The trial for treason and murder took place in the Virginian Court on October 27-31, ere he had recovered. He pleaded for delay till his health allowed him to give more attention to his defence, but the request was refused. So, weak and wounded, he had to lie upon his pallet with a blanket thrown over him. His words were few, and to the same effect as those we have quoted. There was only one verdict possible in that court—GUILTY—and he was sentenced to be hanged. Technically there was no other course possible. The calm verdict of the CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY upon the raid is correct: 'It was the mad folly of an almost crazed fanatic . . . the stain still upon him of the bloodiest of the lawless work done in the name of Freedom; a terrible outlaw because an outlaw for conscience' sake; intense to the point of ungovernable passion—heeding nothing but his own will and sense of right; a revolutionist upon principle; a lawless incendiary, and yet seeking nothing for himself.'
But while we feel the veracity of these words there comes to our mind one of Charles Kingsley's impulsive sayings: 'Get hold of one truth, let it blaze in your sky like a Greenland sun, never setting day or night. See it in everything, and everything in it. The world will call you a bigot and fanatic, and then fifty years after will wonder how it was the bigot and fanatic managed to do so much more than all the sensible men round about him.'
John Brown vindicated that opinion.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HALT OF THE BODY AND THE MARCH OF THE SOUL
The journeys of John Brown's body were now at an end. Only his soul was free to travel, and it found its vehicle in letters which carried thoughts that breathed and words that burned far and wide.
This condemned prisoner had five weeks left of mortal life, and they were the most fruitful he ever spent. The greatest achievement of his life was the marvellous advocacy of the cause conducted from his prison. His friend F. B. Sanborn says: 'Here was a defeated, dying old man, who had been praying and fighting and pleading and toiling for years, to persuade a great people that their national life was all wrong, suddenly converting millions to his cause by the silent magnanimity or the spoken wisdom of his last days as a fettered prisoner.'
He had spoken of a Samson's victory as possibly the great triumph in store for him. Even so it was, and in his death and by the manner of it he mortally wounded his old enemy, Slavery. As the great continent watched from afar his last days, a thrill passed through it that made Emancipation a triumphant cause. Efforts to save Brown's life might be in vain, but Brown's death was helping to save the life of the nation. His letters from the prison were many and widely circulated. All he has to say of himself is that he knows no degradation. 'I can trust God with the time and manner of my death, believing that for me now to seal my testimony with my life will do vastly more for the Cause than all I have done before. Dear wife and children, do not feel degraded on my account.' Humorously he remarks, 'I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.' 'Say to my poor boys never to grieve for one moment on my account; and should many of you live to see the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown, it will not be more strange than many things that have happened.' '"He shall BEGIN to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines." This,' said he, 'I think is true of my commission from God and my work.' The scaffold had no terrors for him. His trust, he averred, was firm in that Redeemer who, to European and Ethiopian, bond and free alike, had brought a year of Jubilee and a great salvation. But though he asked no pity for himself, he pleaded in every letter for those who, as he said, were on the 'under-hill' side. 'Weep not for me,' he wrote home, 'but for the crushed millions who have no comforter.' The old text was continually repeated, 'Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them,' and he bade them abhor with undying hatred that 'sum of all villanies—slavery.'
His only cause of agitation in the prison was the intrusive ministration of certain pro-slavery parsons. He refused to let a man who 'had the blood of the slaves on his skirts' minister to him. 'I respect you as a gentleman, but a HEATHEN gentleman,' he would say. 'Don't let such go with me to the scaffold,' he asked. 'I would rather have an escort of barefooted, bareheaded, ragged slave boys and girls led by some old grey-headed slave mother.'