little comfort it might afford is to meet again would be dearly bought by the pains of a final separation. If she come on here, she must be only a gazing-stock throughout the whole journey, to be remarked upon in every look, word, and action, and by all sorts of creatures, and by all sorts of papers throughout the whole country. O Mary, do not come; but patiently wait for the meeting (of those who love God and their fellowmen) where no separation must follow. "They shall go no more out forever."

Nevertheless, Mrs. Brown went to Harper's Ferry, and, overcoming many obstacles, was finally permitted to spend a few hours in her husband's cell, and to take supper with him a short time before his death. The clergy of the neighborhood tendered him the solace of religion after their fashion, but their ministrations he civilly, but firmly, declined, since he could not recognize any one who justified or palliated slavery as a minister of the God he worshipped, or the Savior in whom he trusted. To one of them, who sought to reconcile slavery with Christianity, he said:

"My dear Sir, you will have to learn the AB Cs in the lesson of Christianity, as I find you entirely ignorant of the meaning of the word. I, of course, respect you as a gentleman; but it is as a heathen gentleman."

On the day of the execution (December 2), Brown rose at dawn and wrote until ordered out to execution. In his last statement he said: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." He walked to the gallows between files of militia, 3,000 of whom had been assembled to prevent any attempt at rescue. As he came out of the jail a negress, with her little child in her arms, stood by the door. Brown stopped a moment, kissed the child, and, without a word, passed on. Being asked on the way if he felt any fear he replied: "It has been a characteristic of me from infancy not to suffer from physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness." Arrived at the gallows he remarked the absence of civilians, the presence of troops alone having been permitted. "That ought

NOT

TUE

193

not to be," he said; "citizens should be allowed to be present as well as others."

After being kept standing on the scaffold for some time while the troops were deployed about it, the trap was sprung, but the fall was so short that it was more than half an hour before the body ceased struggling and life was pronounced extinct. His body was conveyed by his widow to their home in New York State, and there buried. In later years a simple monument was placed above the grave.

On the day of Brown's execution funeral bells were tolled and divine services were held in hundreds of Northern towns. On the other hand a number of "Union meetings" were held in the North shortly after the execution, in which the South was assured that the conservative men of the North repudiated the act of Brown and abhorred the fanatical Abolition spirit of which it was a logical, though fearful, result. One such meeting was held in New York on December 19, at which the first and chief speaker was Charles O'Conor, a distinguished lawyer. Sweeping aside all the familiar constitutional arguments, pro and con, on the slavery question as Brown had done, he based the issue on the morality of slavery-on which, however, he took the opposite side from that of the Abolitionist whose acts in accord with his view had brought him to the gallows.

"SLAVERY IS RIGHT"

CHARLES O'CONOR

Is negro slavery unjust? That is the point to which this great argument, involving the fate of our Union, must now come. Is negro slavery unjust? If it violates that great rules of human conduct, "Render to every man his due," it is unjust. If it violates the law of God, which, says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," it is unjust. And, gentlemen, if it could be maintained that negro slavery is thus in conflict with the law of nature and the law of God, I might be prepared-perhaps we should all be prepared-to go with a distinguished man [Senator William H. Seward] and say there is a "higher law"

which compels us to disregard the Constitution and trample it beneath our feet as a wicked and unholy compact..

I insist that negro slavery is not unjust. [Cries of "Bravo!"] It is not only not unjust, but it is just, wise, and beneficent. [Applause and loud hisses. Cries of "Bravo!" and disorder.] I maintain that negro slavery is not unjust [Cheers], but that it is benign in its influences on the white man and the black. . . . We must no longer favor political leaders who talk about slavery being an evil; nor must we advance the indefensible doctrine that negro slavery is a thing which, although pernicious, is to be tolerated merely because we have made a bargain to tolerate it. . . . Yielding to the decree of nature and the voice of sound philosophy, we must pronounce the institution just, beneficent, lawful, and proper. . . . The negro, to be sure, is a bondman for life. He may be sold from one master to another, but where is the ill in that?

The speaker did not even recoil from the final conclusion of his premises: that the South would be justified in seceding from the Union "if the North continues to conduct itself in the selection of representatives in the Congress of the United States as, perhaps from a certain degree of negligence and inattention, it has heretofore done.”

On December 5, 1859, three days after the execution of John Brown, Congress convened, and the first act of the Senate was, on motion of James M. Mason [Va.], to appoint a committee to investigate the insurrection at Harper's Ferry, in order to find if John Brown and his companions had planned the affair of themselves, or if there was an organized effort behind them, and, in accordance with these findings, to report upon what legislation was in their opinion necessary "for the future preservation of the country, or for the safety of the public property."

In speaking on this motion Northern Senators condemned the act of Brown and declared that the investigation would reveal that it had received no countenance nor support from any considerable number of persons. However, they could not forbear calling the attention of the Southern Senators to the fact that no investigation had been made into a similar attack upon a

Federal arsenal in the West when this assault had been made in the interests of slavery.

In this debate the chief Democratic speakers were Senators Mason, Robert M. T. Hunter [Va.], Jefferson Davis [Miss.], John J. Crittenden [Ky.], Albert G. Brown [Miss.], Alfred Iverson [Ga.]; and the chief Republican speakers were Lyman Trumbull [Ill.], John P. Hale [N. H.], Henry Wilson [Mass.], William P. Fessenden [Me.], Zachariah Chandler [Mich.].

THE CONSPIRACY OF JOHN BROWN

SENATE, DECEMBER 5-14, 1859

SENATOR TRUMBULL.-No man who is not prepared to subvert the Constitution, destroy the Government, and resolve society into its original elements can justify such an act. No matter what evils, either real or imaginary, may exist in the bodypolitic, if each individual, or every set of twenty individuals, out of more than twenty millions of people, is to be permitted in his own way and in defiance of the laws of the land to undertake to correct those evils, there is not a government upon the face of the earth that could last a day. And it seems to me, sir, that those persons who reason only from abstract principles, and believe themselves justifiable on all occasions, and in every form, in combating evil wherever it exists, forget that the right which they claim for themselves exists equally in every other person. All governments, the best which have been devised, encroach necessarily more or less on the individual rights of man, and to that extent may be regarded as evils. Shall we, therefore, destroy government, dissolve society, destroy regulated and constitutional liberty, and inaugurate in its stead anarchy-a condition of things in which every man shall be permitted to follow the instincts of his own passions or prejudices or feelings, and where there will be no protection to the physically weak against the encroachments of the strong? Till we are prepared to inaugurate such a state as this, no man can justify the deeds done at Harper's Ferry.

In regard to the misguided man who led the insurgents on that occasion I have no remarks to make. He has already expiated upon the gallows the crime which he committed against the laws of his country; and to answer for his errors or his virtues, whatever they may have been, he has gone fearlessly