In looking back upon the Kansas War for free soil, the assault upon slavery at Harper’s Ferry, which precipitated the great Civil War a few years later, the sublime figure of John Brown, the most conspicuous leader in the armed conflicts, stands out preëminent. Denounced at the time by superficial observers and writers as a half-crazy, fanatical incendiary, cruel and relentless in his warfare, for a time his motives were misunderstood. But when the ordeal came and he faced his accusers in court, asking no favors, but justifying his mission, he calmly ascended the scaffold and serenely suffered a martyr’s death.
On the day of his execution Victor Hugo, in exile, wrote these prophetic words: “John Brown, condemned to death is to be hanged to-day. His hangman is not Governor Wise, nor the little State of Virginia. His hangman (we shudder to think it and say it) is the whole American Republic. Politically speaking, the murder of Brown will be an irrevocable mistake. It will deal the Union a concealed wound which will finally sunder the States.” A few months later he wrote: “Slavery in all its forms will disappear. What the South slew last December was not John Brown, but slavery. The American Union must be considered dissolved. Between the North and the South stands the gallows of Brown. Union is no longer possible. Such a crime cannot be shared.”
These words of the great French apostle of liberty attracted little attention at the time of their utterance, but two years later the great Army of the Potomac, a hundred thousand strong, was marching through Virginia singing to the stirring music of fife and drum:
“John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on.”
Harper’s Ferry was the thrice fought battle-field of the hosts of Freedom and Slavery, until at Appomattox the last remnant was forever crushed out of the
