He mounted his horse and rode swiftly through the beautiful spring morning toward Richmond—and Immortality. The women stood weeping. The President's messenger watched in sorrow.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
When John Brown cunningly surveyed the lines around those houses in Kansas, observed the fastenings of their doors, marked the strength of the shutters, learned the names of their dogs, crept under the cover of darkness on his prey as a wild beast creeps through the jungle and hacked his innocent victims to pieces, we know that he was a criminal paranoiac pursuing a fixed idea under the delusion that God had sent him.
Yet on the eighteenth of July, 1861, Colonel Fletcher Webster's regiment, the Twelfth Massachusetts, marched through the streets of Boston singing a song of glory to John Brown which one of its members composed. They were also marching Southward to kill. The only difference was they had a Commission.
War had been declared.
Why did the war crowd on the streets and in the ranks burst into song as they marched to kill their fellow men?
To find the answer we must go back to the dawn of human history and see man, as yet a savage beast, with but one impulse the dominant force in life, the archaic impulse to slay.
All wars are not begun in this elemental fashion. There are wars of defense forced on innocent nations by brutal aggressors. But the joy that thrills the soul of the crowd on the declaration of war is always the simple thing. It is the roar of the lion as he springs on his prey.
In this Song to the Soul of John Brown there was no thought of freeing a slave. War was not declared on that ground. The President who called them had no such purpose. The men who marched had no such idea. They sang "Glory, Glory Hallelujah! Glory, Glory Hallelujah!" because they saw Red.
The restraints of Law, Religion and Tradition had been lifted. The primitive beast that had been held in check by civilization, rose with a shout and leaped to its ancient task. The homicidal wish—fancy with which the human mind had toyed in times of peace in dreams and reveries—was now a living reality.