The relation which the anti-slavery people bore to the John Brown episode is that of a chorus: they hailed the coming of the Lord. It is also that of a client: they backed him with money and arms. They are the link between the myth and the fact. They lived inside the swirl of rhapsody which was bearing Brown across the horizon. The progress of righteous-minded law-breaking, which began as soon as Garrison had explained the iniquity of the Federal Constitution, was very rapid after the passage of the fugitive slave law in 1850. To help fugitive slaves escape was a good training for those who were to supply anti-slavery swords and guns to the private war in Kansas. Criticism stands dumb before this situation: no man can tell what he himself would have done under the circumstances. The anti-slavery scholars and saints regarded themselves as the representatives of law and order in fomenting this carnage; and perhaps they were. But the mind of John Brown took one more stride, and imagined a holy war to be begun through a slave insurrection. Nobody could have stopped Brown: he was wound up: he was going to do the thing. He naturally came to his Eastern partisans for support, and of course obtained a different degree of support from each individual to whom his horrifying scheme was disclosed. The people who would listen sifted themselves down by natural law to half a dozen, and among this half-dozen was Dr. Howe. Brown moved about under assumed names, and his accomplices corresponded in cryptic language, raising money and arms. The natural power and goodness of the man cast a spell over many who met him. It was more than a spell, it was the presence and shadow of martyrdom. And it fell upon the imagination of enthusiasts who had spent years of their lives in romantic, sacrificial law-breaking. More than this: John Brown was the living embodiment of an idea with which the anti-slavery mind was always darkly battling--the idea of atonement, of vicarious suffering. Howe and his associates somehow felt that they would be untrue to themselves--false to God--if they did not help John Brown, even if he were going to do something that would not bear the telling. John Brown thus fulfilled the dreams of the abolitionists; he was their man. He portended bloodshed--salvation through bloodshed. It was to come. Brown himself hardly knew his own significance or he would have demanded personal service, not money, from his patrons. Suppose John Brown had said to Gerrit Smith, and to Sanborn and Howe and Higginson and Stearns: “I do not want your money, but come with me. And if you will not come now, yet next year you will come--and the year after--you, and your sons by the thousand. You will follow me and you will not return, as I shall not return.”