of justice, be ground to a violent death, in
obedience to the will of God.

Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend
of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and
sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston,
November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical
prophecy, but now long since fulfilled:

"The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I
think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years
ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to
end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor
ever in the future. All the great charters of _Humanity_ have been
writ in blood. I once hoped that American _Democracy_ would be
engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our
pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a _Pharoah_
will go under and perish. . . .

"Slavery will not _die a dry death_. It may have as many lives as
a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only
the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly
to appear as mourners."(128)

Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave,
but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far
enough to see that within a single decade the "_sin of the nation_"
would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia
--the State that hung John Brown--at the home of its greatest
Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm"
teaching free negroes--sons of Africa--to read and write--to read
the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John
Brown."(129)

One sample of prophecy of what _disunion_ would be, we give from
a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland:

"It would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide.
The act itself is insanity. It will be done, if ever, in a fury
and madness which cannot stop to reason. _Dissolution_ means death,
the suicide of Liberty, without a hope of resurrection--death
without the glories of immortality; with no sister to mourn her
fall, none to wrap her decently in her winding-sheet and bear her
tenderly to a sepulchre--_dead Liberty_, left to all the horrors
of corruption, a loathsome thing, with a stake through the body,
which men shun, cast out naked on the highway of nations, where
the tyrants of the earth who feared her living