Thousands of letters began to pour into the office of the Governor of Virginia, threatening, imploring, pleading for his life. The leading politicians of all parties of the North were at length swept into this howling mob by the press. To every plea the Governor of the Commonwealth replied:
"Southern Society is built on Reverence for Law. The Law has been outraged by this man. It shall be vindicated, though the heavens fall."
In this stand he was immovable and the South backed him to a man. For exciting servile insurrection the King of Great Britain was held up to everlasting scorn by our fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. For this crime among others we rebelled and established the American Republic. Should John Brown be canonized for the same infamy? The Southern people asked this question in dumb amazement at the clamor from the North.
And so the Day of Transfiguration on the scaffold dawned.
Judge Thomas Russell and his good wife journeyed all the way from Boston to minister to the wants of their strange guest. There was in the distinguished jurist"s mind a question which he must ask Brown before the rope should strangle him forever. His martyrdom had cleared every doubt and cloud from the mind of his friend save one. His fascinating letters, filled with the praise of G.o.d and the glory of a martyr"s cause, had exalted him.
The judge had heard his speech in court on the day he was sentenced to death and had believed that each word was inspired. But the old man, who was now to die in glory, had spent a week in Judge Russell"s house in Boston hiding from a deputy sheriff in whose hands was a warrant for plain murder--one of the foulest murders in the records of crime. The judge was a student of character, as well as Abolitionist.
He asked Brown for his last confidential statement as to these crimes on the Pottawattomie. There was no hesitation in his bold reply. Standing beneath the shadow of the gallows, the white hand of Death on his stooped shoulders, one foot on earth and the other pressing the sh.o.r.es of eternity, he lied as brazenly as he had lied a hundred times before.
He a.s.sured his friend and his wife that he had nothing to do with those killings.
Mrs. Russell, weeping, kissed him.
And Brown said calmly: "Now, go."
As he ascended the scaffold he handed to one who stood near his final message, the supreme utterance over which he had prayed day and night to his G.o.d. Despatched from the scaffold, and sealed by his blood, he knew that its magic words would spread by contagion the Red Thought.
His face shone with the glory of his hope as his feet climbed the scaffold steps. On the sc.r.a.p of paper he had written:
"I, JOHN BROWN, AM NOW QUITE CERTAIN THAT THE CRIMES OF THIS GUILTY LAND WILL NEVER BE PURGED AWAY BUT WITH BLOOD."
The trap fell, his darkened soul swung into eternity and the deed was done. He had raised the Blood Feud to the nth power. His message thrilled the world.
Bells were tolling in the North while crowds of weeping men and women knelt in prayer to his G.o.d. Had they but lifted the veil and looked, they would have seen the face of a fiend. But their eyes were now blinded with the madness which had driven him to his death.
In Cleveland, Melodeon Hall was draped in mourning at a meeting where thousands wept and cursed and prayed. Mammoth gatherings were held in New York, in Rochester and Syracuse. In Boston a crowd, so dense they were lifted from their feet by the pressure of thousands behind, clamoring for entrance, rushed into Tremont Temple.
William Lloyd Garrison, the Pacifist, declared the meeting was called to witness John Brown"s resurrection. He flung the last shred of principle to the winds and joined the mob of the Blood Feud without reservation.
"As a peace man--an ultra peace man--I am prepared to say: "Success to every Slave Insurrection in the South and in every Slave Country!""
Wendell Phillips, believing Judge Russell"s report of Brown"s denial of the Pottawattomie murders, declared to the thousands who crowded Cooper Union that John Brown was a Saint--that he was not on the Pottawattomie Creek on that fateful night, that he was not within twenty-five miles of the spot!
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ignorant of the truth of Pottawattomie, hailed Brown as "the new Saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death--the new Saint who has achieved his martyrdom and will make the gallows glorious as the cross."
One great spirit among the anti-slavery forces refused to be swept in the current of insanity. Abraham Lincoln at Troy, Kansas, said on the day of Brown"s death:
"Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a State. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking Slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might _think_ himself right."
Lincoln"s voice was drowned in the roar of the mob.
John Brown from the scaffold had set in motion forces of mind beyond control. Never before had men so little grasped the present, so stupidly ignored the past, so poorly divined the future. Reason had been hurled from her throne. Man had ceased to think.
