John Brown (Chamberlin)/Chapter 7
John Brown went now, grave and severe, his whole nature breathing a terrible earnestness, to New England, demanding rather than asking fresh support for the reorganization of his band. He talked at Concord Town Hall, and the sight and thought of him inspired Concord to an unwonted fire. He impressed the people with his marvellous simplicity. "He is so transparent," Emerson said, "that all men see him through." Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott went to hear him; and no one of them ever wrote anything better than the praise that each one lavished, at this moment, on the old fanatic. These oracles of Concord spoke of Brown as if they had seen a spirit.
Brown was much at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Stearns at Medford, his truest friends and most generous benefactors and supporters. They endured ostracism and the scorn of their own kin on his account; but they knew him to be great, and believed him to be good. He visited Frank B. Sanborn. From all those people and from Gerrit Smith, Brown raised something more than two thousand dollars. He got a brief glimpse of his family at North Elba; he assembled his "young men" as well as he could, or saw that they had employment where he could call them to him at any moment, and finally, in June, 1859, appeared with his two sons, Owen and Oliver, at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where he set up a fictitious hardware business under the name of Isaac Smith & Sons. This fiction was to enable him to receive and ship "goods." He paid what was still due of the one thousand dollars which he had promised for his pikes in Connecticut, and had this hardware abo sent to him at Chambersburg. Then he and his sons went, on July 3, to Harper's Ferry, leaving John Henry Kagi in charge of the business at Chambersburg. Brown had had his lieutenant, John E. Cook, living in the vicinity of Harper's Ferry for some time, spying out the ground. The young man had blended himself so thoroughly with the life of the people that he had married a Virginian's daughter. But he left her, and came to John Brown.
Brown and his sons walked about the hilly farming country on the northern side of the Potomac, opposite Harper's Ferry, prospecting for a base of operations. They were Isaac Smith and his two sons; they had been farmers in northern New York, but the frosts there cut off their crops till they were sick of it. They had also made a business of buying up fat cattle and driving them into New York. They thought they could combine this business with a little farming in this favorable region. The Maryland country people, simple-hearted and hospitable, accepted this explanation without suspicion. The men looked honest and respectable, and spoke well and frankly. Brown hired a farm-house and cabin, called the Kennedy place, in a retired situation amidst the woods about four miles from the Potomac. They took up their residence on this place. Martha Brown, the wife of young Oliver Brown, and Anne, John Brown's daughter, now sixteen years old, came on to keep house for them. The neighborhood people visited them occasionally, and found nothing suspicious about them. But meantime Brown, little by little, was, with consummate cleverness, getting his boxes of rifles and pikes and other munitions down from Chambersburg, partly by wagon and partly by rail, and storing them in the cabin.
Stearns and Sanborn and Gerrit Smith did not know that he was doing these things nor where he was going to strike. They did not want to know what he was doing, and he was careful not to inform them. He wrote home to his wife a good deal of advice about the farming operations at North Elba. His son Watson, and the brothers of his son-in-law, the two young Thompsons, who were as faithful to him as sons, came on and joined him; and so did others of the "young men." They spent their time mostly in hiding about the Kennedy place. John Brown, Jr., worked hard in shipping the freight—that is, the war material—to Harper's Ferry and in doing various errands for his father in connection with the business. He went to Canada for him, and to Boston. By the end of August Brown wrote to his son, "Our freight is principally here." About that time Frederick Douglass, the most famous, intelligent, and influential colored man in America, went to Chambersburg to see Brown. This was at Brown's urgent request. In a way, Douglass held the key to the hearts of the negroes; and Brown seems to have estimated his influence at a high figure. At the time of the meeting, Brown was fishing in an old flooded stone quarry somewhere near Chambersburg. Douglass has left an account of the interview. It is interesting, and none the less so because, like Douglass's story of his interview with Brown in 1847, it shows some traces of the embellishment of a lively imagination.
