d to a personal friend during his stay in Kansas: "Young
men must learn to wait. Patience is the hardest lesson to learn. I
have waited for twenty years to accomplish my purpose." These are not
the words of a mere visionary idealist, but the mature language of a
practical and judicious leader, a leader than whom the world has never
seen a greater. By greatness is meant deep convictions of duty, a
sense of the Infinite, "a strong hold on truth," a "conscience void of
offence toward God and man," to which the appeals of the innocent and
helpless are more potential than the voices of angry thunder or
destructive artillery. Such a man was John Brown. He was strong in his
moral and mental nature, as well as in his physical nature. He was
born to lead; and he led, and made himself the pro-martyr of a cause
rapidly perfecting. All through his boyhood days he felt himself
lifted and quickened by great ideas and sublime purposes. He had
flowing in his veins the blood of his great ancestor, Peter Brown, who
came over in the "Mayflower"; and the following inscription appears
upon a marble monument in the graveyard at Canton Centre, New York:
"In memory of Captain John Brown, who died in the Revolutionary army,
at New York, September 3, 1776. He was of the fourth generation, in
regular descent, from Peter Brown, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, who
landed from the 'Mayflower,' at Plymouth, Massachusetts, December 22,
1620." This is the best commentary on his inherent love of absolute
liberty, his marvellous courage and transcendent military genius. For
years he elaborated and perfected his plans, working upon the public
sentiment of his day by the most praiseworthy means. He bent and bowed
the most obdurate conservatism of his day, and rallied to his
standards the most eminent men, the strongest intellects in the North.
His ethics and religion were as broad as the universe, and beneficent
in their wide ramification. And it was upon his "religion of
humanity," that embraced our entire species, that he proceeded with
his herculean task of striking off the chains of the enslaved. Few,
very few of his most intimate friends knew his plans--the plan of
freeing the slaves. Many knew his great faith, his exalted sentiments,
his ideas of liberty, in their crudity; but to a faithful few only did
he reveal his stupendous plans in their entirety.

Hon. Frederick Douglass and Colonel Richard J. Hinton, knew more of
Brown's real purposes than any oth