Books: The Man in Gray

T >> Thomas Dixon >> The Man in Gray

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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.

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