the system that made necessary the sacrifice of such a life?

But Andrew's words "whatever may be thought of John Brown's acts"--call
for further consideration. What were his acts, and what were their
consequences? A part of the answer was seen in the bodies of men of
Harper's Ferry, lying in the streets, peaceful men with wives and
children, slain for resisting an armed invasion of their quiet little
village. The first man to fall was a negro porter of a railway train,
who, failing to halt when challenged by one of Brown's sentinels, was
shot. The second man killed was a citizen standing in his own doorway.
The third was a graduate of West Point who, hearing of trouble, came
riding into town with his gun, and was shot as he passed the armory.

Among the letters that came to Brown in prison was one from the widow of
one of the Pottawatomie victims, with these words: "You can now
appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my
house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them
out in the yard, and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You
can't say you did it to free our slaves; we had none and never expected
to own one; but it only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless
children."

Brown's first plan, of drawing off the slaves to a mountain
fortress,--peaceable only in semblance, and involving inevitable
fighting,--he exchanged at last for a form of attack which was an
instant challenge to battle. In a conference with Frederick Douglass, on
the eve of the event, Douglass vainly urged the earlier plan, but found
Brown resolved on "striking a blow which should instantly rouse the
country." On the day of his death, Brown penned these sentences and
handed them to one of his guards: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain
that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with
blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very
much bloodshed it might be done." But no man so directly and
deliberately aimed to settle the difficulty by bloodshed as he. It is
thus that men make God responsible for what themselves are doing.

The Civil War when it came brought enough of suffering and horror. But
it was mild and merciful compared to what a slave insurrection might
have been. And it was essentially a slave insurrection that Brown aimed
at. The great mass of the Northern people would have recoiled with
abhorrence from a servile revolt. But wh