"The only possible terms I can offer I suggested in my first message. I will protect you and your men from this infuriated crowd and guarantee you a fair trial by the civil authorities."
"I can't accept," Brown answered curtly. "You must allow me to leave this place with my men and the prisoners I hold as hostages until I reach the canal locks on the Maryland side. There I will release your citizens, and as soon as this is done your troops may fire on us, and pursue us."
"Such an offer is a waste of words. You must see that further resistance is useless."
"You have the numbers on us, sir," Brown answered defiantly. "But we are not afraid of death. I'd as lief die by a bullet as on the gallows. I can do more now by dying than by living. I came here to destroy the institution of Slavery by the sword—"
Lee's answer came with clean-cut emphasis.
"The law which protects Slavery is going to be repealed in God's own time. I am, myself, working toward that end as well as you, sir, and the end is sure. But at this moment the Constitution of the United States to which we owe liberty, justice, order, progress, wealth and power, guarantees this institution. Until its repeal it is my duty and it is your duty to obey the law. Will you submit?"
Brown's answer came like the crack of a rifle.
"The laws of the United States I have burned in a public square, sir. The Constitution is a covenant with Death, an agreement with Hell. I loathe it. I despise it. I spit upon it—"
Lee lifted his hand in gesture of command.
"That will do, sir!"
He faced Stuart with quick decision.
"Take him back to his men and give the signal of assault."
"Good!"
Stuart turned to Green.
"I'll wave my cap."
Stuart led Brown through the gate to the Engine House.
Lee summoned Green.
"Your troops are raw men, I understand."
"They have never been under fire, sir. But they're soldiers—never fear."
"All right. We'll put them to the test. Assault and take the Engine House without firing a shot. No matter how severe the fire on you, we must protect our citizens held inside. Use the bayonet only. Give each of your twelve men careful instructions. When fired on, they must not return that fire!"
Green saluted and passed to the head of his detail of twelve men. A shout from the boys in the tree tops was the signal of Stuart's return.
"Watch that crowd," Lee ordered the sentinel. "Use the reserves to hold them out of range."
Stuart returned with his eyes flashing.
"Ready, sir!"
"Give your signal."
Stuart stepped into the open, and waved his cap.
Green's detail of twelve men, the commander at their head, rushed to the Engine House with a shout. The crowd of two thousand people answered with a roar.
A volley rang from the besieged and a moment's silence followed. Their first shots had gone wild and not a marine had fallen. They had reached the door and their sledge hammers were raining blows on its solid timbers. An incessant fire poured from the portholes which Brown had cut through the walls. The men were so close to the door his shots were not effective.
Brown ordered one of his prisoners, Captain Dangerfield, a clerk of the Armory Staff, to secure the fastenings. Dangerfield slipped the bolts to their limit and stood watching his chance to throw them and admit the marines.
Brown ordered him back. He retreated a few feet and watched the bolts, as the blows rained on the door.
Stuart had slipped into the fight. He called to Green.
"The hammers are too light. There's a big ladder outside. Get it and use it as a battering ram."
With a shout the marines seized the ladder, five men on a side, and drove it with tremendous force against the door. The first blow shivered a panel.
Brown ordered the fire engine rolled against the door. Dangerfield sprang to assist. He slipped the bolt out instead of in! The next rush of the ladder drove the door against the engine, rolled it back a foot and made a small opening through which Lieutenant Green forced his way.
The marines crowded in behind him. Green sprang on the engine with drawn sword and looked for Brown. A shower of bullets greeted him. Yet the miracle happened. Not one touched him. He recognized Colonel Washington, leaped from the engine and rushed to his side.
On one knee, a few feet to his left, knelt a man with a carbine in his hand pulling the lever to reload.
Colonel Washington waved his arm.
"That's Osawatomie."
The Lieutenant sprang twelve feet at him. He gave a quick underthrust of his sword, struck him midway of the body and raised the old man completely from the ground. He fell forward with his head between his knees. Green clubbed his sword and rained blow after blow on his head.
The men who watched the scene supposed that he had split the skull. Yet he survived. Green's first sword thrust had struck the heavy leather belt and did not enter the body. The sword was bent double. The clubbed blade was too light. It had made only superficial wounds.
As the marines pressed through the opening the first man was shot dead. The second was wounded in the face. The men who followed made short work of the fight. They bayoneted a raider under the engine and pinned another to the wall.
The fight had lasted but three minutes.
Brown lay on the ground wounded. His son, Oliver, was dead. His son, Watson, was mortally wounded. All the rest were dead or prisoners, save seven who made good their escape with Cook and Owen Brown into the hills of Pennsylvania.
Colonel Lee entered the Engine House and greeted Washington.
"You are all right, sir?"
"Sound as a dollar, Colonel Lee. The damned old fool's had me penned up here for two days. I'm dry as a powder horn and hungry as a wolf. Nothing to eat, and nothing to drink, but water out of a horse-bucket!"
Green faced his Colonel and saluted. He glanced at the prostrate prisoners.
"See that their wounds are dressed immediately. Give them good food, and take them as quickly as possible to the jail at Charlestown under heavy guard. See that they are not harmed or insulted by the people."
Lee turned sadly to his friend.
"Colonel Washington, the thing we have dreaded has come. The first blow has been struck. The Blood Feud has been raised."
CHAPTER XXXI
On the surface only was the Great Deed a failure. Not a single pike had been thrust into a white man's breast by his slave. Not a single torch had been applied to a Southern home. His chosen Captains never passed the sentinel peak into Fauquier county. The Black Bees had not swarmed. But the keen ear of the old man had heard the rumble of the swarming of twenty million white hornets in the North.
The moment he had lifted his head a prisoner in the hands of his courteous captor, he foresaw the power which the role of martyrdom would give to his cause. Instantly he assumed the part and played it with genius to the last breath of his indomitable body.
He had stained the soil of Virginia with the blood of innocent and unoffending citizens. He had raised the Blood Feud at the right moment, a few months before a Presidential campaign. He had raised it at the right spot in a mountain gorge that looked southward to the Capitol at Washington and northward to the beating hearts of the millions, who had been prepared for this event by the long years of the Abolition Crusade which had culminated in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
A wave of horror for a moment swept the nation, North and South. Frederick Douglas fled to Europe. Sanborn, the treasurer and manager of the conspiracy, hurried across the border into Canada. Howe and Stearns hid. Theodore Parker was already in Europe.
