not
because of a lack of devoted and accomplished advocates; it seems rather
to be due to the fact that it has not yet succeeded in winning over the
great body of women, who have held aloof and viewed the movement with
indifference, if not with suspicion.

* * * * *

We cannot close this consideration of the anti-slavery movement without
some reference to that strange fanatic, John Brown, who headed a
forlorn hope and gave up his life for an idea. It was the custom at one
time to consider John Brown a saint, at the north, and a very emissary
of Satan, at the south. One estimate was as untrue as the other. He was
merely a misguided old man, grown a little mad, perhaps, from long
brooding over one subject.

He was born at Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, his father being a
shoemaker and tanner, who, five years later, moved to Hudson, Ohio, then
a mere outpost in the wilderness. He was soon expert in woodcraft, and
he relates how, when he was six years old, an Indian boy gave him a
yellow marble, the first he had ever seen, and which he treasured for a
long time. He had little or no schooling, and a project to educate him
for the ministry was cut short by an inflammation of the eyes. He grew
up into a tall, handsome man, headstrong, but humane and kind, and
easily moved to tears. He married young and had many children, for some
of whom a tragic fate was waiting.

He soon became interested in the anti-slavery movement, and, by 1837,
was so absorbed by it that he made his family take a solemn oath of
active opposition to slavery. Ten years later, he unfolded to Frederick
Douglass a plan for a negro insurrection in the Virginia mountains, but
nothing came of it. From that time forward, the project seems to have
slumbered at the back of his mind, and he grew more and more certain
that the only way to end slavery was to arm the blacks and encourage
them to fight for freedom. In 1854, his sons emigrated to Kansas, then
in the throes of civil war over the slavery question, and their father
busied himself raising money to send arms and ammunition into the
troubled state. Finally, in September, 1855, he himself removed to
Kansas, became the captain of a band of Free State Rangers, took part in
the fight at Lawrence, and in some other affairs, and then, proceeding
to the shores of Pottawatomie creek, where several pro-slavery men
lived, seized five of them and put them to death.

For this deed h