capacity for the ordinary practical
affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes,
and viewing them with a fanatic's narrowness and a fanatic's
absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have
been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced by his
reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. Of the modern
State and the duties of the modern citizen he had no rational idea.
Following the Old Testament analogy, he conceived of the slaveholders as
the enemies of God--like the Canaanites; and he came to imagine for
himself a mission like one of the Hebrew leaders. His favorite hero
seems to have been Gideon, and to assail and overcome the Midianites, a
handful against a host, became his dream.

How the peaceful tactics of the Free-State party suited his temper may
be easily guessed, and four days after the attack on Lawrence (which was
May 20, 1856), he acted on a plan of his own. At the head of a small
group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at
night down Pottawatomie creek, stopping at three houses. The men who
lived in them were well-known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been
rough characters; their most specific offense (according to Mr. Sanborn,
Brown's biographer and eulogist), was the driving from his home by
violent threats an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went
down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses; took five
men away from their wives and children; and deliberately shot one and
hacked the others to death with swords.

Mr. Sanborn's defense of this act is: "Brown long foresaw the deadly
conflict with the slave power which culminated in the Civil War, and was
eager to begin it, that it might be the sooner over." He begins his
chapter on "The Pottawatomie Executions": "The story of John Brown will
mean little to those who do not believe that God governs the world, and
that he makes his will known in advance to certain chosen men and
women, who perform it consciously or unconsciously. Of such prophetic
heaven-appointed men, John Brown was the most conspicuous in our time,
and his life must be construed in the light of that fact." He also
declares that the "execution" of these five men was an offset to the
killing of five Free-State men by various persons during the preceding
twelve-month, and that it was calculated to strike wholesome terror into
evil-doers. The ethics, theology,