my only religious attendants be poor,
little, dirty, ragged, bareheaded, and barefooted slave boys and girls,
led by some gray-headed slave mother.... Farewell, farewell." He died in
the spirit of the letter written the day before, when he said, "I think
I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison, for men cannot chain
or hang the soul."

His deed puzzled the world. For multitudes it is still an enigma. To
many, John Brown seems not only a fanatic but a lunatic. To others, now
that long time has passed, this white-haired old man, weltering in his
blood, which he had spilled for a broken and despised race, seems
right, and he seems to have died, not as a fool dies, but as martyrs
die. That his enterprise was doomed to failure in advance, all knew.
That it was not the wisest plan, Brown's best friends must grant. But
that its fanaticism was overruled by God to release the great South from
the incubus of slavery, Brown's friends and Brown's enemies alike must
concede.

What other men had been writing about, John Brown did in action. The
attack on Harper's Ferry was the first blow struck during the Civil War.
Other men and women assembled the explosives, but John Brown dropped the
spark in the magazine, which finally blew up that hindrance to progress,
slavery--the Hell Gate obstruction in the passageway of the South and of
all civilization.

VII

LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS: INFLUENCE OF THE GREAT DEBATE

Strictly speaking, there were three stages in the development of the
anti-slavery sentiment leading up to the Civil War. There was the period
of indifference, from 1759 to 1830, when the North winked at slavery,
ignored the traffic and avoided the whole subject. There was the epoch
of agitation, from 1831 to 1850, when Garrison and his friends insisted
upon "the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves on the
soil," and the agitation was kept up by men who "would not retreat, who
would not equivocate, who would not be silent and who would be heard."
Then came the stage when men tried legislative palliatives; when all
manner of political medicaments and poultices were tried as cures, which
were about as effective in destroying the poison as a porous plaster
would be to draw out the fire from a volcano. For more than sixty years
a veil had hung before men's minds, and it was as if they saw slaves as
trees walking, in an unreal world. The sea captain fears a fog more than
an equinoctial storm. When