It is said that Brown’s violent anti-slavery feeling was engendered by his having seen, in his youth, a colored boy of about his own age cruelly misused.  He brooded over the wrongs of the blacks until, as some students of his life believe, he became insane on this subject.  His utterances show that he was willing to give up his life and those of his sons and other followers, if by such action he could merely draw attention to the cause which had taken possession of his soul.  In the course of the fighting he saw his two sons mortally wounded, and was himself stabbed and cut.  Throughout the fight and his subsequent trial at Charles Town he remained imperturbable; when taken to the gallows he sat upon his coffin, in a wagon, and he not only mounted the scaffold without a tremor, but actually stood there, apparently unmoved, for ten or fifteen minutes, with the noose around his neck, while the troops which had formed his escort were marched to their positions.

A large number of troops were present at the execution, for it was then believed in the South that the Brown raid was not the mere suicidal stroke of an individual fanatic, but an organized movement on the part of the Republican party; an effort to rescue Brown was therefore apprehended.  This idea was later shown to be a fallacy, Brown having made his own plans, and been financed by a few northern friends, headed by Gerrit Smith of New York.

There has been a tendency in the North to make a saint of John Brown, and in the South to make a devil of him.  As a matter of fact he was a poor, misguided zealot, with a wild light in his eye, who had set out to do a frightful thing; for, bad though slavery was, its evils were not comparable with the horrors which would have resulted from a slave rebellion.

It must be conceded, however, that those who would canonize John Brown have upon their side a strange and impressive piece of evidence.  The jail where he was lodged in Charles Town and the courthouse where he was tried, still stand, and it is the actual fact that, when the snow falls, it always miraculously melts in a path which leads diagonally across the street from the one to the other.  That this is true I have unimpeachable testimony. Snow will not stand on the path by which John Brown crossed back and forth from the jail to the court-house. There will be snow over all the rest of the street, but not on that path; there you can see it melting.

But, as with certain other “miracles,” this one is not so difficult to understand if you know how it is brought about.  The courthouse is heated from the jail, and the hot pipes run under the pavement.

CHAPTER XI

THE VIRGINIAS AND THE WASHINGTONS

In colonial times, and long thereafter, the present State of West Virginia was a part of Virginia.  Virginia, in the old days, used to have no western borders to her most westerly counties, which, in theory, ran out to infinity.  As the western part of the State became settled, county lines were drawn, and new counties were started farther back from the coast.  For this reason, towns which are now in Jefferson County, West Virginia, used to be in that county of Virginia which lies to the east of Jefferson County, and some towns have been in several different counties in the course of their history.