Poor, old, gentle, generous Gerrit Smith collapsed and was led to the insane asylum at Ithaca, New York.
Two men alone of the conspirators realized the tremendous thing that had been done—John Brown in jail at Charlestown, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the militant preacher of Massachusetts.
To Brown, life had been an unbroken horror. His tragic Puritan soul had ever faced it with scorn—scorn for himself and the world. He was used to failure and disaster. They had been his meat and drink. Bankruptcy, imprisonment, flight from justice and the death of half his children had been mere incidents of life.
He had cast scarcely a glance at his dying sons in the Engine House. He had not tried to minister to them. His hand was tightly gripped on his carbine.
His grim soul now rose to its first long flight of religious ecstasy. He saw that the Southerner's reverence for Law and Order would make his execution inevitable. His dark spirit shouted for joy. His own blood, if he could succeed in playing the role of martyr, would raise the Blood Feud to its highest power. No statesman, no leader, no poet, no seer could calm the spirit of the archaic beast in man, which this martyrdom would raise if skillfully played. He was sure he could play the role with success.
The one man in the North who saw with clear vision the thing which
Brown's failure had done was the Worcester clergyman.
Higginson was a preacher by accident. He was a born soldier. From the first meeting with Brown his fighting spirit had answered his cry for blood with a shout of approval. Higginson not only refused to run, but also groaned with shame at the fears of his fellow conspirators. His first utterance was characteristic of his spirit.
"I am overwhelmed with remorse that the men who gave him money and arms could not have been by his side when he fell."
He stood his ground in Worcester and dared arrest. He did not proclaim his guilt from the housetop. But his friends and neighbors knew and he walked the streets with head erect.
He did more. He joined with John W. LeBarnes and immediately organized a plot to liberate Brown by force. He raised the money and engaged George H. Hoyt to go to Harper's Ferry, ostensibly to appear as his attorney at the trial, in reality to act as a spy, discover the strength of the jail and find whether it could be stormed and taken by a company of determined men.
At his first interview with Brown the spy revealed his purpose.
"I have come from Boston to rescue you," he whispered.
The old man's face was convulsed with anger. He spoke in the tones of final command which had always closed argument with friend or foe.
"Never will I consent to such a scheme."
"But listen—"
"You listen to me, young man. The bare mention of this thing again and I shall refuse to see or speak to you. Do you accept my decision, sir?"
Hoyt agreed at once. Only in this way could he keep in touch with the man whom he had come to save.
"The last thing on this earth I would ask," Brown continued sternly, "is to be taken from this jail except by the State of Virginia when I shall ascend the scaffold."
Hoyt looked longingly at the old-fashioned fireplace in his prison room.
Two men could have crawled up its flue at the same time.
His refusal did not stop Higginson's efforts. He appealed to the forlorn wife at North Elba, New York, to go to Harper's Ferry, ask to see her husband and whisper her plan into his ear. He sent the money and got Mrs. Brown as far as Baltimore on her journey when Brown heard of it and stopped her with a peremptory command.
The determined conspirator then worked up the proposition to buy a steam tug which could make 18 knots an hour, steam up the James River to Richmond, kidnap the Governor of the Commonwealth, Henry Wise, and hold him for ransom until Brown was released. The scheme only failed for the lack of money.
Higginson had seen one thing. Brown saw a bigger thing.
Higginson's refusal to flee was based on sound psychology. He knew that from the day John Brown struck his brutal blow at the heart of the South and blood had begun to flow, the Blood Feud would be the biggest living fact in the Nation's history.
He knew that he could remain in Worcester with impunity. The strength of a revolution lies in the fact that its first bloodletting releases the instincts of the animal in man hitherto restrained by law. He knew that Brown's cry of Liberty for the slave would become for millions the cloak to hide the archaic impulse to kill. He knew that while the purpose of civilization is to restrain and control these instincts of the beast in man—it was too late for the forces of Law and Order to rally in the North. The first outbursts of indignation against Brown would quickly pass. They would be futile.
He read them with a smile. The New York Herald said: "He has met with a fate which he courted, but his death and the punishment of all his criminal associates will be as a feather in the balance against the mischievous consequences which will probably follow from the rekindling of the slavery excitement in the South."
The Tribune took the lead in dismissing the act as the deed of a madman. The Hartford Evening News declared:
"Brown is a poor, demented, old man. The calamity would never have occurred had there been no lawless and criminal invasion of Kansas."
But the most significant utterance in the North came from the Pacifist leader of Abolition, William Lloyd Garrison, himself. Higginson read it with a cry of joy.
The Liberator's words of comment were brief but significant of the coming mob mind:
"The particulars of a misguided, wild, and apparently insane, through disinterested and well-intended effort by insurrection, to emancipate the slaves in Virginia, under the leadership of Captain John, alias 'Osawatomie' Brown, may be found on our third page. Our views of war and bloodshed even in the best of causes, are too well known to need, repeating here; but let no one who glories in the revolutionary struggle of 1776, deny the right of slaves to imitate the example of our fathers."
Even the leader of the movement for Abolition by peaceful means had succumbed to the poison of the smell of human blood.
Higginson knew that the process of a revolution was always in the order of Ideas, Leaders, The Mob, The Tread of Armies. For thirty years Garrison and the Abolition Crusaders had spread the Ideas. The Inspired Leader had at last appeared. His right arm had struck the first blow. He could hear the roar of the coming mob whose impulse to murder had been roused. It would call their ancestral soul. The answer was a certainty. He could see no necessity for Brown's blood to be spilled in martyrdom.
The old man, walking with burning eyes toward his trial, knew better. His vision was clear. God had revealed His full purpose at last. He would climb a Virginia gallows and drag millions down, from that scaffold into the grave with him.
CHAPTER XXXII
Never in the history of an American commonwealth was a trial conducted with more reverence for Law than the arraignment of John Brown and his followers in the stately old Court House at Charlestown, Virginia.
The people whom he had assaulted with intent to kill, the people against whom he had incited slaves to rise in bloody insurrection, the kinsmen of the dead whom his rifles had slain, stood in line on the street and watched him pass into the building manacled to one of his disciples. They did not hoot, nor hiss, nor curse. They watched him walk in silence between the tall granite pillars of the House of Justice.
The behavior of this crowd was highwater mark in the development of Southern character. The structure of their society rested on the sanctity of Law. It was being put to the supreme test.
A Northern crowd under similar conditions, had they followed the principles which John Brown preached, would have torn those prisoners to pieces without the formality of a trial.
It was precisely this trait of character in his enemies on which Brown relied for the martyrdom he so passionately desired. When the witnesses at the preliminary hearing had testified to his guilt and the Court had ordered the trial set, he was asked if he had counsel.
He rose from his seat and addressed the nation, not the Court:
"Virginians, I did not ask for any quarter at the time I was taken. I did not ask to have my life spared. The Governor of the State of Virginia tenders me his assurance that I shall have a fair trial, but under no circumstances whatever will I be able to have a fair trial. If you seek my blood, you can have it at any moment, without this mockery of a trial. I have no counsel. I am ready for my fate. I do not wish a trial. I have now little further to ask, other than that I may not be foolishly insulted, as cowardly barbarians insult those who fall into their power."
The posing martyr was courting insults which had not been offered him. He was grieved that he could not bring the charge of barbarous treatment. He had been treated by Colonel Lee with the utmost consideration. His wounds had been dressed. He had received the best medical care. He had eaten wholesome food. His jailer had proven friendly and sympathetic.
He went out of his way to insult the Court and the people and invite abuse. He demanded that he be executed without trial.
The Court calmly assigned him two of the ablest lawyers in the county, and ordered the trial to proceed.
At noon the following day the Grand Jury returned a true bill against each of the prisoners for treason to the commonwealth, and for conspiring with slaves to commit both treason and murder, and for murder.
Captain Avis, the kindly jailer, was ordered to bring his prisoners into Court. He found old Brown in bed, pretending to be ill. He refused to rise. He was determined to get the effect of an arraignment of his prostrate body in the court room. He had foreseen the effect of this picture on the imagination of the North. The crowd of eager reporters at the preliminary hearing had given him the cue.
He was carried into the court room exactly as he had desired, on a cot. While the hearing proceeded he lay with his eyes closed as if in deep suffering. He had carefully prepared a plea for delay which he knew would not be granted. Its effect on the mob mind of the North was what he sought. The press would give it wings.
He lifted himself on his elbow and asked Judge Parker to allow him to make a protest:
"I have been promised a fair trial. I am not now in circumstances that enable me to attend a trial, owing to the state of my health. I have a severe wound in the back, or rather in one kidney which enfeebles me very much. But I am doing well, and I only ask for a very short delay of my trial, that I may be able to listen to it! And I merely ask this that, as the saying is, the devil may have his dues, no more. I wish to say further that my hearing is impaired by wounds I have about my head. I could not hear what the Court said this morning. I would be glad to hear what is said at my trial. Any short delay would be all I would ask. I do not presume to ask more than a very short delay so that I may in some degree recover and be able at least to listen to my trial."
Dr. Mason the attending physician, swore that he had examined Brown, and that his wounds had effected neither his hearing nor his mind. He further swore that he was not seriously disabled.
Brown knew that this was true, but he had entered his plea. His words would flash over the nation. The effect was what he foresaw. Although he had defied the laws of God and man, he dared demand more than justice under the laws which he had spit upon. And, however inconsistent his position, he knew that as the poison of the Blood Feud which he was raising filled the souls of the people through the press, he would be glorified from day to day and new power given to every word he might utter.
He had already composed his last message destined to sway the minds of millions. The response of the radical press to his pose of illness was quick and sharp. The Lawrence, Kansas, Republican voiced the feelings of thousands:
"We defy an instance to be shown in any civilized community where a prisoner has been forced to trial for his life, when so disabled by sickness or ghastly wounds as to be unable even to sit up during the proceedings, and compelled to be carried to the judgment hall upon a litter. Such a proceeding shames the name of Justice, and only finds a congenial place amid the records of the bloody Inquisition."
Even so conservative a paper as the Boston Transcript said:
"Whatever may be his guilt or folly, a man convicted under such circumstances, and, especially, a man executed after such a trial, will be the most terrible fruit that Slavery has ever borne, and will excite the execration of the civilized world."
The canny old poseur was on his way to an immortal martyrdom. He knew that every article of the Virginia Code was being scrupulously obeyed. He knew that the Grand Jury was in session and that the trial was set at the first term of the court following the crime. There had been no haste. He also knew that the impartial Judge who was presiding was the soul of justice in his dealings both with the clamorous people, the prosecution and the counsel appointed for the defense. But he also knew that the mob mind to whom he was appealing would not believe that he knew this. In appeals to the crowd he was a past master. In this appeal he knew that facts would count for nothing—beliefs, illusions for everything.
He played each opportunity for all it was worth.
When the Court opened the following morning, his counsel, Mr. Botts, amazed the prisoner and the prosecution by reading a telegram from Ohio asking a delay on the ground that important affidavits were on the way to prove legally that John Brown was insane. Before the old man could stop him he gave to the Court the substance of these sworn statements.
His friends and relatives in Ohio had sworn that Brown had been always a monomaniac and had been intermittently insane for twenty years. One swore that he had been plainly insane for a quarter of a century. On the family record of insanity the affidavits all agreed. His grandmother was hopelessly insane for six years and died insane. His uncles and aunts, two sons and two daughters had been intermittently insane for years, while one of his daughters had died a hopeless maniac. His only sister, her daughter and one of his brothers were insane at intervals. Two of his first cousins were occasionally mad. Two had been committed to the State Insane Asylum repeatedly and two others were at that time in close restraint.
Brown refused to allow this plea to be entered. He bitterly denounced the counsel assigned to him as traitors, and at their request the following day they were allowed to withdraw from the case. No sooner had he finished his denunciation of his counsel than Hoyt, the young alleged attorney, sent by Higginson to defend him, sprang to his feet and asked a delay, as he was unprepared to proceed without assistance.
The Judge adjourned the Court until the following morning at ten o'clock.
The young spy knew nothing of law but he bluffed it through until the arrival of two able attorneys, Samuel Chilton of Washington, and Hiram Grismer of Cleveland.
Botts, the dismissed counsel, who had sought to save Brown's life by the plea of insanity, put his notes and his office at the disposal of Hoyt and sat up all night with him preparing his work for the following day.
When the new lawyers appeared the old man made another play at illness to gain delay. The Court ordered him to be brought in on his cot. Again, the physician swore he was lying, that he was gaining in strength daily. The Judge, however, granted a delay of two days.
The moment the order was issued for an adjournment Brown deliberately rose from his cot and walked back to jail.
The trial was closed on Monday by the speeches of the prosecution and the defense. The judge charged the jury and in three-quarters of an hour they filed back into the jury box.
The crowd jammed every inch of space in the old Court House, the wide entrance hall, and overflowed into the street.
The foreman solemnly pronounced him guilty.
The old man merely pulled the covers of his cot up and stretched his legs, as if he had no interest in the verdict. Entirely recovered from every effect of his wounds, as able to walk as ever, he had refused to walk and had been carried again into the court room. He had determined to receive his sentence on a bed. He knew the effect of this picture on the gathering mob.
The silence of death fell on the crowded room. Not a single cry of triumph from the kindred of the dead. Not a single cheer from the men whose wives and children had been saved from the horrors of massacre.
Chilton made his motion for an arrest of judgment and the judge ordered the motion to stand over until the next day. Brown heard the arguments the following day again lying on his cot. The judge reserved his decision and the final scene of the drama was enacted on November second.
The clerk asked John Brown if he had anything to say concerning why sentence should not be pronounced upon him.
The crowd stared as they saw the wiry figure of the old man quickly rise. He fixed his eagle eye on them, not on the judge.
Over their heads he talked to the gathering mob of his countrymen. Brown had been a habitual liar from boyhood. In this speech, made on the eve of the sentence of death, he lied in every paragraph. He lied as he had when he grew a beard to play the role of "Shubel Morgan." He lied as he had lied to his victims when posing as a surveyor on the Pottawattomie. He lied as he had done when he crept through the darkness of the night on his sleeping prey. He lied as he had a hundred times about those gruesome murders. He lied for his Sacred Cause.
He lied without stint and without reservation. He lied with such conviction that he convinced himself in the end that he was a hero—a martyr of human liberty and progress. And that he was telling the solemn truth.
"I have, may it please the court, a few words to say:
"In the first place I deny everything but what I have already admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leading them into Canada. I designed to have done the thing again on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or to incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.
"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children—and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust treatment—I say let it be done."
David Cruise was not there to tell of the bullet that crashed through his heart in Missouri. Frederick Douglas was not there to tell that he abandoned Brown in the old stone quarry outside Chambersburg, precisely because he had changed the plan of carrying off slaves as in Missouri to a scheme of treason, wholesale murders and insurrection.
Cruise was in his grave and Douglas on his way to Europe. There was no one to contradict his statements. The mob mind never asks for facts. It asks only for assertions. John Brown gave them what he knew they wished to hear and believe.
They heard and they believed.
With due solemnity, the Judge pronounced the sentence of death and fixed the date on December the second, thirty days in the future.
The old man's eyes flamed with hidden fires at the unexpected grant of a month in which to complete the raising of the Blood Feud so gloriously begun. He was a master in the coming of mystic phrases in letters. He gloried in religious symbols. Within thirty days he could work with his pen the miracle that would transform a nation into the puppets of his will.
He walked beside the jailer, his eyes glittering, his head uplifted. The Judge ordered the crowd to keep their seats until the prisoner was removed. In silence he marched through the throng without a hiss or a taunt.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The day of the Great Deed was one never to be forgotten by Cook's little bride. They had been married six months. Each hour had bound the girl's heart in closer and sweeter bonds. The love that kindled for the handsome blond the day of their first meeting had grown into the deathless passion of the woman for her mate.
He was restless Saturday night. Through the long hours she held her breath to catch his regular breathing. He did not sleep.
At last the terror of it gripped her. Her hand touched his brow and brushed the hair back from his forehead.
"What's the matter, John dear?"
"Restless."
"What is it?"
"Oh, nothing much. Just got to thinking about something and can't sleep.
That's all. Go to sleep now, like a good girl. I'm all right."
The little fingers sought his hand and gripped it.
"I'll try."
She rose at dawn. He had asked an early breakfast to make a long trip into the country.
At the table she watched him furtively. She had asked to go with him and he told her he couldn't take her. She wondered why. A great fear began to steal into her soul. It was the first time she had dared to look into the gulf. She would never ask his secret. He must tell her of his own free will. Her eyes searched his. And he turned away without an answer.
He fought for self-control when he kissed her goodbye. A mad desire swept his heart to take her in his arms, perhaps for the last time.
It would be a confession at the moment the blow was about to fall. He would betray the lives of his associates. He gripped himself and left her with a careless smile.
All day she brooded over the odd parting, the constraint, the silence, the sleepless night.
She went to the services of the revival and sought solace in the songs and prayers of the people. At night the minister preached a sermon that soothed her. A warm glow filled her heart. If God is love as the preacher said, he must know the secrets of his heart and life. He must watch over and bring her lover safely back to her arms.
She reached home at a quarter to ten and went to bed humming an old song
Cook had taught her. The tired body was ready for sleep. She did
not expect her husband to return that night. He had gone as far as
Chambersburg. He promised to come on Monday afternoon.
Through the early hours of the fatal night she slept as soundly as a child.
The firing at the Arsenal between three and four o'clock waked her. She sprang to her feet and looked out the window. The street lamps flickered fitfully in the drizzling rain. No one was passing. There were no shouts, no disturbances.
She wondered about the shots. A crowd of drunken fools were still hanging around the Galt House bar perhaps. She went back to bed and slept again.
It was eight o'clock before the crash of a volley from the Arsenal enclosure roused her. She leaped to her feet, rushed to the window and stood trembling as volley followed volley in a long rattle of rifle and shotgun and pistol.
A neighbor hurried past with a gun in his hand. She asked him what the fighting meant.
"Armed Abolitionists have invaded Virginia," he shouted.
Still it meant nothing to her personally. Her husband was not an Abolitionist. She had known him for more than a year. She had been with him day and night for six months in the sweet intimacy of home and love.
And then the hideous truth came crashing on her terror-stricken soul. Cook had been recognized by a neighbor as he drove Colonel Washington's wagon across the Maryland bridge at dawn. A committee of citizens came to cross-examine her.
She faced them with blanched cheeks.
"My husband, an Abolitionist!" she gasped.
"He's with those murderers and robbers."
She turned on the men like a young tigress.
"You're lying—I tell you!"
For an hour they tried to drag from her a confession of his plans. They left at last convinced that she knew nothing, that she suspected nothing of his real life. She had fought them bravely to the last. In her soul of souls she knew the hideous truth. She recalled the strange yearning with which he had looked at her as he left Sunday morning. She saw the bottom of the gulf at last.
With a cry of anguish and despair she sank to the floor in a faint.
She stirred with one thought tearing at her heart. Had they killed or captured him? She rose, dressed and joined the crowd that surged through the streets. The Rifle Works had been captured, Kagi was dead, the other two wounded, one fatally, the other a prisoner. No trace of her husband had been found. He had not reentered the town from the Maryland side.
She walked to the bridge and found it guarded by armed citizens. Tears of joy filled her eyes.
"He can't get back now!" she breathed.
She hurried to her room, fell on her knees and prayed:
"Oh, dear Lord Jesus, I've tried to be a good and faithful wife. My man has loved me tenderly and truly. Save him, oh, Lord! Don't let him come back now into this den of howling beasts. They'll tear him to pieces. And I can't endure it. I can't. I can't. Have pity, Lord. I'm just a poor, heart-broken wife!"
Through six days of terror and excitement, of surging crowds and marching soldiers, the shivering figure watched through her window—and silently prayed. A guard had been set at her house to catch her husband if he dared to return. She laughed softly.
He would not return! She had asked God not to let him. She was asking him now with every breath she breathed. God would not forget her. He would answer her prayers. She knew it. God is love.
She had begun to sleep again at night. Her man was safe in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The Governor of Virginia had set a price on his head. Men were scouring the hills hunting, as they hunt wild beasts, but God would save him. She had seen His shining face in prayer and He had promised.
And then the blow fell.
Far down the street she caught the roar of a mob. Its cries came faintly at first and then they grew to fierce oaths and brutal shouts.
A man stopped in front of her house and spoke to the guard.
"They've got him!"
"Who?"
"Cook!"
"The damned beast, the spy, the traitor!"
"Where are they takin' him?"
"To the jail at Charlestown."
She had no time to lose. She must see him. Bareheaded she rushed into the street and fought her way to his side. His hands were manacled but his fair head was held erect until he saw the white face of his bride. And then his eyes fell.
Would she, too, turn and curse him?
He asked himself the hideous question once and dared not lift his head. He felt her coming nearer. The guard halted. His eyes were blurred. He could see nothing.
He only felt two soft arms slip round his neck. His own moved instinctively to clasp her but the manacles held them. She kissed his lips before the staring crowd and murmured inarticulate sounds of love and tenderness. She smoothed his blond hair back from his forehead and crooned over him as a mother over a babe.
"My little wife—my poor little girlie—my baby!" he murmured. "Forgive me—I tried to save you from this. But I couldn't. Love would have it so. Now you can forget me!"
The arms tightened about his neck, and gave the answer lips could not frame.
When his trial came she moved to Charlestown to sit by his side in the prison dock, touch his manacled hands and look into his eyes.
The trial moved to its certain end with remorseless certainty. Cook's sister, the wife of Governor Willard, sat beside her doomed brother, and cheered the desolate heart of the girl he had married. Governor Willard gave the full weight of his position and his sterling manhood to his wife in her grief.
He had employed the best lawyer in his state to defend Cook—Daniel W. Vorhees, whose eloquence had given him the title of "The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash."
When the great advocate rose, his towering figure commanded a painful silence in the crowded court room. The people, who packed every inch of its space, hated the man who had lived among them for more than a year as a spy. But he had a wife, he had a sister. And in this solemn hour he should have his day in court. The crowd listened to Vorhees' speech with rapt attention.
His appeal was not based on the letter of the law. He took broader, higher grounds. He sketched the dark days of blood-cursed Kansas. He saw a handsome prodigal son, lured by the spirit of adventure, drawn into its vortex of blind passions. He pictured the sinister figure of the grim Puritan leader condemned to death. He told of the spell this evil mind had thrown over a sensitive boy's soul. He pleaded for mercy and forgiveness, for charity and divine love. He pictured the little Virginia girl at his side drawn into the tragedy by a deathless love. He sketched in words that burned into the souls of his hearers the love of his sister, a love big and tender and strong, a love that had followed him in the far frontiers with prayers, a love that encircled him in the darkness of deeds of violence against the forms of law and order. He pleaded for her and the distinguished Governor of a great state, not because of their high position in life but because they had hearts that could ache and break.
When he had finished his remarkable speech, strong men who hated Cook were sobbing. The room was bathed in tears. The stern visaged judge made no effort to hide his.
The court charged the jury to do impartial justice under the laws of the commonwealth.
There could be but one verdict. It was solemnly given by the foreman and the judge pronounced the sentence of death.
Two soft arms stole around the doomed man's neck, and then, before the court, crowd and God as witnesses, the little wife tenderly cried:
"My lover—my sweetheart—my husband—through evil report and through good report, through life, through death, through all eternity—I—love—you!"
Again strong men wept and turned from one another to hide the signs of their weakness.
The wife walked beside her doomed lover back to the jail. As they went through the narrow passage to his cell, the tall, rough-looking prison guard who accompanied them brushed close, caught her hand and pressed it.
His eyes met hers in a quick look that said more plainly than words:
"I must see you alone."
She waited outside the jail until he reappeared.
He approached her boldly and spoke as if he were delivering a casual message.
"Keep your courage, young woman. And don't you be surprised at anything I'm going to say to you. There's people lookin' at us now. I'm just tellin' you a message your husband's told me—you understand."
"Yes—yes—go on—I understand," she answered quickly.
