l as to the righteousness of his cause. Such words and such
behaviour do not comport with the "black heart" which a large part of
the nation was then ascribing to him. It is true, he told a clergyman
of a Southern church who attempted to draw an argument in defence of
Slavery, that he did not know the A B Cs of Christianity since he was
entirely ignorant of the meaning of the word, "I, of course, respect
you as a gentleman, but it is as a _heathen_ gentleman." I can,
myself, appreciate to some extent what must have been the feelings of
the prisoner at the religious ministrations offered him; for I well
remember with what a skeptical air I heard the prayer and the words of
a Rebel clergyman who visited the prison in which I was confined in
1865. I knew he was daily praying God to bring defeat to my comrades
in arms, to increase the number of prisoners, in fine, for the triumph
of the Confederate cause. He undertook a pretty serious task, that of
talking entertainingly in a general way to a company of Federal
prisoners. Had he come to kneel by the side of a dying man, and to
point the way to eternal life, it had been different; but for
doctrinal policies what cared we? We had empty stomachs, and till they
were filled all creeds were alike illusory. Preaching to hungry men
was not a success, and he came but seldom--indeed I remember only
once. Dead men were carried out daily, but they went unattended by
religious rites. I recall now the thought, if God heard his prayer and
answered it, of what avail was mine; but I was certain that mine was
the one listened to, and that being the case, of what avail was his
opinion on the state of the country any way? During these weeks the
condemned man is visited by large numbers of people, both friends and
foes; but before no one does he for a moment weaken in his constant
declaration of the correctness of his cause. Some of the verbal shot
that his proslavery interlocutors received were as hot as those which
he fired from his musket into their midst on that terrible Monday--for
instance, he told Col. Smith, of the Virginia Military Institute, that
he would as soon be escorted to his death by blacklegs or robbers as
by slave-holding ministers. Socrates, awaiting the death which slowly
creeps from his extremities to his heart converses not more quietly
and resignedly to those about him than does this decided old man of
Harper's Ferry. One, a Stoic, discourses on Death and Immortality; and