the era of Northern fear of
secession, and, finally, opinion crystallizing into legislation
non-committal, viz: That States applying for admission should be
admitted as free or slave States, as a majority of their inhabitants
might determine. Then came the struggle for Kansas. Emigration societies
were fitted out in the New England and Northern States to send free
State men to locate who would vote to bring in Kansas as a free State.
Similar organizations existed in the slave States for the opposite
purpose.

[Illustration: HON. JOHN M. LANGSTON.

Born in Louisa Country, Va.--Educated at Oberlin, Ohio--Member Board of
Health, District of Columbia in 1871--Minister Resident and
Consul-General to Port-au-Prince, Hayti, 1877--Elected to Congress from
Fourth Congressional District of Virginia in 1890--Author of "Freedom
and Citizenship" and "From the Virginia Plantation to the National
Capitol."]

It is not pleasant to dwell nor fitly portray the terrible ordeal
through which the friends of freedom passed. In 1859 they succeeded;
right and justice were triumphant, the beneficial results of which will
reach remotest time. It was in this conflict that the heroism of John
Brown developed. It was there he saw his kindred and his friends
murdered, and there registered his vow to avenge their blood in the
disenthralment of the slave. The compeers of this "grand old man" or
people of the nation could have scarcely supposed that this man,
hitherto obscure, was to be the instrument of retributive justice, to
inaugurate a rebellion which was to culminate in the freedom of
4,000,000 slaves. John Brown, at the head of a few devoted men, at
Harper's Ferry, struck the blow that echoed and re-echoed in booming gun
and flashing sabre until, dying away in whispered cadence, was hushed in
the joyousness of a free nation. John Brown was great because he was
good, and good because he was great, with the bravery of a warrior and
the tenderness of a child, loving liberty as a mother her first born, he
scorned to compromise with slavery. Virginia demanded his blood and he
gave it, making the spot on which he fell sacred for all time, upon
which posterity will see a monument in commemoration of an effort, grand
in its magnanimity, to which the devotees of liberty from every clime
can repair to breathe anew an inspiration from its shrine--

"For whether on the gallows high
Or in the battle's van,
The noblest place for man to die