Passion does not reason; but if Brown reasoned and desired to give a public motive to his personal rancors, he probably said to himself that “the slave drivers had tried to put down freedom in Kansas by force of arms, and he would try to put down slavery by the same means.” Thus the bloody instructions which they taught return to plague the inventors. They gave, for the first time in the history of the United States, an example of the resort to arms to carry out political schemes, and, dreadful as the retaliation is which Brown has initiated, must take their share of the responsibility. They must remember that they accustomed men, in their Kansas forays, to the idea of using arms against their political opponents, that by their crimes and outrages they drove hundreds to madness, and that the feelings of bitterness and revenge thus generated have since rankled in the heart. Brown has made himself an organ of these in a fearfully significant way. The evident terror many Southerners had of a slave insurrection filled Bryant with scorn. Buchanan wished to acquire Cuba and northern Mexico, and Southern newspapers wished Africa opened and new millions of blacks poured in; slavery was a blessed institution, and we could not have too much of it! “But while they speak the tocsin sounds, the blacks are in arms, their houses are in flames, their wives and children driven into exile or killed, and a furious servile war stretches its horrors over years. That is the blessed institution you ask us to foster, and spread, and worship, and for the sake of which you even spout your impotent threats against the grand edifice of the Union!” Pending the trial there was much interest in Brown’s carpet-bag. The _Evening Post_ said that its incendiary contents were probably Washington’s will, emancipating his slaves; his letter of 1786 to Lafayette expressing hope that slavery would be abolished; Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, deploring slavery; his project of 1785 for emancipating the slaves; and similar documents by Patrick Henry, John Randolph, and Monroe. Bryant’s utterance when John Brown was hanged recalls that of our other great men of letters. Emerson spoke of Brown as “that new saint awaiting his martyrdom”; Thoreau called him “an angel of light”; Longfellow jotted in his diary, “The date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one.” Bryant wrote: ... History, forgetting the errors of his judgment in the contemplation of his unfaltering courage, of his dignified and manly deportment in the face of death, and of the nobleness of his aims, will record his name among those of its martyrs and heroes.