Brown, Douglass, Shields Green (a negro whom Douglass had brought with him), and Kagi sat down to talk while Brown fished. Brown frankly declared his purpose to take the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and from there to proceed to the mountains. Douglass, opposed the plan earnestly. It would, he said, "be fatal to all engaged; it would be an attack on the federal government, and would array the whole country against us." Douglass was for starting the movement in the mountains, and drawing the slaves up there. Brown said he could keep the Virginians off, for a sufficient time, at Harper's Ferry by means of the prominent men whom he would take and hold as hostages, and that the very boldness of the blow would instantly arouse the whole North. And here came another great scene. Neither man could convince the other. Brown, who seemed to suspect a little timidity in Douglass, got up and put his arms around him. "Come with me," he said: "I will defend you with my life! I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm; and I shall want you to help hive them." Douglass refused. Turning to the plantation negro, Shields Green, who was a runaway slave whom he had harbored, Douglass said, "Well, Green, what have you decided to do?" and the black man answered, "I b'lieve I'll go wid de ole man!" At Harper's Ferry, Green refused to take advantage of an opportunity to escape, and went back and died like a hero with Brown. This man's willing sacrifice of his life was one of many smaller heroic tragedies which were absorbed in the greater one.
Douglass's plan may have been better than Brown's; but, if he had been a hero, he would have gone when Brown implored him. Douglass's defection was, in a way, a prophecy of the failure of the negro race to support Brown; but Brown himself was of the type of men who would accept an isolated act like Shields Green's heroic devotion as a favorable omen, disregarding the more significant act of the other. John Brown's own sons disapproved the blow at Harper's Ferry. He confessed to his son Owen that he felt profound discouragement at this opposition, and said to his men, "As you are opposed to the plan of attacking here, I will resign: we will choose another leader, and I will faithfully obey." He did resign. Within five minutes the band voted for a leader. Brown was unanimously re-elected. The choice of any other man would have been as absurd and as impossible as the election of a successor for Bonaparte before Austerlitz. Prom that time forward there was no talk of any other plan than his.
The time was near in which the women must be sent away. The blow was ready. Brown wrote on September 8 to his wife and children at North Elba, who were consulting him about details of farm management: "It now appears likely that Martha and Anne will be on their way home in the course of a month, but they may be detained to a little later period. I do not know what to advise about fattening the old spotted cow, as much will depend on what you have to feed her with, whether your heifers will come in or not next spring, also upon her present condition. You must exercise the best judgment you have in the matter, as I know but little abont your crops. I should like to know more as soon as I can."
"The girls," who had been of immense service, who kept discreet watch over the prattling conspirators in the house and hustled them out of sight on occasion, and who turned aside local suspicion by their sweet and honest ways, went home early in October. Meantime scenes of extraordinary strangeness were enacting at and around the Kennedy place. Eighteen or twenty men, mostly white, with three or four colored, were packed away there. They played checkers, sang sentimental songs, studied military books, put their large stock of weapons into order, and argued much and volubly on religious questions. Brown conducted some form of rdigious worship every day, though his adherents were mostly free thinkers. There was a little congregation of Dunkers, or Winebrennarians, who held meetings in a school-house not far away; and Brown went and exhorted and preached to them. Meantime he worried lest Cook's loquacity should get him into trouble. Some of the neighbors saw negroes at the place, and suspected that old Isaac Smith and his sons were running off slaves. But they did nothing about it. The habitual apathy and indolence of the Maryland population fought on Brown's side.
A more alarming thing happened, though Brown knew nothing of it. Some one sent anonymously from Cincinnati a letter to Mr. Floyd, Secretary of War, warning him, in so many words, that "Old John Brown, late of Kansas," had a party ready with which he was about to "pass down through Pennsylvania and Maryland and enter Virginia at Harper's Ferry, with the purpose of liberating and arming slaves." It was, on the whole, a very accurate betrayal of the whole scheme. There have been various conjectures as to the way in which this information got out. The identity of the man who sought to betray the secret is now pretty well known. It does not matter who he was. The wonder is that the secret was not betrayed sooner. But once more the Southern dolce far niente came to Brown's aid. Secretary Floyd received this letter while he was pleasuring at a watering-place, glanced it over, filed it away as if it were a paper of some importance, and did nothing more about it. The paper came out only after the blow had been struck.
Brown ran over to Philadelphia on the 10th or 11th of October, and met there Francis Jackson Merriam, a young man of good family in Boston, who at once definitely and enthusiastically joined the desperate expedition. Brown sent Merriam to Baltimore to buy forty thousand percussion caps, and the merchant who sold them was allowed to suppose that they were intended for a filibustering expedition to Nicaragua. These caps went safely to Harper's Ferry; and Merriam, who was said to be in feeble health, and who was the only "gentleman," in the old sense of the word, in the party, joined the band at the Kennedy place as its humblest member.
