as well as Abolitionist.
He asked Brown for his last confidential statement as to these crimes on the Pottawattomie. There was no hesitation in his bold reply. Standing beneath the shadow of the gallows, the white hand of Death on his stooped shoulders, one foot on earth and the other pressing the shores of eternity, he lied as brazenly as he had lied a hundred times before. He assured his friend and his wife that he had nothing to do with those killings.
Mrs. Russell, weeping, kissed him.
And Brown said calmly: "Now, go."
As he ascended the scaffold he handed to one who stood near his final message, the supreme utterance over which he had prayed day and night to his God. Despatched from the scaffold, and sealed by his blood, he knew that its magic words would spread by contagion the Red Thought.
His face shone with the glory of his hope as his feet climbed the scaffold steps. On the scrap of paper he had written: