Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/376

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
364
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]

  1. Letter to Mrs. George L. Steams, 1859, in Sanborn, pp. 610–611.