Emile Zola - "The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Vol. 3"

Various - "US Presidential Inagural Addresses"

Arthur M. Winfield - "The Rover Boys in the Jungle"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1570 72"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Man in Gray

T >> Thomas Dixon >> The Man in Gray




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.