"I'm from Kansas. I'm a friend of John Cook's. I come all the way here to help him. I joined these guards to get to him. I'm goin' to get him out of here if I can."
"Thank God—thank God," she murmured.
"Keep a stiff upper lip and get your hand on some money to follow us."
"I will."
Another guard approached.
"Leave me now. My name's Charles Lenhart. Don't try to talk to me again.
Just watch and wait."
She nodded, brushed the tears from her eyes and left quickly.
He was on the job without delay. Cook and Edwin Coppoc, condemned to die on the same day, occupied the same room in jail. They borrowed a knife from Lenhart as soon as he came on duty and "forgot" to return it. With this knife they worked at night for a week cutting a hole through the brick wall. Under their clothes in a corner they concealed the fragments of bricks.
When the opening had been completed, they cut teeth in the knife blade and made a small saw strong and keen enough to eat through a link in their shackles.
On the night fixed, Lenhart was on guard waiting in breathless suspense for the men to drop the few feet into the prison yard. A brick wall fifteen feet high could he scaled from his shoulders and the last man up could give him a lift.
Through the long, chill hours he paced his beat on the wall and waited to hear the crunching of the bodies slipping through the walls.
What had happened?
Something had gone wrong in the impulsive mind of the blue-eyed adventurer inside. The hole was open, the saw in his hand to cut the manacles, when he suddenly stopped.
"What's the matter?" Coppoc asked.
"We can't do this to-night."
"For God's sake, why?"
"My sister's in town with Governor Willard to tell me goodbye. They will put the blame of this on them. My sister might be imprisoned. The Governor would be in bad. I've caused them trouble enough—God knows—"
"When are they going?"
"To-morrow. We'll wait until to-morrow night—after they've gone."
"But Lenhart may not be on guard."
"That's so," Cook agreed. "Coppoc, you can go alone. You'd better do it."
"No."
"You'd better."
"I'm not made out of that sort of goods," the boy answered.
"You've got a good old Quaker mother out in Springdale praying for you.
It's your chance—go—I can't tonight."
Nothing could induce Coppoc to desert his comrade and leave him to certain death when his escape should be known.
They replaced the bricks, covered the debris and waited until the following night.
At eleven o'clock they cut the manacles and Coppoc crawled out first. He had barely touched the ground when Cook followed. They glanced about the yard and it was deserted. They strained their eyes to make out the figure of the guard who passed the brick wall. He was not in sight. It was a good omen. Lenhart had no doubt foreseen their escape and dropped to the street outside.
They saw that the timbers of the gallows on which they were to die had not all been fastened.
They secured two pieces of scantling and reached the top of the wall. Suddenly the dark figure of a guard moved toward them. Cook called the signal to Lenhart. But a loyal son of Virginia stood sentinel that night. The answer was a rifle shot. They started to leap and caught the flash of a bayonet below.
They walked back into the jail and surrendered to Captain Avis, their friendly keeper.
The little wife waited and watched in vain.
CHAPTER XXXIV
All uncertainty at an end to his execution, John Brown set his hand to finish the work of his life in a supreme triumph. He entered upon the task with religious joy. The old Puritan had always been an habitual writer of letters. The authorities of Virginia allowed him to write daily to his friends and relatives. He quickly took advantage of this power. The sword of Washington which he grasped on that fatal Sunday night had proven a feeble weapon. He seized a pen destined to slay a million human beings.
His soul on fire with the fixed idea that he had been ordained by God to drench a nation in blood, he joyfully began the task of creating the mob mind.
No man in history had a keener appreciation of the power of the daily press in the propaganda of crowd ideas. The daily newspaper had just blossomed into its full radiance in the modern world. No invention in the history of the race has equaled the cylinder printing press as an engine for creating crowd movements.
The daily newspaper of 1859 spoke only in the language of crowds. They were, in fact, so many mob orators haranguing their subscribers. They wrote down to the standards of the mob. They were molders of public opinion and they were always the creatures of public opinion. They wrote for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations, with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them. There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd as God-inspired truth.
We no longer needed to seek for the mob in the streets. We had it at the breakfast table, in the office, in the counting room. The process of crowd thinking became the habit of daily life.
John Brown hastened to use this engine of propaganda. From his comfortable room in the jail at Charlestown there poured a daily stream of letters which found their way into print.
A perfect specimen of his art was the concluding paragraph of a letter to his friend and fellow conspirator, George L. Stearns of Boston.
"I have asked to be spared from having any mock or hypocritical prayers made over me when I am publicly murdered; and that my only religious attendants be poor, little, dirty, ragged, bareheaded and barefooted slave boys and girls, led by old, gray-headed slave mothers,"
This message he knew would reach the heart of every Abolitionist of the North, of every reader of Uncle Tom's Cabin. On the day of his transfiguration on the scaffold he would deliver the final word that would sweep these millions into the whirlpool of the Blood Feud.
To his wife and children he wrote a message which hammered again his fixed idea into a dogma of faith:
"John Rogers wrote to his children, 'Abhor the arrant whore of Rome.' John Brown writes to his children to abhor with undying hatred also the 'sum of all villainies,' slavery."
Not only did these daily letters find their way into the hands of millions through the press, but the newspapers maintained a staff of reporters at Charlestown to catch every whisper from the prisoner. So brilliantly did these reports visualize his daily life that the crowds who read them could hear the clanking of the chains as he walked and the groans that came from his wounded body.
Thousands of letters began to pour into the office of the Governor of Virginia, threatening, imploring, pleading for his life. The leading politicians of all parties of the North were at length swept into this howling mob by the press. To every plea the Governor of the Commonwealth replied:
"Southern Society is built on Reverence for Law. The Law has been outraged by this man. It shall be vindicated, though the heavens fall."
In this stand he was immovable and the South backed him to a man. For exciting servile insurrection the King of Great Britain was held up to everlasting scorn by our fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence. For this crime among others we rebelled and established the American Republic. Should John Brown be canonized for the same infamy? The Southern people asked this question in dumb amazement at the clamor from the North.
And so the Day of Transfiguration on the scaffold dawned.