On Sunday, October 16, Brown rose early, and called all his men to worship. There were now twenty-two or twenty-three men in the house. There is radical disagreement as to whether or not one John Anderson, a negro, was present. There is no proof that he was there. Without him there were twenty-two men. John Brown was commander-in-chief. John Henry Kagi was his adjutant and lieutenant. Aaron Dwight Stephens, Owen Brown, Watson Brown, Oliver Brown, John Edwin Cook, and Charles Plummer Tidd were "captains"; that is, they were to bear that rank in the negro army which was soon to be organized. William Henry Leeman, Albert Hazlett, Jeremiah G. Anderson, Edwin Coppoc, William Thompson, and Dauphin Thompson were lieutenants. The private soldiers were Shields Green, Dangerfield Newby, John A. Copeland, Osborne Perry Anderson, and Sherrard Lewis Leary, negroes, and Steward Taylor, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Merriam, white men. This gentleman of Boston came last of all in Brown's honorable roster. Brown read a chapter in the Bible, and uttered an earnest prayer for the success of his expedition. The men ate a solemn breakfast, after which Brown called the roll of his band. A sentinel was placed at the door; and a "council meeting" was held, with Osborn P. Anderson, a colored man, in the chair. But the orders which were to govern the proceedings of the next night and day were submitted by Brown.
Every man's duty for at least twenty-four hours had been carefully assigned him. Three men—Owen Brown, Merriam, and Barclay Coppoc, were ordered to remain at the house and guard the arms. All the rest were to proceed, as soon as it was dark, silently to Harper's Ferry, their weapons kept out of sight. Two men were to step aside before the bridge over the Potomac was reached, and tear down the telegraph wire. Two men were to seize and hold the ferry watchman, and two others to remain on guard on the Potomac bridge and two on the Shenandoah bridge until morning. Two were to occupy the fire engine-house in the heart of the town, while Hazlett and others were to capture the United States armory, Stephens, with mien, was to go out into the country and capture Colonel Lewis Washington, a descendant of George Washington's brother, free his negroes, seize as much of his property as was available, and turn him and his negroes over to the negro Osborn Anderson, who was to bring them to the Ferry. Brown himself was to go ahead of the band from the Kennedy place, in a wagon loaded with arms, and was to remain at Harper's Ferry in command. Stephens, with a gang of his liberated n'roes and horses and wagons, was to go back to the Kennedy place, and bring down the rifles, pikes, and other materials stored there. Brown expected soon to have negro hands into which to put every one of his one hundred and ninety-four rifles and one thousand pikes.
The council over and his orders promulgated to the band, it is asserted that Brown went quietly over to the little Dunker chapel and preached to the siniple believers there. But it was not later than eight o'clock in the evening when he set out in his wagon, eighteen men following in pairs behind him, for Harper's Ferry. His only speech before the departure was this: "Men, get on your arms: we will proceed to the Ferry." He had a sledge-hammer and a crow-bar thrown into the wagon. Always a little bit of a fetichist, Brown got out an old cap which he had worn in Kansas and iput it on. He mounted the wagon, said, "Come, boys," and drove down the road. The night was cold and dark. Before morning rain fell.
They reached the covered bridge over the Potomac without adventure, crossed until they were near the Virginia side, and were there challenged by the solitary watchman. They seized and held him, and no alarm was given. The bridge was left under guard of Watson Brown, and Taylor. John Brown, with the main party, went on to the armory gate, broke it down with sledge-hammer and crow-bar, and entered the yard. A watchman came out in alarm, and was promptly seized. Brown sent one small party to capture a building called the rifle-works about half a mile from the armory proper, and another to occupy the arsenal. By this time the whole village was practically in Brown's hands, and not a shot had been fired. A considerable number of citizens had been picked up, but there was no general alarm. About midnight an Irish watchman came down to relieve the other watchman on the railroad bridge over the Shenandoah, and found Oliver Brown and William Thompson in charge. He resisted arrest, and Thompson fired at him, the bullet grazing his scalp. This shot alarmed many of the people in the town, who awoke to find the place firmly in the possession of a band of men of whose purposes and motives they knew absolutely nothing.
