A few minutes after 11 a.m. on December 2, 1859, John Brown walked down the steps of the Charles Town jail, climbed into the back of a horse-drawn wagon, and sat down on his own coffin. Flanked by files of soldiers, the wagon moved off toward a field a short distance from the town where a scaffold had been erected. No civilians were permitted near the execution site. The field was ringed by 1,500 soldiers, among them a company of Virginia Military Institute cadets commanded by a stern-looking professor who would soon gain fame and immortality as the Confederate Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson. In the ranks of a Richmond company stood another man who, in a few short years, would also achieve immortality by committing one of the most infamous deeds in American history—John Wilkes Booth. [Illustration: With soldiers lining the streets, John Brown comes down the steps of the Charles Town jail on the way to his execution, December 2, 1859. The wagon containing his coffin stands nearby.] As the hushed military watched, Brown climbed the scaffold steps. Sheriff John W. Campbell pulled a white linen hood over the prisoner’s head and set the noose. John Avis, the jailer, asked Brown to step forward onto the trap. “You must lead me,” Brown replied, “for I cannot see.” The abolitionist’s last words were directed to Avis as one final adjustment of the noose was made. “Be quick,” he said. At 11:30 a hatchet stroke sprung the trap and John Brown died. The voice of a militia colonel broke the stillness: “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such enemies of the human race!” But the end was not yet. True, Brown was dead; but he had helped to arouse popular passions both North and South to the point where compromise would be impossible. The raid created a national furor and generated a wave of emotionalism that widened the sectional breach that had divided the country for so many years. Although conservative Northern opinion quickly condemned the raid as the work of a madman, the more radical hailed it as “the best news America ever had” and glorified Brown as “the new saint” whose martyrdom in the cause of human freedom would make the gallows “glorious like the cross.” [Illustration: The hanging of John Brown took place at 11:30 a.m., December 2, 1859, in a field just outside Charles Town. The field no longer exists, but the site is identified by a simple stone marker.]