Judge Thomas Russell and his good wife journeyed all the way from Boston to minister to the wants of their strange guest. There was in the distinguished jurist's mind a question which he must ask Brown before the rope should strangle him forever. His martyrdom had cleared every doubt and cloud from the mind of his friend save one. His fascinating letters, filled with the praise of God and the glory of a martyr's cause, had exalted him.
The judge had heard his speech in court on the day he was sentenced to death and had believed that each word was inspired. But the old man, who was now to die in glory, had spent a week in Judge Russell's house in Boston hiding from a deputy sheriff in whose hands was a warrant for plain murder—one of the foulest murders in the records of crime. The judge was a student of character, as well as Abolitionist.
He asked Brown for his last confidential statement as to these crimes on the Pottawattomie. There was no hesitation in his bold reply. Standing beneath the shadow of the gallows, the white hand of Death on his stooped shoulders, one foot on earth and the other pressing the shores of eternity, he lied as brazenly as he had lied a hundred times before. He assured his friend and his wife that he had nothing to do with those killings.
Mrs. Russell, weeping, kissed him.
And Brown said calmly: "Now, go."
As he ascended the scaffold he handed to one who stood near his final message, the supreme utterance over which he had prayed day and night to his God. Despatched from the scaffold, and sealed by his blood, he knew that its magic words would spread by contagion the Red Thought.
His face shone with the glory of his hope as his feet climbed the scaffold steps. On the scrap of paper he had written:
"I, JOHN BROWN, AM NOW QUITE CERTAIN THAT THE CRIMES OF THIS GUILTY LAND WILL NEVER BE PURGED AWAY BUT WITH BLOOD."
The trap fell, his darkened soul swung into eternity and the deed was done. He had raised the Blood Feud to the nth power. His message thrilled the world.
Bells were tolling in the North while crowds of weeping men and women knelt in prayer to his God. Had they but lifted the veil and looked, they would have seen the face of a fiend. But their eyes were now blinded with the madness which had driven him to his death.
In Cleveland, Melodeon Hall was draped in mourning at a meeting where thousands wept and cursed and prayed. Mammoth gatherings were held in New York, in Rochester and Syracuse. In Boston a crowd, so dense they were lifted from their feet by the pressure of thousands behind, clamoring for entrance, rushed into Tremont Temple.
William Lloyd Garrison, the Pacifist, declared the meeting was called to witness John Brown's resurrection. He flung the last shred of principle to the winds and joined the mob of the Blood Feud without reservation.
"As a peace man—an ultra peace man—I am prepared to say: 'Success to every Slave Insurrection in the South and in every Slave Country!'"
Wendell Phillips, believing Judge Russell's report of Brown's denial of the Pottawattomie murders, declared to the thousands who crowded Cooper Union that John Brown was a Saint—that he was not on the Pottawattomie Creek on that fateful night, that he was not within twenty-five miles of the spot!
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ignorant of the truth of Pottawattomie, hailed Brown as "the new Saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death—the new Saint who has achieved his martyrdom and will make the gallows glorious as the cross."
One great spirit among the anti-slavery forces refused to be swept in the current of insanity. Abraham Lincoln at Troy, Kansas, said on the day of Brown's death:
"Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a State. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking Slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right."
Lincoln's voice was drowned in the roar of the mob.
John Brown from the scaffold had set in motion forces of mind beyond control. Never before had men so little grasped the present, so stupidly ignored the past, so poorly divined the future. Reason had been hurled from her throne. Man had ceased to think.
Had Lieutenant Green's sword pierced Brown's heart he would have died the death of a mad dog. His imprisonment, his carefully staged martyrdom, his message of blood, and final, just execution by Law created the mob mind which destroyed reverence for Law.
As he swung from the gallows and his body swayed for a moment between heaven and earth Colonel Preston, standing beside the steps, solemnly cried:
"So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union!
All such foes of the human race!"
Yet even as the trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for their martyr hero.
A criminal paranoiac had become the leader of twenty millions of people. The mob mind had caught the disease of his insanity and a nation began to go mad.
Robert E. Lee, in command of the forces of Law and Order, watched the swaying ghostly figure with a sense of deep foreboding for the future.
CHAPTER XXXV
John Brown's body lay molderingin the grave but his soul was marching on. And his soul was a thousand times mightier than his body had ever been.
While living, his abnormal mind repelled men of strong personality. He had never been able to control more than two dozen people in any enterprise which he undertook. And in these small bands rebellions always broke out.
The paranoiac had been transfigured now into the Hero and the Saint through the worship of the mob which his insanity had created. His apparent strength of character was in reality weakness, an incapacity to master himself or control his criminal impulses. But the Jacobin mind of his followers did not consider realities. They only cherished dreams, illusions, assertions. The mob never reasons. It only believes. Reason is submerged in passion.
John Brown was a typical Jacobin leader. He was first and last a Puritan mystic. The God he worshipped was a fiend, but he worshipped Him with all the more passionate devotion for that reason. When he committed murder on the Pottawattomie he stalked his prey as a panther. He sang praises to his God as he paused in the brush before he sprang. His narrow mind, with a single fixed idea, was inaccessible to any influences save those which fed his mania. Nothing could loose the grip of his soul on this dream. He closed his glittering eyes and refused to consider anything that might contradict his faith.
He acted without reason, driven blindly forward by an impulse. When his cunning mind used reason it was never for the purpose of finding truth. It was only for the purpose of confounding his enemies. He never used it as a guide to conduct.
By the magic of mental contagion he had transferred from the scaffold this Jacobin mind to the soul of a nation. The contact of persons is not necessary to transfer this disease. Its contagion is electric. It moves in subtle thought waves, as a mysterious pestilence spreads in the night. The mob mind, once formed, is a new creation and becomes with amazing rapidity a resistless force. The reason for its uncanny power lies in the fact that when once formed it is dominated by the unconscious, not the conscious forces, of man's nature. Its credulity is boundless. Its passions dominate all life. The records of history are a sealed book. Experience does not exist.
Impulse rules the universe.
And this mob mind moves always as a unit. It devours individuality. Men who as individuals may be gentle and humane are swept into accord with the most beastly cry of the crowd. This mental unity grows out of the crushing power of contagion. Gestures, cries, deeds of hate and fury are caught, approved, repeated.
