on and
culture was unchained, the massacres began. Every cruelty known to man
had been their pastime.

And these beasts were white men. How much more should he expect of the
Blacks? Haiti had given him assurance of darker deeds. The world was
shivering with the horrors of the Black uprising in Haiti when he was
born. He had drunk the story from his Puritan mother's breast. From
childhood he had brooded with secret joy over its bloody details.

The Black Bees had swarmed there and Toussaint L'Overture had hived them
as he had asked Frederick Douglas to hive them here. They seized the
rudest weapons and wiped out the white population. They butchered ten
thousand French men, women and children. And not a cry of pity or mercy
found an echo in a savage breast.

What was wrong here?

He had proclaimed the slave a freeman. He had placed an iron pike in his
right hand and a torch in his left. Why had they not answered with a
shout of triumph?

His somber mind refused to believe that they would not rise. Even now he
was sure they were mobilizing in a sheltered mountain gorge. Before noon
he would hear the roar of their coming and see the terror-stricken faces
of the whites fleeing before their rush.

He had repeated to his Northern crowds the fable of negro suffering in
the South until he believed the lie himself. He believed it with every
beat of his stern Puritan heart. And he had repeated and shouted it
until the gathering Abolitionist mob believed it as a message from God.
The fact that the system of African slavery, as actually practiced in
the South, was the mildest and most humane form of labor ever fixed
by the masters of men, they refused to consider. The mob leader never
allows his followers to consider facts.

He knows that his crowd prefers dreams to facts. Dreams are the motives
of crowd action. The dream, the illusion, the unreality have ever been
the forces that have shaped human history in its hours of crisis when
Fate has placed the future in the hands of the mob.

The fact that Slavery in the South had lifted millions of black
savages--half of them from cannibal tribes--into the light of human
civilization--that it had been their school, their teacher, their
church, their inspiration--did not exist, because it was a fact. They
did not deal in facts.

And so again Brown lifted his burning eyes toward the hills reflected
in the mirror of the rivers. Down one of those rocky slopes the Black
Legion woul