, and given them arms the slaves
would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his
lead. But when they were attacked in the Arsenal, Brown and his men
were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Washington;
several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered
death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.

Some think that Brown was mad, some that he was inspired, some that he
was right, some that he was wrong; but whatever men think of him, there
are none who doubt that he was a hero, ready to shed his blood for
the cause he held just. His name can never die, so long as the name of
America lives, and it is part of the fame of Ohio that he dwelt many
years in our state. For many years of his younger manhood Brown had
lived at Hudson, in Summit County; for months before his attempt in
Virginia he and his men were coming and going at different points in the
Western Reserve, and in Ashtabula County where one of his sons then had
a farm, he kept hidden the pikes with which he hoped to arm the slaves.
One of the young men who died with him on the scaffold at Charlestown
was the Quaker lad, Edwin Coppock, of Columbiana County, who wrote, two
days before he suffered, a touching letter of farewell to his friends.
"I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration
of Independence fully realized; I had hoped to see the dark stain of
slavery blotted from our land.... But two more short days remain to me
to fulfill my earthly destiny. At the expiration of those days I shall
stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that
scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe that I am
innocent of any crime justifying such a punishment. But by the taking of
my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on the
day when the slave will rejoice in his freedom."

[Illustration: John Brown making pikes for Slaves 234R]

XXII. THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO

Though the Ohio people were too plodding for Aaron Burr, and though they
were taunted almost from the first as the Yankee state of the West, they
seem to have had war in their blood, which may have been their heritage
from the long struggle with the Indians. But after the peace with Great
Britain in 1815 there was no war cloud in the Ohio sky until Morgan
swept across our horizon with his hard-riders, except at one time in
1835. There had then arisen betwe