While living, his abnormal mind repelled men of strong personality. He had never been able to control more than two dozen people in any enterprise which he undertook. And in these small bands rebellions always broke out.
The paranoiac had been transfigured now into the Hero and the Saint through the worship of the mob which his insanity had created. His apparent strength of character was in reality weakness, an incapacity to master himself or control his criminal impulses. But the Jacobin mind of his followers did not consider realities. They only cherished dreams, illusions, assertions. The mob never reasons. It only believes. Reason is submerged in passion.
John Brown was a typical Jacobin leader. He was first and last a Puritan mystic. The God he worshipped was a fiend, but he worshipped Him with all the more passionate devotion for that reason. When he committed murder on the Pottawattomie he stalked his prey as a panther. He sang praises to his God as he paused in the brush before he sprang. His narrow mind, with a single fixed idea, was inaccessible to any influences save those which fed his mania. Nothing could loose the grip of his soul on this dream. He closed his glittering eyes and refused to consider anything that might contradict his faith.
He acted without reason, driven blindly forward by an impulse. When his cunning mind used reason it was never for the purpose of finding truth. It was only for the purpose of confounding his enemies. He never used it as a guide to conduct.
By the magic of mental contagion he had transferred from the scaffold this Jacobin mind to the soul of a nation. The contact of persons is not necessary to transfer this disease. Its contagion is electric. It moves in subtle thought waves, as a mysterious pestilence spreads in the night. The mob mind, once formed, is a new creation and becomes with amazing rapidity a resistless force. The reason for its uncanny power lies in the fact that when once formed it is dominated by the unconscious, not the conscious forces, of man's nature. Its credulity is boundless. Its passions dominate all life. The records of history are a sealed book. Experience does not exist.
Impulse rules the universe.
And this mob mind moves always as a unit. It devours individuality. Men who as individuals may be gentle and humane are swept into accord with the most beastly cry of the crowd. This mental unity grows out of the crushing power of contagion. Gestures, cries, deeds of hate and fury are caught, approved, repeated.
Any lie can be built into a religion if repeated often enough to a crowd by a mind on fire with its passions. Pirates have died as bravely as John Brown. The glorification of the manner of his dying was merely a phenomenon of the unity of the crowd mind. It was precisely the grip of his Puritan mysticism, his worship of the Devil, that gave to his insanity its most dangerous appeal.
For the first time in the history of the republic the mob mind had mastered the collective soul of its people. The contagion had spread both North and South. In the North by sympathy, in the South by a process of reaction even more violent and destructive of reason.
John Brown had realized his vision of the Plains. He had raised a
National Blood Feud.