Lincoln's voice was drowned in the roar of the mob.
John Brown from the scaffold had set in motion forces of mind beyond control. Never before had men so little grasped the present, so stupidly ignored the past, so poorly divined the future. Reason had been hurled from her throne. Man had ceased to think.
Had Lieutenant Green's sword pierced Brown's heart he would have died the death of a mad dog. His imprisonment, his carefully staged martyrdom, his message of blood, and final, just execution by Law created the mob mind which destroyed reverence for Law.
As he swung from the gallows and his body swayed for a moment between heaven and earth Colonel Preston, standing beside the steps, solemnly cried:
"So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union!
All such foes of the human race!"
Yet even as the trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for their martyr hero.
A criminal paranoiac had become the leader of twenty millions of people. The mob mind had caught the disease of his insanity and a nation began to go mad.
Robert E. Lee, in command of the forces of Law and Order, watched the swaying ghostly figure with a sense of deep foreboding for the future.
CHAPTER XXXV
John Brown's body lay molderingin the grave but his soul was marching on. And his soul was a thousand times mightier than his body had ever been.