nown to need,
repeating here; _but let no one who glories in the revolutionary
struggle of 1776, deny the right of slaves to imitate the example of our
fathers._"

Even the leader of the movement for Abolition by peaceful means had
succumbed to the poison of the smell of human blood.

Higginson knew that the process of a revolution was always in the order
of Ideas, Leaders, The Mob, The Tread of Armies. For thirty years
Garrison and the Abolition Crusaders had spread the Ideas. The Inspired
Leader had at last appeared. His right arm had struck the first blow. He
could hear the roar of the coming mob whose impulse to murder had been
roused. It would call their ancestral soul. The answer was a certainty.
He could see no necessity for Brown's blood to be spilled in martyrdom.

The old man, walking with burning eyes toward his trial, knew better.
His vision was clear. God had revealed His full purpose at last. He
would climb a Virginia gallows and drag millions down, from that
scaffold into the grave with him.

CHAPTER XXXII

Never in the history of an American commonwealth was a trial conducted
with more reverence for Law than the arraignment of John Brown and his
followers in the stately old Court House at Charlestown, Virginia.

The people whom he had assaulted with intent to kill, the people against
whom he had incited slaves to rise in bloody insurrection, the kinsmen
of the dead whom his rifles had slain, stood in line on the street and
watched him pass into the building manacled to one of his disciples.
They did not hoot, nor hiss, nor curse. They watched him walk in silence
between the tall granite pillars of the House of Justice.

The behavior of this crowd was highwater mark in the development of
Southern character. The structure of their society rested on the
sanctity of Law. It was being put to the supreme test.

A Northern crowd under similar conditions, had they followed the
principles which John Brown preached, would have torn those prisoners to
pieces without the formality of a trial.

It was precisely this trait of character in his enemies on which Brown
relied for the martyrdom he so passionately desired. When the witnesses
at the preliminary hearing had testified to his guilt and the Court had
ordered the trial set, he was asked if he had counsel.

He rose from his seat and addressed the nation, not the Court:

"Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken.
I did no