It would be proper to say that the conquest of the Southern States was the greatest or principal undertaking in Brown's career, and that it was in 1857 that he first planned to attempt it. His capture of Pate's horses and mules at Black Jack in June; and the days which he spent in stealing cattle, at and around Osawatomie, during the last days of August, 1856; and his plundering in Missouri and Kansas in 1858, may be called meddling with slavery; though grafting upon the anti-slavery sentiment of the time, would more accurately describe the relation, if any, of his operations to slavery. There was this difference between Nat Turner and John Brown: the negro was a religious fanatic; he was sincere and consistent. Falsehood, deception, greed, selfishness, are not attributes of fanaticism, but they are characteristic of Brown's life. The sincerity of his "death-bed" professions of godliness, and of sympathy for the men in bondage, is discredited by the actions of a lifetime as conspicuous for its turpitude as it was barren of virtues. Neither charitable deed, nor manifestation of a benevolent, or of a patriotic spirit, appears, even incidentally, along the lines of his life, to break the monotone of selfishness that distinguishes it. In public affairs he took no part worthy of consideration. Mr. Gill gave up a view of his natural or unassumed personality that is consistently discreditable, and Brown's correspondence is a confirmation of that estimate. It teaches the lesson that he administered his deportment to suit the circumstances of the occasion existing at the time; and that it covered the entire range of the various phases of human intercourse; from that of a coarse, brutal vulgarity, to the saintliness of his latest metamorphosis; from the use of language so distinctly vulgar and obscene, as to be, in the opinion of the writer, unprintable,[510] to the crafty assumptions of godliness contained in his letter to the innocent Quakeress.[511] Brown was crafty in the sublimest degree of the art. His craftiness was a distinction. It will be difficult to find in our literature a more interesting example of the refinements of the art than the piece which he set for Mrs. Stearns: his "Old Brown's Farewell: to the Plymouth Rocks; Bunker Hill Monuments; Charter Oaks; and Uncle Toms Cabbins." In the setting, and in the dramatic execution of the play, he exhibited the perfection of the actor. The paper was not drawn for Mr. Parker to read to his congregation. Brown was not "casting his pearls before swine." It was for Mrs. Stearns personally that the paper was written; it was her heart that he intended to touch, and her generous emotions that he intended to prey upon. How successfully he played the part she has related.[512]