Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston, November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical prophecy, but now long since fulfilled: "The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters of _Humanity_ have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American _Democracy_ would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a _Pharoah_ will go under and perish. . . . "Slavery will not _die a dry death_. It may have as many lives as a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly to appear as mourners."(128) Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave, but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far enough to see that within a single decade the "_sin of the nation_" would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia --the State that hung John Brown--at the home of its greatest Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm" teaching free negroes--sons of Africa--to read and write--to read the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John Brown."(129) One sample of prophecy of what _disunion_ would be, we give from a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland: