Sometimes they sorely tax the loyalty of their admirers
with their eccentricities and their defiance of the conventions
of their age. Wisdom is only justified of these, her strange
children, in the next generation. Prominent among such lives is
that of John Brown. The conscience of the Northern States on the
question of slavery needed but some strong irritant to arouse it
to vigorous action, and, the hanging of John Brown sufficed.
The institution of slavery became both ridiculous and hateful to
multitudes because so good a man must be done to death to
preserve it. The verdict of Victor Hugo, 'What the South slew
last December was not John Brown, but slavery,' found an echo in
many minds. And when the long, fierce conflict, through which
Emancipation came, was begun, the quaint lines,
John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on,
became one of the mightiest of the battle-songs which urged the
Federal hosts to victory. His name kindled the flame of that
passion for freedom which made the cause of the North triumphant,
and there was awe mingled with the love they bore his memory.
Perhaps no man had been oftener called with plausible reason a
fool; but those who knew the single-hearted devotion to a great
cause of this ready victim of the gallows came reverently to
think of him as 'God's fool.
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