CHAPTER IV

TWO MEN AND THEIR INFLUENCE

John Brown.  Fireside Discussions.  Runaway Slaves.  Fred Douglas.  Rev. Asa Niles.  A Runaway Trip to Boston.

Two men entered into Russell Conwell’s life in these formative days of boyhood who unconsciously had much to do with the course of his after life.

One was John Brown, that man “who would rush through fire though it burn, through water though it drown, to do the work which his soul knew that it must do.”  During his residence in Springfield, this man “possessed like Socrates with a genius that was too much for him” was a frequent visitor at the Conwell home.  Russell learned to know that face with “features chiselled, as it were, in granite,” the large clear eyes that seemed fairly to change color with the intensity of his feelings when he spoke on the one subject that was the very heart of the man.  Tall, straight, lithe, with hair brushed back from a high forehead, thick, full beard and a wonderful, penetrating voice whose tones once heard were never forgotten, his arrival was always received with shouts by the Conwell boys.  Had he not lived in the West and fought real Indians!  What surer “open sesame” is there to a boy’s heart?  He was not so enrapt in his one great project, but that he could go out to the barn and pitch down hay from the mow with Russell, or tell him wonderful stories of the great West where he had lived as a boy, and of the wilderness through which he had tramped as a mere child when he cared for his father’s cattle.  Russell was entirely too young to grasp the meaning of the earnest discussions that went on about the fireplace of which this Spartan was then the centre.  But in later years their meaning came to him with a peculiar significance.  A light seemed to be shed on the horrors of slavery as if the voice of his childhood’s friend were calling from the grave in impassioned tones, to aid the cause for which he had given his life.

Martin Conwell, progressive, aggressive, was not a man to let his deeds lag behind his words.  Such help as he could, he lent the cause of the oppressed.  He made his home one of the stations of the “Underground Railway,” as the road to freedom for escaping slaves was called.  Many a time in the dead of night, awakened by the noise of a wagon, Russell would steal to the little attic window, to see in the light of the lantern, a trembling black man, looking fearfully this way and that for pursuers, being hurried into the barn.  Back to bed went Russell, where his imagination pictured all manner of horrible cruelties the slaves were suffering until the childish heart was near to bursting with sympathy for them and with fiery indignation at the injustice that brought them to this pitiful state.  Not often did he see them, but sometimes childish curiosity was too strong and he searched out the cowering fugitive in the barn, and if the runaway happened to be communicative, he