4. John Brown.

For the next few months the excitements of the great political world concern this biography little.  There was strife between Davis and Douglas in the Senate.  At a meeting strong against slavery, Seward regained courage from the occasion and roused the North with grave and earnest words about the “irrepressible conflict.”  The “underground railway,” or chain of friendly houses by which fugitive slaves were stealthily passed on to Canada, became famous.  Methodist professors riotously attempted to rescue an arrested fugitive at Oberlin.  A Southern grand jury threw out the bill of indictment against a slave-trading crew caught red-handed.  In California Democrats belonging to what was nicknamed “the chivalry” forced upon Senator Broderick, a literally democratic Irishman and the bravest of the Democrats who stood out for fair treatment to Kansas, a duel in which he might fairly be said to have been murdered.  The one event which demands more than allusion was the raid and the death of John Brown.

John Brown, in whom Puritan religion, as strict as that of his ancestors on the Mayflower, put forth gentler beauties of character than his sanguinary mission may suggest, had been somewhat of a failure as a scientific farmer, but as a leader of fighting men in desperate adventure only such men as Drake or Garibaldi seem to have excelled him.  More particularly in the commotions in Kansas he had led forays, slain ruthlessly, witnesses dry-eyed the deaths of several of his tall, strong sons, and as a rule earned success by cool judgment—­all, as he was absolutely sure, at the clear call of God.  In October, 1859—­how and with whose help the stroke was prepared seems to be a question of some mystery—­John Brown, gathering a little band of Abolitionists and negroes, invaded the slave States and seized the United States arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia.  In the details, which do not matter, of this tiny campaign, John Brown seems, for the first time in his life, to have blundered badly.  This was the only thing that lay upon his conscience towards the last.  What manner of success he can have expected does not appear; most likely he had neither care nor definite expectation as to the result.  The United States troops under Robert Lee, soon to be famous, of course overcame him quickly.  One of his prisoners describes how he held out to the last; a dead son beside him; one hand on the pulse of a dying son, his rifle in the other.  He was captured, desperately wounded.  Southerners could not believe the fact that Brown had not contemplated some hideous uprising of slaves against their wives and children, but he only wished to conquer them with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, quietly freeing slaves as he went.  So naturally there was talk of lynching, but the Virginian gentlemen concerned would not have that.  Governor Wise, of Virginia, had some talk with him and justified his own high