ice; he an untaught, ill-balanced visionary, who at least staked his
life on his faith. Their complicity in his plot illustrates how in some
moral enthusiasts the hostility to slavery had distorted their
perception of reality. Such men saw the Southern communities through
the medium of a single institution, itself half-understood. They saw, so
to speak, only the suffering slave and his oppressor. They failed to see
or forgot the general life of household and neighborhood, with its
common, kindly, human traits. They did not recognize that Harper's Ferry
was made up of much the same kind of people, at bottom, as Concord. They
did not realize that a slave insurrection meant a universal social
conflagration. Indeed, Brown's original scheme of a general flight of
slaves to a mountain stronghold had a fallacious appearance of avoiding
a violent insurrection, and it was with the background of this plan that
Brown, a wounded prisoner with death impending, appealed to the Northern
imagination as a hero and martyr.

But this glorification of him wrought a momentous effect in the South.
It is best described by those who witnessed it. John S. Wise, son of the
Governor who signed Brown's death-warrant, writes in his graphic
reminiscences, _The End of an Era_: "While these scenes were being
enacted"--the trial and execution of Brown and the Northern comments--"a
great change of feeling took place in Virginia toward the people of the
North and toward the Union itself. Virginians began to look upon the
people of the North as hating them, and willing to see them assassinated
at midnight by their own slaves, led by Northern emissaries; as flinging
away all pretense of regard for laws protecting the slave-owner; as
demanding of them the immediate freeing of their slaves, or that they
prepare against further attacks like Brown's, backed by the moral and
pecuniary support of the North. During the year 1860 the Virginians
began to organize and arm themselves against such emergencies."

The spirit of proscription against all anti-slavery men broke out
afresh. At Berea, Kentucky, a little group of anti-slavery churches and
schools had been growing for six years, championed by the stalwart
Cassius M. Clay, and with the benignant and peaceful John G. Fee as
their leader. A month after Brown's foray a band of armed horsemen
summoned twelve of their men to leave the State. Governor Magoffin said
he could not protect them, and with their families t