The trend of Brown's constant defence was that he obeyed his conscience. His lawless conduct, the death of many of his party and the murder of Virginia citizens gave him very little apparent intellectual unrest. He sowed to the wind and reaped the logical harvest, if it is the appropriate word, the whirlwind. Brown's high Calvinism bordered on fatalism. Oliver Cromwell never believed more radically in the foreordination of all human actions than did he. When questioned concerning the failure of this invasion he replied: "All of our actions, even all of the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made." When Judge Russell visited him he said: "I know that the very errors by which my scheme was marred were decreed before the world was made. I had no more to do with the course I pursued than a shot leaving a cannon has to do with the spot where it shall fall." It is when patriotic men read the story of "John Brown's Raid" by the torches of President Lincoln's early election, the Civil War and the Emancipation of all American slaves, that they seem to become blind to the terrible criminal features of the invasion and look only at the national results and the magnificient courage, benevolent motives and supreme self-sacrifice of this martyr. Multitudes of visionary men regard him as a divinely appointed John the Baptist raised up to usher in the day of physical freedom for every slave on American soil and their posterity to the end of time. They claim that in this instance "The End has justified the Means." His raid made the North solid against the slave system and the South as solid against anti-slavery theories and agitators. Before the Brown raid the vote for John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate for President, was 1341000. James Buchanan had 496000 majority. The year after the raid Abraham Lincoln received 1886000 votes for President and had 491000 majority over Stephen A. Douglas, when the South voted for another Democrat. Fremont had 114 votes in the Electoral College. Lincoln had 180. Under his presidency the emancipation of every slave on the national soil took place. The nations of Europe learned for the first time the important lesson that the United States was able to maintain its national unity. This raid beyond question hastened in the Civil War. I have seen Federal regiments marching on to battle enthusiastically singing: "John Brown's body lies a mould'ring in the grave, But his soul is marching on." A few weeks after Brown's execution Victor Hugo said, "What the South slew last December was not John Brown but slavery." His statement developed into a colossal historical truth. The great statesman, orator and senator, John J. Ingalls of Kansas, closed an oration with these remarkable words: