“It was in this field that Brown received his impulse. A tender father, whose life was in his sons’ life, he saw his first-born seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by suffering and heat, beaten by the officer in charge like a dog, and long lying at death’s door! Another noble boy, without warning, without offence, unarmed, in open day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead! No justice sought out the murderers. No United States attorney was despatched in hot haste. No marines or soldiers aided the wronged and weak! “The shot that struck the child’s heart crazed the father’s brain. Revolving his wrongs and nursing his hatred of that deadly system that breeds such contempt of justice and humanity, at length his phantoms assume a slender form and organize such an enterprise as one might expect from a man whom grief had bereft of good judgment. He goes to the heart of a slave State: one man—and sixteen followers! He seizes two thousand brave Virginians and holds them in duress. “When a great State attacked a handful of weak colonies the government and nation were torpid; but when seventeen men attacked a sovereign State, then Maryland arms, and Virginia arms, and the United States government arms, and they three rush against seventeen men! “Travellers tell us that the Geysers of Iceland—those singular boiling springs of the North—may be transported with fury by plucking up a handful of grass or turf and throwing them into the springs. The hot springs of Virginia are of the same kind! A handful of men was thrown into them, and what a boiling there has been! “But meanwhile no one can fail to see that this poor, child-bereft old man is the manliest of them all. Bold, unflinching, honest, without deceit or dodge, refusing to take technical advantages of any sort, but openly avowing his principles and motives, glorying in them in danger and death as much as when in security—that wounded old father is the most remarkable figure in this whole drama. The governor, the officers of the State, and all the attorneys are pigmies compared to him. “I deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sorrows. I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his reason. I disapprove of his mad and feeble schemes. I shrink from the folly of the bloody foray, and I shrink, likewise, from all the anticipations of that judicial bloodshed which, doubtless, ere long will follow—for when was cowardice ever magnanimous? They will kill the man, not for treason, but for proving them cowards! “By and by, when men look back and see without prejudice that whole scene, they will not be able to avoid saying: ‘What must be the measure of manhood in a scene where a crazed old man stood head and shoulders above those who had their whole reason? What is average citizenship when a lunatic is a hero?’”