rly three thousand souls. With these
eighteen men he held that large community firmly in his grasp for
thirty long hours. With these eighteen men he rallied in a single
night fifty slaves to his standard, and made prisoners of an equal
number of the slave-holding class. With these eighteen men he defied
the power and bravery of a dozen of the best militia companies that
Virginia could send against him. Now, when slavery struck, as it
certainly did strike, at the life of the country, it was not the fault
of John Brown that our rulers did not at first know how to deal with
it. He had already shown us the weak side of the rebellion, had shown
us where to strike and how. It was not from lack of native courage
that Virginia submitted for thirty long hours and at last was relieved
only by Federal troops; but because the attack was made on the side of
her conscience and thus armed her against herself. She beheld at her
side the sullen brow of a black Ireland. When John Brown proclaimed
emancipation to the slaves of Maryland and Virginia he added to his
war power the force of a moral earthquake. Virginia felt all her
strong-ribbed mountains to shake under the heavy tread of armed
insurgents. Of his army of nineteen her conscience made an army of
nineteen hundred.

Another feature of the times, worthy of notice, was the effect of this
blow upon the country at large. At the first moment we were stunned
and bewildered. Slavery had so benumbed the moral sense of the nation,
that it never suspected the possibility of an explosion like this, and
it was difficult for Captain Brown to get himself taken for what he
really was. Few could seem to comprehend that freedom to the slaves
was his only object. If you will go back with me to that time you will
find that the most curious and contradictory versions of the affair
were industriously circulated, and those which were the least rational
and true seemed to command the readiest belief. In the view of some,
it assumed tremendous proportions. To such it was nothing less than a
wide-sweeping rebellion to overthrow the existing government, and
construct another upon its ruins, with Brown for its President and
Commander-in-Chief; the proof of this was found in the old man's
carpet-bag in the shape of a constitution for a new Republic, an
instrument which in reality had been executed to govern the conduct of
his men in the mountains. Smaller and meaner natures saw in it nothing
higher than a