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JOHN BROWN
where Nat Turner had fought and died, where Gabriel had looked for refuge and where John Brown had builded his awful dream. Some say he kissed a Negro child as he passed, but Andrew Hunter vehemently denies it. "No Negro could get access to him," he says, and he is probably right; and yet all about him as he hung there knelt the funeral guard he prayed for when he said:
"My love to all who love their neighbors. I have asked to be spared from having any weak or hypocritical prayers made over me when I am publicly murdered, and that my only religious attendants be poor little dirty, ragged, bareheaded, and barefooted slave boys and girls, led by some gray-headed slave mother. Farewell! Farewell!"[1]
- ↑ Letter to Mrs. George L. Steams, 1859, in Sanborn, pp. 610–611.