of mortal life, and they
were the most fruitful he ever spent. The greatest achievement of his
life was the marvellous advocacy of the cause conducted from his
prison. His friend F. B. Sanborn says: 'Here was a defeated, dying old
man, who had been praying and fighting and pleading and toiling for
years, to persuade a great people that their national life was all
wrong, suddenly converting millions to his cause by the silent
magnanimity or the spoken wisdom of his last days as a fettered
prisoner.'

He had spoken of a Samson's victory as possibly the great triumph in
store for him. Even so it was, and in his death and by the manner of
it he mortally wounded his old enemy, Slavery. As the great continent
watched from afar his last days, a thrill passed through it that made
Emancipation a triumphant cause. Efforts to save Brown's life might be
in vain, but Brown's death was helping to save the life of the nation.
His letters from the prison were many and widely circulated. All he
has to say of himself is that he knows no degradation. 'I can trust
God with the time and manner of my death, believing that for me now to
seal my testimony with my life will do vastly more for the Cause than
all I have done before. Dear wife and children, do not feel degraded
on my account.' Humorously he remarks, 'I am worth inconceivably more
to hang than for any other purpose.' 'Say to my poor boys never to
grieve for one moment on my account; and should many of you live to see
the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John
Brown, it will not be more strange than many things that have
happened.' '"He shall BEGIN to deliver Israel out of the hand of the
Philistines." This,' said he, 'I think is true of my commission from
God and my work.' The scaffold had no terrors for him. His trust, he
averred, was firm in that Redeemer who, to European and Ethiopian, bond
and free alike, had brought a year of Jubilee and a great salvation.
But though he asked no pity for himself, he pleaded in every letter for
those who, as he said, were on the 'under-hill' side. 'Weep not for
me,' he wrote home, 'but for the crushed millions who have no
comforter.' The old text was continually repeated, 'Remember them that
are in bonds as bound with them,' and he bade them abhor with undying
hatred that 'sum of all villanies--slavery.'

His only cause of agitation in the prison was the intrusive
ministration of certain pro-slavery parsons.