g, kissed him.

And Brown said calmly: "Now, go."

As he ascended the scaffold he handed to one who stood near his final
message, the supreme utterance over which he had prayed day and night to
his God. Despatched from the scaffold, and sealed by his blood, he knew
that its magic words would spread by contagion the Red Thought.

His face shone with the glory of his hope as his feet climbed the
scaffold steps. On the scrap of paper he had written:

"I, JOHN BROWN, AM NOW QUITE CERTAIN THAT THE CRIMES OF THIS GUILTY LAND
WILL NEVER BE PURGED AWAY BUT WITH BLOOD."

The trap fell, his darkened soul swung into eternity and the deed
was done. He had raised the Blood Feud to the nth power. His message
thrilled the world.

Bells were tolling in the North while crowds of weeping men and women
knelt in prayer to his God. Had they but lifted the veil and looked,
they would have seen the face of a fiend. But their eyes were now
blinded with the madness which had driven him to his death.

In Cleveland, Melodeon Hall was draped in mourning at a meeting where
thousands wept and cursed and prayed. Mammoth gatherings were held in
New York, in Rochester and Syracuse. In Boston a crowd, so dense they
were lifted from their feet by the pressure of thousands behind,
clamoring for entrance, rushed into Tremont Temple.

William Lloyd Garrison, the Pacifist, declared the meeting was called to
witness John Brown's resurrection. He flung the last shred of principle
to the winds and joined the mob of the Blood Feud without reservation.

"As a peace man--an ultra peace man--I am prepared to say: 'Success to
every Slave Insurrection in the South and in every Slave Country!'"

Wendell Phillips, believing Judge Russell's report of Brown's denial of
the Pottawattomie murders, declared to the thousands who crowded Cooper
Union that John Brown was a Saint--that he was not on the Pottawattomie
Creek on that fateful night, that he was not within twenty-five miles of
the spot!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ignorant of the truth of Pottawattomie, hailed
Brown as "the new Saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led
by love of men into conflict and death--the new Saint who has achieved
his martyrdom and will make the gallows glorious as the cross."

One great spirit among the anti-slavery forces refused to be swept in
the current of insanity. Abraham Lincoln at Troy, Kansas, said on the
day of Brown's death:

"Old John Brown has been execute