Stephens and Anderson brought in Colonel Lewis Washington and his negroes and some neighboring slaveowners. Brown, who had set up his headquarters at the armory, received these Virginians in a very courtly manner, and conducted them to a fire. Stephens had brought from Washington's house a sword which Frederick the Great of Prussia had sent as a gift to General George Washington, and which Lewis Washington had inherited. Brown took this sword, and carried it proudly until he was himself made a prisoner. Colonel Washington was much impressed by Brown's manner, and had no doubt at all that the wearer of his ancestral sword was in command of a large force.
At half-past one in the morning a train came in from the west. It halted at the bridge, finding the lights extinguished. A negro porter, who was sent forward to see what was the matter, refused to halt when challenged by the guard, and was shot and mortally wounded. Brown committed the mistake, which from this distance is inexplicable, of letting this train go on to Washington before morning with the news of his foray. He had, either from motives of policy or because it was natural to him, adopted a somewhat grand and condescending manner toward these people. He knew he was playing a tremendous game of "bluff." In the main, he played it very well; but he "bluffed" too far. He himself walked over the bridge with the conductor of the train, to satisfy him that it was safe; for the man suspected a trap. The train sped on, to Brown's ruin.
The morning dawned with Brown in full possession of the town. Many of the citizens had not been awakened at all. Captain Dangerfield, the clerk of the armory, came to his office to begin his day's work without any knowledge of what had happened, and fell into: the hands of the raiders. He thought they were crazy men. Brown's men, reinforced by a few negroes from Washington's plantation, were busy making prisoners. Bat, meantime, other citizens were arming themselves and spreading the alarm about the country. The attempt was now locally recognized as a negro insurrection under the lead of an unknown white man, who was called "Captain Smith." The train which he had allowed to proceed was bearing the news to Washington and Baltimore. The first accounts published in the papers stated that the insurgents were commanded by "one Captain Anderson, who is about sixty years of age, with a heavy white beard,—cool, collected, and with a determined and desperate demeanor." These stories showed how wholly by surprise the attack had taken the country, and how completely "Old John Brown" of Kansas had been lost sight of.
Brown's time had now come to leave the town and take to the mountains. Authorities agree that he might have done this safely at any time up to nine o'clock on Monday morning, and probably he might have escaped at any time before noon. By that time he had been completely invested, in a little town hemmed in by a broad river and high hills. Why did he not go? A great deal of conjecture has been wasted on this point. A newspaper reported him as saying this, after his arrest: "A lenient feeling towards the citizens led me to parley with them as to a compromise; and by prevarication on their part I was delayed until attacked, and then in self-defence was compelled to entrench myself." He certainly never admitted that his sacrifice of himself and his men was deliberate; but he never lamented it, and to his brother Frederick he wrote after his condemnation. "I am fully persuaded that I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose."
There was scattered fighting all that forenoon of October 17. Brown ran his prisoners into the engine-house, where there were small windows and port-holes which he could fire through. Several of his men, including his son Watson and William Thompson, were shot and captured about the town. On their part, his men killed several of the townspeople. Some Maryland militia came up, across the Potomac, but were beaten back for a little time. Several companies of Virginia militia arrived at Harper's Ferry in the course of the day. The little garrisons at the rifle-works and the armory were killed or captured, with the exception of two men who escaped. The bodies of Kagi, Leary, and Thompson were hurled savagely into the Potomac River. Owen Brown, the Bostonian Merriam, and Barclay Coppoc, who were trying to move the arms down from the Kennedy farm, found themselves cut off, and, after some shooting from a distance, fled to the North.
When Brown finally barricaded him self in the engine-house; he had but six men with him. Ballets came whizzing through the windows and doors. One of Brown's sons fell, and died in a moment. Captain Dangerfield, in his story of the fight in the engine-house, says of this incident: "Brown did not leave his post at the port-hole; but, when the flighting was over, he walked to his son's body, straightened out his limbs, took off his trappings, and then turned to me and said, 'This is the third son I have lost in this cause.' Another son had been shot in the morning, and was then dying, having been brought in from the street; Often during the affair in the engine-house, when his men would want to fire upon some one who might be seen passing, Brown would stop them, saying, 'Don't shoot: that man is unarmed.'" Brown took sufficiently good care of his prisoners so that none of them were hurt. They all gave him credit afterward for perfect intrepidity and coolness.