Had Lieutenant Green"s sword pierced Brown"s heart he would have died the death of a mad dog. His imprisonment, his carefully staged martyrdom, his message of blood, and final, just execution by Law created the mob mind which destroyed reverence for Law.
As he swung from the gallows and his body swayed for a moment between heaven and earth Colonel Preston, standing beside the steps, solemnly cried:
"So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union!
All such foes of the human race!"
Yet even as the trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for their martyr hero.
A criminal paranoiac had become the leader of twenty millions of people.
The mob mind had caught the disease of his insanity and a nation began to go mad.
Robert E. Lee, in command of the forces of Law and Order, watched the swaying ghostly figure with a sense of deep foreboding for the future.
CHAPTER x.x.xV
John Brown"s body lay molderingin the grave but his soul was marching on. And his soul was a thousand times mightier than his body had ever been.
While living, his abnormal mind repelled men of strong personality.
He had never been able to control more than two dozen people in any enterprise which he undertook. And in these small bands rebellions always broke out.
The paranoiac had been transfigured now into the Hero and the Saint through the worship of the mob which his insanity had created. His apparent strength of character was in reality weakness, an incapacity to master himself or control his criminal impulses. But the Jacobin mind of his followers did not consider realities. They only cherished dreams, illusions, a.s.sertions. The mob never reasons. It only believes. Reason is submerged in pa.s.sion.
John Brown was a typical Jacobin leader. He was first and last a Puritan mystic. The G.o.d he worshipped was a fiend, but he worshipped Him with all the more pa.s.sionate devotion for that reason. When he committed murder on the Pottawattomie he stalked his prey as a panther. He sang praises to his G.o.d as he paused in the brush before he sprang. His narrow mind, with a single fixed idea, was inaccessible to any influences save those which fed his mania. Nothing could loose the grip of his soul on this dream. He closed his glittering eyes and refused to consider anything that might contradict his faith.
He acted without reason, driven blindly forward by an impulse. When his cunning mind used reason it was never for the purpose of finding truth.
It was only for the purpose of confounding his enemies. He never used it as a guide to conduct.
By the magic of mental contagion he had transferred from the scaffold this Jacobin mind to the soul of a nation. The contact of persons is not necessary to transfer this disease. Its contagion is electric. It moves in subtle thought waves, as a mysterious pestilence spreads in the night. The mob mind, once formed, is a new creation and becomes with amazing rapidity a resistless force. The reason for its uncanny power lies in the fact that when once formed it is dominated by the unconscious, not the conscious forces, of man"s nature. Its credulity is boundless. Its pa.s.sions dominate all life. The records of history are a sealed book. Experience does not exist.
Impulse rules the universe.
And this mob mind moves always as a unit. It devours individuality. Men who as individuals may be gentle and humane are swept into accord with the most beastly cry of the crowd. This mental unity grows out of the crushing power of contagion. Gestures, cries, deeds of hate and fury are caught, approved, repeated.
Any lie can be built into a religion if repeated often enough to a crowd by a mind on fire with its pa.s.sions. Pirates have died as bravely as John Brown. The glorification of the manner of his dying was merely a phenomenon of the unity of the crowd mind. It was precisely the grip of his Puritan mysticism, his worship of the Devil, that gave to his insanity its most dangerous appeal.
For the first time in the history of the republic the mob mind had mastered the collective soul of its people. The contagion had spread both North and South. In the North by sympathy, in the South by a process of reaction even more violent and destructive of reason.
John Brown had realized his vision of the Plains. He had raised a National Blood Feud.
No hand could stay the scourge. The Red Thought burst into a flame that swept North and South, as a prairie fire sweeps the stubble of autumn.
_Uncle Tom"s Cabin_ had prepared the stubble.
From the Northern press began to pour a stream of vindictive abuse. A fair specimen of this insanity appeared in the New York _Independent_:
"The ma.s.s of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain. Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina! Progeny of the highwaymen, the horse thieves and sheep stealers and pickpockets of Old England!"
The fact that this paper was a religious publication, the outgrowth of the New England conscience, gave its columns a peculiar power over the Northern mind.