conducted from his prison. His friend F. B. Sanborn says:
'Here was a defeated, dying old man, who had been praying and
fighting and pleading and toiling for years, to persuade a great
people that their national life was all wrong, suddenly
converting millions to his cause by the silent magnanimity or
the spoken wisdom of his last days as a fettered prisoner.'

He had spoken of a Samson's victory as possibly the great
triumph in store for him. Even so it was, and in his death and
by the manner of it he mortally wounded his old enemy, Slavery.
As the great continent watched from afar his last days, a thrill
passed through it that made Emancipation a triumphant cause.
Efforts to save Brown's life might be in vain, but Brown's death
was helping to save the life of the nation. His letters from
the prison were many and widely circulated. All he has to say
of himself is that he knows no degradation. 'I can trust God
with the time and manner of my death, believing that for me now
to seal my testimony with my life will do vastly more for the
Cause than all I have done before. Dear wife and children, do
not feel degraded on my account.' Humorously he remarks, 'I am
worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.'
'Say to my poor boys never to grieve for one moment on my
account; and should many of you live to see the time when you
will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown, it will
not be more strange than many things that have happened.' '" He
shall BEGIN to deliver Israel out of the hand of the
Philistines." This,' said he, 'I think is true of my commission
from God and my work.' The scaffold had no terrors for him.
His trust, he averred, was firm in that Redeemer who, to
European and Ethiopian, bond and free alike, had brought a year