I spent some evenings now with Aldington and Abigail.  We drove out to see the Douglas property south of the town.  A horse-car line was being built from Randolph Street to 12th Street, but beyond that was the waste of sand and of scrub oaks, and the land which Douglas had all but lost in financing himself in this campaign.  I was ready to help Douglas with money if he would accept it from me; but just now he was not an easy man to find, and he did not come to me.

The trial and execution of John Brown was another thunderclap.  And Abigail showed me what was being said about it.  A certain Henry Thoreau, a strange, radical soul living in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, had compared John Brown to Christ.  “Some eighteen hundred years ago,” Thoreau said, “Christ was crucified; this morning perchance Captain Brown was hung.  These are the two ends of the chain which is not without its links.  He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light....  I foresee the time when a painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject.  The poet will sing it, the historian will record it; and with the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here.  We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown.”

Could it be possible that this Captain Brown should have his Pinturicchio?  Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis?  Abigail also had Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, who was preaching the doctrine of brotherhood, democracy, resistance to the law.

“What sort of country is this?” I asked Abigail.  “Can every one set himself up as a judge of the laws and disobey them if he chooses?  If you had heard Douglas’ speech you would be convinced that this sort of mania will cease or there will be war.  Even Emerson is among these idealistic rebels, for he says that it is a lack of health to cry ‘madman’ at a hero as he passes.  I think the Bible is responsible for much of this turmoil and foolish rebellion, if not all of it.  Lincoln founded his campaign upon the Bible:  a house divided against itself cannot stand.  And just because Christ is taken as divine, every word and act of his is lived up to by some madman as justification for acts like those of Brown.”

In the meantime Abigail had found among her papers the words of Victor Hugo:  “He is not a New Englander,” she said, “nor an American idealist.  And he says—­I’ll translate it for you:  ’In killing Brown the Southern States have committed a crime which will take its place among the calamities of history.  The rupture of the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown.  As to Brown, he was an apostle and a hero.  The gibbet has only increased his glory and made him a martyr.’”

Well, was not Douglas a martyr too?  Who had done more for his country?  Was Lincoln any more radical than Douglas?  Lincoln was defeated to be sure, but Douglas was penalized for what he had said in these debates.  No sooner had he returned to Washington than he found himself deposed from the committee on territories.  He was beginning to be a man without a party.  He was paying for his ideas.