‘JOHN BROWN’ IS DEAD!
‘He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought his last battle.’ He rope with which Virginia strangled the old man to death was the result of slave labor. Slavery has at last put its iron grip upon the throat of Liberty. The Vulture and Eagle have met. The Eagle fell, but amid the stormy splendor, soared again to gaze upon the Morning Star of Liberty in a world of peace, where the monarch merchant and mendicant slave are equal before the throne of God, and the strifes of tyrant scease. The ‘gallows’ of noble and patriotic Virginia has done its barbarous work, but the great principle written by Nature on the heart of John Brown will survive the ‘wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.’ His name will echo in every slave-hovel in the more than arctic midnight confines of Slavery, and the motive of his action will illumine every heart like the blaze of a million beacons. While the hearts of Virginia as coward soldiery quaked with fear, he smiled on their ‘bristling steel,’ and bore their gibes and jeers with heroic fortitude. His thoughts are ‘thoughts that breathe,’ and his ‘words will burn’ in the breast of all honest men, when the ashes of the soldier’s camp-fires shall be scattered to the four winds of heaven, and those who built them forgotten; for ‘Man cannot hide what God would reveal.’ The oppressor for every broken law will feel the retribution power of insulted justice.
‘The vote that shakes the turrets of the land,
The freemen will cast with unpurchased hand,’
and that which to-day is denounced as criminal before the law, will be the golden Rule of life; and the ‘sad music of humanity’ will cease, and our country be the ‘Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave.’
In defence of Liberty, four millions of slaves will fill the rank and file, and redress the accumulated infamy which ages have heaped upon their forefathers. It will be no ‘ten-party sizzle,’ or Harper’s Ferry bubble; for the indomitable spirit of John Brown will go before them, like a ‘pillar of fire by night,’ and light them to the proud eyrie where the eagle now dreams in her next. One scream from her now strangled throat, and every slave would be a tiger in his den, thirsting for blood, and the ‘pound of flesh’ alone would cancel the deep damning wrong they seek to revenge. The North would have no voice in this; it would be the oppressor and the oppressed; and the beauties of ‘disunion’ would be seen and felt, and the South be heard to exclaim, ‘God save the United States of America!’ not the institution of Slavery.
John Brown failed for the hour, but success will grow out of the rashness of his act. The South have sown the seeds of discord broad-cast among the slaves: those who ‘sow the wind will reap the whirlwind’; the wrath of God will overtake the wicked, and the ‘Green Bay Tree’ will flourish, when they shall have all fallen, and gone down to their dishonored resting place.
