t they never would consent to give up their
slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads."

It was five years before this event at Harper's Ferry, while the
conflict between freedom and slavery was waxing hotter and hotter with
every hour, that the blundering statesmanship of the National
Government repealed the Missouri compromise, and thus launched the
territory of Kansas as a prize to be battled for between the North and
the South. The remarkable part taken in this contest by Brown has been
already referred to, and it doubtless helped to prepare him for the
final tragedy, and though it did not by any means originate the plan,
it confirmed him in it and hastened its execution.

During his four years' service in Kansas it was my good fortune to see
him often. On his trips to and from the territory he sometimes stopped
several days at my house, and at one time several weeks. It was on
this last occasion that liberty had been victorious in Kansas, and he
felt that he must hereafter devote himself to what he considered his
larger work. It was the theme of all his conversation, filling his
nights with dreams and his days with visions. An incident of his
boyhood may explain, in some measure, the intense abhorrence he felt
to slavery. He had for some reason been sent into the State of
Kentucky, where he made the acquaintance of a slave boy, about his own
age, of whom he became very fond. For some petty offense this boy was
one day subjected to a brutal beating. The blows were dealt with an
iron shovel and fell fast and furiously upon his slender body. Born in
a free State and unaccustomed to such scenes of cruelty, young Brown's
pure and sensitive soul revolted at the shocking spectacle and at that
early age he swore eternal hatred to slavery. After years never
obliterated the impression, and he found in this early experience an
argument against contempt for small things. It is true that the boy is
the father of the man. From the acorn comes the oak. The impression of
a horse's foot in the sand suggested the art of printing. The fall of
an apple intimated the law of gravitation. A word dropped in the woods
of Vincennes, by royal hunters, gave Europe and the world a "William
the Silent," and a thirty years' war. The beating of a Hebrew
bondsman, by an Egyptian, created a Moses, and the infliction of a
similar outrage on a helpless slave boy in our own land may have
caused, forty years afterwards, a John Brown and a H