Early in the evening Colonel Robert E. Lee and lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, both of them afterward famous as Confederate generals, arrived by train from Washington with a company of United States marines. Stuart came into the engine-house with a light, under a flag of truce, to parley. He exclaimed, on seeing Brown, "Why, aren't you old Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, whom I once had there as my prisoner?" "Yes," said Brown; "but you did not keep me. "This was the first intimation that the Harper's Ferry people had of Brown's identity. Stuart advised Brown to "trust to the clemency of the government"; but Brown answered, "I prefer to die just here." After two more of his men had been killed, and more parleying had taken place, the marines got a ladder, and, using it as a battering ram, burst in the engine-house door and poured into the room. Lieutenant Israel Green, of the marines, leaped upon Brown, struck him heavily with his sabre in the head and face, cutting and striking him several times after he was down, and inflicting wounds which were at first supposed to be mortal.
Brown was soon in the presence of the Governor of Virginia, Henry S. Wise, of Colonel Lee, and of a crowd of functionaries and reporters, being subjected, as he lay wounded and bleeding, to a cross-examination as to his intentions and purposes. We who have followed his career know what his purposes were. Under this riddling fire of questions, Brown's battered head was perfectly dear. He summed the matter all up in this sentence: "We are abolitionists from the North, come to take and release your slaves." The politicians tried to get out of him something incriminating the Republican leaders of the North. Of course they did not succeed; for he had had nothing to do with these. Apparently, his questioners knew nothing of Stearns and the rest who were really concerned.
A long report of his interview with Senator Mason of Virginia, Clement Vallandigham, J. E. B. Stuart, and others, printed in the New York Herald was probably in the main correct. The responses attributed in it to Brown are all characteristic of him. His clean-cut expressions flash out from the others' words like fire. The report is a classic, quite fit to be put in the reading-books. "Who sent you here?" asked Vallandigham. "No man sent me here," said Brown. "I acknowledge no master in human form." "Did you get up the expedition yourself?" "I did." He was asked "how long he had been engaged in this business," and he answered fully and truly, "From the breaking out of the difficulties in Kansas." When they began to question Stephens, who was also wounded, Brown warned him to be cautious in his answers. "You had better," he said, lifting his bleeding head and surveying the crowd about him,—"yon had better, all you people of the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question,—this negro question: the end of that is not yet." "These wounds were inflicted upon me," he also said, "both sabre cuts on my head and bayonet stabs in different parts of my body, some minutes after I had ceased fighting and had consented to surrender for the benefit of others, not for my own." We may observe that Brown took note of the fact that he had been struck by a sabre, not an officer's customary sword. An officer of marines would have been more likely to carry a sword than a sabre; but it happened that Lieutenant Green did carry a sabre. Brown seems to have watched the blade that fell upon his head and face.
The Virginians were anxious to know whether his intention was to free the slaves there or to carry them off; and he declared that it was his intention to set them free, not to carry them off. "But to set them free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community," he was told by one; and he answered, "I do not think so." "You are fanatical!" exclaimed the Virginian. "And I," answered Brown, "think you are fanatical. 'Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad'; and you are mad." This the Virginians could not understand. It was to them crazy talk.
One man knew that Brown was not crazy, and that was Governor Henry S. Wise. Wise was a strong man, of large mental measure. He recognized a man of like measure in Brown. He said to him oracularly, after his wont: "Mr. Brown, the silver of your hair is reddened by the blood of crime; and you should think upon eternity. You are suffering from wounds perhaps fatal; and, should you escape death from these causes, you must submit to a trial which may involve death. Your confessions justify the presumption that you will be found guilty. It is better that you should turn your attention to your eternal future." And Brown answered gravely, taking up a little of the grandiose tone of his tormentor, but improving on it with fine Yankee humor: "Governor, I have, from all appearances, not more than fifteen or twenty years the start of you on the journey to that eternity of which you kindly warn me; and, whether my time here shall be fifteen months or fifteen days or fifteen hours, I am equally prepared to go. There is an eternity behind and an eternity before; and the little speck in the centre, however long, is but comparatively a minute. The difference between your tenure and mine is trifling, and I therefore tell you to be prepared. I am prepared. You all have a heavy responsibility, and it behooves you to prepare more than it does me."
