John
Brown has paid the penalty of his crime. He was executed yesterday
according to appointment, with due solemnity and under a very
imposing display of the military strength of the State of Virginia.
The event created a good deal of feeling throughout the country.
Our columns contain notices of meetings and other indications
of sympathy, held in various sections of the Northern States.
In this City two churches were opened for public service one
the Shiloh Church of colored worshipers, and the other the church
of Dr. Cheever. No other public demonstration took place here,
and even at these churches the attendance was not large. In
other places, according to our advices, a very small minority
only of the people took part in these public proclamations of
sympathy. In both branches of the Massachusetts Legislature
a motion to adjourn received but a very meagre support. Half
a dozen individuals, in any
village, it must be borne in mind, can hold a meeting, or ring
bells, or fire minute guns, and so attract as much attention
at a
distance as if the whole population had been engaged in the
affair.
It
is but just to add, however, that hundreds and thousands of
persons in the City and throughout the North, were deeply moved
by personal sympathy for Brown who were still too thoroughly
convinced of the legal justice of his execution, to make any
outward
show of their commisseration. There is not, as we have had occasion
to say repeatedly, any general or even any considerable
sympathy with Brown's invasion of Virginia or with the object
which took him there, in the North. But there is a very wide
and profound conviction in the public mind that he was personally
honest and sincere, -that his motives were such as he deemed
honorable and righteous, and that he believed himself to be
doing a religious duty in the work which he undertook. And the
public heart a ways
weighs the motives, as well as the acts, of men, and gives
its compassion and its pity freely to the man who stakes everything
upon
the performance of what he believes to be his duty. We do not
believe that one tenth of the people of the Northern States
would assent to the justice of Brown's views of duty, or deny
that he had merited the penalty which has overtaken his offence.
But we have just as little doubt that a majority of them pity
his fate and respect his memory, as that of a rave, conscientious
and misguided man.
Now that the curtain has fallen upon this sad tragedy, we trust
the public feeling will resume a healthier tone, especially
in the Southern States, where it has risen to an unreasonable
and a perilous heat . . . .
So
far as this outbreak of violent sentiment has been the work
of partisans, it is quite useless to protest against it. Some
of these men aim at disunion, and they naturally avail themselves
of every opportunity to stimulate the distrust, resentment and
hatred of the two sections towards each other. Others among
them aim only at the ascendancy of their own sectional party
in the national councils; and they use these incidents merely
to unite the South and coerce the North into conformity to their
desires. And still another class aim merely to crush some local
competitor, or overbear some local clique, by arousing a public
sentiment powerful enough to sweep away all who hesitate about
yielding to its current. As these men are thoroughly and recklessly
selfish in their aims, no considerations of the public good
would check their insane endeavors. It is their determination
to goad the South into the conviction that the whole North is
bent on waging active war upon Slavery in the Southern States,
and that John Brown's troop was only the advanced guard of the
general army. They deliberately and willfully falsify the sentiment
of the North upon this subject. They represent the Northern
people as all Abolitionists, all fanatics, all reckless of Southern
rights and Southern interests, all ready to plunge Southern
society into the horrors of anarchy and servile insurrection.
Whatever ministers to this belief is lavishly used for that
purpose; whatever corrects it, is ignored or discredited. The
harangues of Phillips, the sermons of Cheever, the diatribes
of our Abolition orators and journalists, are greedily copied
in Southern prints and put forward as illustrations of Northern
sentiment; while the conservative declarations which emanate
from our pulpits, our rostrums, and our presses, are utterly
unnoticed. We cannot wonder that, under such tuition and discipline,
the people of the South, come to regard every Northern man as
their enemy . . . .
