Whether they be from the North or the South, fair-minded men, who are thoroughly conversant with the history of this raid, can hardly cherish any doubt concerning the turpitude of the invasion, the fairness of Brown's trial and the justice of his conviction and execution. He fell under the direction of a misguided conscience. The noble endowment that philosophers call conscience that gives its verdicts as to the moral merit or demerit of actions and affections, was strangely warped in Brown's intense and brave character. The possession of this faculty of conscience is the massive foundation of all human responsibility. Illustrations of the moral enormities that a perverted conscience can perpetrate are manifold along the pages of sacred and secular history.
When Jesus looked down the aisles of the future, He said to His disciples that the men who would finally transfigure them into martyrs would murder them in the belief that they were rendering acceptable service to God.
Paul declared that he regarded himself as meeting the divine approval when he was persecuting and murdering the primitive Christians.
When the officers of the Spanish Inquisition saw the agonies of the victims who refused to renounce their religious creeds they joyfully exclaimed, "Let God be glorified."
Charles the Ninth of France said he was conscientious in ordering the Saint Bartholomew massacre that resulted in the murder in French cities of tens of thousands of Christian Hugenots.
The Bloody Queen, Mary Tudor, said she had a pure conscience when she sent to the scaffold the learned and gentle young Ex-Queen Lady Jane Grey. Thousands of criminals have sheltered their crimes in the temple of Conscience.
The trend of Brown's constant defence was that he obeyed his conscience. His lawless conduct, the death of many of his party and the murder of Virginia citizens gave him very little apparent intellectual unrest. He sowed to the wind and reaped the logical harvest, if it is the appropriate word, the whirlwind.
Brown's high Calvinism bordered on fatalism. Oliver Cromwell never believed more radically in the foreordination of all human actions than did he. When questioned concerning the failure of this invasion he replied: "All of our actions, even all of the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made." When Judge Russell visited him he said: "I know that the very errors by which my scheme was marred were decreed before the world was made. I had no more to do with the course I pursued than a shot leaving a cannon has to do with the spot where it shall fall."
It is when patriotic men read the story of "John Brown's Raid" by the torches of President Lincoln's early election, the Civil War and the Emancipation of all American slaves, that they seem to become blind to the terrible criminal features of the invasion and look only at the national results and the magnificient courage, benevolent motives and supreme self-sacrifice of this martyr. Multitudes of visionary men regard him as a divinely appointed John the Baptist raised up to usher in the day of physical freedom for every slave on American soil and their posterity to the end of time. They
claim that in this instance "The End has justified the Means." His raid made the North solid against the slave system and the South as solid against anti-slavery theories and agitators. Before the Brown raid the vote for John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate for President, was 1341000. James Buchanan had 496000 majority. The year after the raid Abraham Lincoln received 1886000 votes for President and had 491000 majority over Stephen A. Douglas, when the South voted for another Democrat. Fremont had 114 votes in the Electoral College. Lincoln had 180. Under his presidency the emancipation of every slave on the national soil took place. The nations of Europe learned for the first time the important lesson that the United States was able to maintain its national unity. This raid beyond question hastened in the Civil War. I have seen Federal regiments marching on to battle enthusiastically singing:
