4.

"O, patience, felon of the hour!
Over thy ghastly gallows-tree
Shall climb the vine of Liberty,
With ripened fruit and fragrant flower."

So wrote William Dean Howells, then a rising young poet and author in
Columbus, Ohio, in November, 1859, on the eve of John Brown's execution
at Charleston, Va. In the month before, on the night of October 16th,
John Brown, at the head of twenty-one men, sixteen of whom were white
and five black, marched on Harper's Ferry and delivered the attack that
sent his body to the gallows and his soul to immortal glory.

The heroic blood of old Brown himself flowed in the veins of all his
twenty-one intrepid young followers. There was not a coward among them.
Three of them were Brown's own sons and two others were near relatives.

Brown was fifty-nine; his adjutant general twenty-four. All his
followers were young men, some of them barely of age.

When Colonel Richard J. Hinton, who followed John Brown in Kansas, heard
of the intended raid on Harper's Ferry, he said to Kagi, the stripling
adjutant general: "You'll all be killed." "Yes, I know it, Hinton," was
the ready reply, "but the result will be worth the sacrifice."

Kagi was said to resemble "a divinity student rather than a warrior,"
and when taunted by an adversary, he answered, "We will endure the
shadow of dishonor, but not the stain of guilt."

"These words of John Henry Kagi," wrote Hinton, "expressed the spirit of
John Brown's men and, in an especial sense, the character of the young
and brilliant man who fell riddled with bullets into the Shenandoah.
Thirty miles below, the blood-tinged stream flowed through the lands of
his father's family."

Spartan souls were these who marched on Harper's Ferry that fateful
night, there to strike a blow at the cost of their lives that was
destined to make Harper's Ferry more famed than Waterloo--a blow that
was to emancipate a race and change abruptly the whole current of
American history.

"Down the still road, dim white in the moonlight, and amid the chill of
the October night, went the little band, silent and sober."

The twenty-one young heroes who followed old John Brown on that historic
night were of the exalted type that Emerson described: "When souls reach
a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive
without selfishness."

It is related that when Garibaldi was organizing his army of liberation
in Italy, he was asked