"John Brown's body lies a mould'ring in the grave,
But his soul is marching on."
A few weeks after Brown's execution Victor Hugo said, "What the South slew last December was not John Brown but slavery." His statement developed into a colossal historical truth. The great statesman, orator and senator, John J. Ingalls of Kansas, closed an oration with these remarkable words:
"Carlyle says that when any great change in human society is to be wrought God raises up men to whom that change is made to appear as the one thing needful and absolutely indispensable. Scholars, orators, poets, philanthropists, play their parts, but the crisis comes at last through some one who is stigmatized as a fanatic by his contemporaries, and whom the supporters of the systems he assails crucify between theives or gibbet as a felon. The man who is not afraid to die for an idea is the most potential and convincing advocate.
"Already the great intellectual leaders of the movement for the abolition of slavery are dead. The student of the future will exhume their orations, arguments and state papers, as a part of the subterranean history of the epoch.
The antiquarian will dig up their remains from the alluvial drift of the period, and construe their relations to the great events in which they were actors. But the three men of this era who will loom forever against the remotest horizon of time, as the pyramids against the voiceless desert, or mountain peaks over the subordinate plains, are Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and old John Brown of Ossowattamie."
Senator Ingalls well knew that Brown had no such intellectual massiveness, or splendid culture, as had Webster, Clay, Jefferson, Sumner, and many other eminent Americans. He referred to the majesty of personal achievements. From this standpoint men like Garabaldi, Morse, Harriman, Edison, Roosevelt and Cook, the Arctic explorer have been great. Brown's life was a perpetual sacrifice for the annihilation of American slavery. Very defective as a military leader he was always ready to do, dare and die to assist in this work. Even today tens of thousands of educated men regard him as a monomaniac concerning the abolition of slavery. For many years, in the state of Kansas, he had permitted his own life, and the life of each of his sons, to be in continual peril that they might assist in placing Kansas in the constellation of free States. Men like Gerrit Smith and John L. Stearns financed his schemes from their wealth. Men like Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George B. Cheever, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker, delivered eulogies on Brown after he had been hung. They most eloquently denounced slavery from pulpits and platforms; but they lived in the limelight of oratorical popularity and flourished amidst luxurious ease. To Brown's immortal credit be it said that he gave domestic security, his humble fortune, his perillous work, the lives of his cherished sons and his own blood and life for the anti-slavery opinions that were anchored in his soul. His prison letters to many friends are full of intrepidity, submission to the divine providence and heroic anticipations of immortal blessedness. Ten minutes before he left his jail cell for the gallows he handed to a prison official a sheet of paper on which he had written these words: "I, John Brown, am
quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood, I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."
His surpassing bravery and self-sacrificing candor profoundly impressed eminent Virginians. Governor Henry A. Wise said: "He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw, cut and thrust; and bleeding and in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, indomitable; and it is but just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners. He is a fanatic, but firm, and truthful and intelligent." Colonel Lewis W. Washington and Captain John E. P. Dangerfield bore testimony to his courage.
Brown's wonderful moral heroism became resplendent after Judge Richard Parker had sentenced him to death. Many of his letters to his friends, collected and published by Mr. F. B. Sanford, would have done honor to the pen of Paul. He was exultant from the standpoint of a happy spiritual experience and triumphant as he gazed beyond this mortal life. In one of his last letters he wrote these words: "I sleep as peacefully as an infant, or if I am wakeful glorious thoughts come to me entertaining my mind. I do not believe I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, in this prison or on the scaffold. But I should do so if I denied my principles against slavery." Surely he must have been sincere as he faced eternity.
As early as 1820 John Quincy Adams said of the overthrow of American slavery, "The object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects and sublime and beautiful in its issues. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed." John Brown, along illegal and criminal lines, placed before the world such a life and death. He saw clearly what American statesmen of his period saw but dimly. Beyond all question he died as emphatically for the overthrow of slavery as Paul died for the honor of Christianity. Three of his favorite books were the life stories of men of great