Any lie can be built into a religion if repeated often enough to a crowd by a mind on fire with its passions. Pirates have died as bravely as John Brown. The glorification of the manner of his dying was merely a phenomenon of the unity of the crowd mind. It was precisely the grip of his Puritan mysticism, his worship of the Devil, that gave to his insanity its most dangerous appeal.
For the first time in the history of the republic the mob mind had mastered the collective soul of its people. The contagion had spread both North and South. In the North by sympathy, in the South by a process of reaction even more violent and destructive of reason.
John Brown had realized his vision of the Plains. He had raised a
National Blood Feud.
No hand could stay the scourge. The Red Thought burst into a flame that swept North and South, as a prairie fire sweeps the stubble of autumn. Uncle Tom's Cabin had prepared the stubble.
From the Northern press began to pour a stream of vindictive abuse. A fair specimen of this insanity appeared in the New York Independent:
"The mass of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain. Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina! Progeny of the highwaymen, the horse thieves and sheep stealers and pickpockets of Old England!"
The fact that this paper was a religious publication, the outgrowth of the New England conscience, gave its columns a peculiar power over the Northern mind.
The South retorted in kind. De Bow's Review declared:
"The basic framework and controlling inference of Northern sentiment is Puritanic, the old Roundhead rebel refuse of England, which has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees, the worst bigots on earth and the meanest tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."
When the Conventions met a few months later to name candidates for the Presidency and make a declaration of principles, leaders had ceased to lead and there were no principles to declare.
The mob mind was supreme.
The Democratic Convention met at Charleston, South Carolina, to name the successor of James Buchanan. Their constituents commanded a vast majority of the voters of the Nation. The Convention became a mob. The one man, the one giant leader left in the republic, the one constructive mind, the one man of political genius who could have saved the nation from the holocaust toward which it was plunging was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He could have been elected President by an overwhelming majority had he been nominated by this united convention. He was entitled to the nomination. He had proven himself a statesman of the highest rank. He had proven himself impervious to sectional hatred or sectional appeal. He was a Northern man, but a friend of the South as well as the North. He was an American of the noblest type.
But the radical wing of his party in the South were seeing Red. Old Brown's words to them meant the spirit of the North. They heard echoing and reechoing from every newspaper and pulpit:
"I, JOHN BROWN, AM NOW QUITE CERTAIN THAT THE CRIMES OF THIS GUILTY LAND WILL NEVER BE PURGED AWAY BUT WITH BLOOD."
If the hour for bloodshed had come they demanded that the South prepare without further words. And they believed that the hour had come. They heard the tread of swarming hosts. They were eager to meet them.
Reason was flung to the winds. Passion ruled. Compromise was a thing beyond discussion. Douglas was a Northern man and they would have none of him. He was hooted and catcalled until he was compelled to withdraw from the Convention.
The radical South named their own candidate for President. He couldn't be elected. No matter. War was inevitable.
Let it come.
The Northern Democratic Convention named Douglas for President. He couldn't be elected. No matter. War was inevitable. Let it come.
In dumb amazement at the tragedy approaching—the tragedy of a divided Union and a bloody civil war—the Union men of the party nominated a third ticket, Bell of Tennessee and Everett of Massachusetts. They couldn't be elected. No matter. War was inevitable. It had to come. They would stand by their principles and go down with them.
When the new Republican party met at Chicago they were sobered by the responsibility suddenly thrust upon them of naming the next President of the United States. Fremont, a mere figurehead as their candidate, had polled a million votes in the campaign before. With three Democratic tickets in the field, success was sure.
They wrote a conservative platform and named for their candidate Abraham Lincoln, the one man in their party who had denounced John Brown's deeds, the man who had declared in his debates with Douglas that he did not believe in making negroes voters or jurors, that he did not believe in the equality of the races, that he did not believe that two such races could ever live together in a Democracy on terms of political or social equality.
Their candidate was the gentlest, broadest, sanest man within their ranks. Unless the nation had already gone mad they felt that in his triumph they would be safe from the Red Menace which stalked through their crowded hall. Their radical leaders were furious. But they were compelled to submit and fight for his election. The life of their party depended on it. Their own life was bound up in their party.
There was really but one issue before the nation—peace or war. The new party, both in its candidate and its platform, sought with all its power to stem the Red Tide of the Blood Feud which John Brown had raised.
Their well-meant efforts came too late.
War is a condition of mind primarily. Its causes are always psychological—not physical. The result of this state of mind is an abnormal condition of the nervous system, in which the thoughts and acts of men are controlled by the collective mind—the mob mind. Indians execute their war dances for days and nights to produce this mental state. Once it had been created, the war cry alone can be heard.
This mind, once formed, deliberative bodies cease to exist. The Congress of the United States ceased to exist as a deliberative body at the session which followed John Brown's execution.
The atmosphere of both the Senate and the House was electric with hatred and passion. Men who met at the last session as friends, now glared into each other's faces, mortal enemies.
L. Q. C. Lamar, the young statesman from Mississippi, threw a firebrand into the House on the day of its opening.
"The Republicans of this House are not guiltless of the blood of John Brown, his conspirators, and the innocent victims of his ruthless vengeance."
Keitt of South Carolina shouted:
"The South asks nothing but her rights. I would have no more, but as God is my judge I would shatter this republic from turret to foundation stone before I would take a little less!"
Old Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania scrambled up on his club foot and with a face flaming with scorn replied:
"I do not blame gentlemen of the South for using this threat of rending God's creation from foundation to turret. They have tried it fifty times, and fifty times they have found weak and recreant tremblers in the North who have been affected by it, and who have retreated before these intimidations."
He turned to the group of conservative members of his own party with a look of triumphant taunting. He wanted war. He courted it. He saw its coming with a shout of joy.
The House was in an uproar. Members leaped from their seats and jammed the aisles, shouting, cheering, hissing, catcalling. The clerk was powerless to preserve order.
For two months the bedlam continued while they voted in vain to elect a Speaker. The new party was determined to have John Sherman. The opposition was divided but finally chose Mr. Pennington, a moderate of mediocre ability.
During these eight weeks of senseless wrangling the members began to arm themselves with revolvers. One of the weapons dropped from the pocket of a member from New York and he was accused of attempting to draw it for use against an opponent.