"They are mistaken," Wise said soon afterward in a public speech at Richmond, "who take Brown to be a madman. 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 heady of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable. It is but just to say that he was humane to his prisoners, and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth."
Brown's sons, Watson and Oliver, were by this time dead, as were also William and Dauphin Thompson, Kagi, Leeman, Taylor, Leary, Jeremiah Anderson, and Newby. Owen Brown, Cook, Tidd, Barclay Coppoc, Merriam, Hazlett, and Osborn Anderson were fugitives. Cook and Hazlett being captured and brought back for trial. The bodies of some of the dead were atrociously and revoltingly maltreated. Several of the bodies, after being dragged and thrown about, were sent to the medical college at Winchester for dissection. The five men named above were the only men of the party who escaped death in the fighting or on the gallows.
For Brown, of course, was tried, and swiftly convicted of "treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel, and of murder in the first degree," and was sentenced to death. The trial, which took place at Charlestown, six miles from Harper's Ferry, was opened on October 26; and the verdict of conviction was brought in on November 2. The proceedings, though swift, were not unseemly, and not unduly summary, considering the excitement of the Virginians, and their great fear that a rescue would be attempted from the North.
Brown was fairly well defended, though by no strong or famous or highly gifted counsel. He lay on a mattress in the court-room, in heavy chains, and gave his testimony from this pallet. While in his cell, he was kept constantly and very heavily chained to the floor. He denounced to the court his lawyer's plea of insanity in his behalf, declaring it to be "a miserable artifice." His wounds and general health improved during his trial and confinement A very strong guard of militia was kept over him, and in the streets of Charlestown and in Harper's Ferry. He refused to encourage an attempt to rescue him, which might very likely have been made if he had been willing, saying at once, "I think that my great object will be nearer its accomplishment by my death than by my life"; and by and by he said, after reflection, "I would not walk out of the prison if the door was left open."
He was sentenced to be hung at Charlestown on December 2. During the month that he lay heavily chained, awaiting execution, he slept as calmly as a child every night, and grew stronger. He wrote a great many letters, all of which appear to have been faithfully forwarded. Several of these were to his wife, who just before his execution came to see him, against his advice, and was admitted once, and went away. His letters from his prison were dignified, solemn, and somewhat wordy, as if this terrible situation, and the opportunity to express himself which all this letter-writing afforded, had led him to abandon his customary succinctness of expression. He wrote not one letter to his old abolitionist correspondents and supporters, knowing that to write to them would direct suspicion toward these men. But to Mary Stearns, wife of his chief benefactor, at Medford, he did write a very simple, eloquent letter of farewell.
On the appointed day Brown was taken to the gallows in a wagon, in the presence of a great force of Virginian soldiery of all arms. From the seat of the wagon he had a prospect of the great hills,—Appalachian brothers of those amidst which he was born, had made his home at North Elba, and had already ordered that his body should be buried. He paid no attention to the crowd and the soldiery, but those hills filled him with new emotion. "This is a beautiful country," he exclaimed to his attendants. "I have not cast my eyes on it before; that is, in this direction." The best Virginian account of his execution is that written by Parke Poindexter, then a soldier in the Richmond company of militia, who held the "post of honor" at the gallows, and was afterward a colonel in the Confederate army. "I witnessed the whole proceeding," says Poindexter. "Brown mounted the scaffold as calmly and quietly as if he had been going to his dinner. He did not exhibit the slightest excitement or fear. Not a muscle moved, nor was there the slightest nervous excitement He stood erect and calm, as if he were upon post."
This was not the end of John Brown, as all the world knows. His name and his strange, direct, simple influence were soon imbedded in the history and song of his country. I have repeated above what the large-minded Governor Wise of Virginia said of Brown, when he was in prison and in chains. It was in praise of Brown's honesty and courage. More than four years afterward, when the Civil War had been fought and its results were declared, a Union general, in Wise's presence, mentioned the name of John Brown. Whereupon the Virginian quickly said: "John Brown? John Brown was a great man, sir. John Brown was a great man!"