Wise and Buchanan started immediately on Douglass’s track and he fled to Canada and eventually to England. Why did not Douglass join John Brown? Because, first, he was of an entirely different cast of temperament and mind; and because, secondly, he knew, as only a Negro slave can know, the tremendous might and organization of the slave power. Brown’s plan never in the slightest degree appealed to Douglass’s reason. That the Underground Railroad methods could be enlarged and systematized, Douglass believed, but any further plan he did not think possible. Only national force could dislodge national slavery. As it was with Douglass, so it was practically with the Negro race. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan. He touched their warm loving hearts but not their hard heads. The Canadian Negroes, for instance, were men who knew what slavery meant. They had suffered its degradation, its repression and its still more fatal license. They knew the slave system. They had been slaves. They had risked life to help loved ones to escape its far-reaching tentacles. They had reached a land of freedom and had begun to taste the joy of being human. Their little homes were clustering about—they had their churches, lodges, social gatherings, and newspaper. Then came the call. They loved the old man and cherished him, helped and forwarded his work in a thousand little ways. But the call? Were they asked to sacrifice themselves to free their fellow-slaves? Were they not quite ready? No—to do that they stood ever ready. But here they were asked to sacrifice themselves for the sake of possibly freeing a few slaves and certainly arousing the nation. They saw what John Brown did not fully realize until the last: the tremendous meaning of sacrifice even though his enterprise failed and they were sure it would fail. Yet in truth it need not have failed. History and military science prove its essential soundness. But the Negro knew little of history and military science. He did know slavery and the slave power, and they loomed large and invincible in his fertile imagination. He could not conceive their overthrow by anything short of the direct voice of God. That a supreme sacrifice of human beings on the altar of Moloch might hasten the day of emancipation was possible, but were they called to give their lives to this forlorn hope? Most of them said no, as most of their fellows, black and white, ever answer to the “voice, without reply.” They said it reluctantly, slowly, even hesitatingly, but they said it even as their leader Douglass said it. And why not, they argued? Was not their whole life already a sacrifice? Were they called by any right of God or man to give more than they already had given? What more did they owe the world? Did not the world owe them an unpayable amount?
Then, too, the sacrifice demanded of black men in this raid was far more than that demanded of whites. In 1859 it was a crime for a free black man even to set foot on Virginia soil, and it was slavery or death for a fugitive to return. If worse came to worst, the Negro stood the least chance of escape and the least consideration on capture. Yet despite all this and despite the terrible training of slavery in cowardice, submission and fatality; the systematic elimination, by death and cruelty, of strength and self-respect and bravery, there were in Canada and in the United States scores of Negroes ready for the sacrifice. But the necessary secrecy, vagueness and intangibility of the summons, the repeated changes of date, the difficulty of communication and the poverty of black men, all made effective coöperation exceedingly difficult.
Even as it was, fifteen or twenty Negroes had enlisted and would probably have been present had they had the time. Five, probably six, actually came in time, and thirty or forty slaves actively helped. Considering the mass of Negroes in the land and the character of the leader, this was an insignificant number. But what it lacked in number it made up in characters like Shields Green. He was a poor, unlettered fugitive, ignorant by the law of the land, stricken in life and homely in body. He sat and listened as Douglass and Brown argued amid the boulders of that old Chambersburg quarry. Some things he understood, some he did not. But one thing he did understand and that was the soul of John Brown, so he said, “I guess I’ll go with the old man.” Again in the sickening fury of that fatal Monday, a white man and a black man found themselves standing with freedom before them. The white man was John Brown’s truest companion and the black man was Shields Green. “I told him to come,” said the white man afterward, “that we could do nothing more,” but he simply said, “I must go down to the old man.” And he went down to John Brown and to death.
If this was the attitude of the slave, what was that of the master? It was when John Brown faced the indignant, self-satisfied and arrogant slave power of the South, flanked by its Northern Vallandighams, that the mighty paradox and burning farce of the situation revealed itself. Picture the situation: An old and blood-bespattered man, half-dead from the wounds inflicted but a few hours before; a man lying in the cold and dirt, without sleep for fifty-five nerve-wrecking hours, without food for nearly as long, with the dead bodies of two sons almost before his eyes, the piled corpses of his seven slain comrades near and afar, a wife and a bereaved family listening in vain, and a Lost Cause, the dream of a lifetime, lying dead in his heart. Around him was a group of bitter, inquisitive Southern aristocrats and their satellites, headed by one of the foremost leaders of subsequent secession.
“Who sent you—who sent you?” these inquisitors insisted.
“No man sent me—I acknowledge no master in human form!”
“What was your object in coming?”
“We came to free the slaves.”
“How do you justify your acts?”
“You are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I think I did right; and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times. I hold that the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you,’ applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty.”