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pression that John Brown did not receive fair treatment.^® 
There seems to be no basis for such a view, if all of the facts 
are taken into consideration. The presiding judge was a 
man of great learning and ability in his profession. He had 
previously served in Congress, was of distinguished family 
and of excellent reputation. In his charge to the grand jury 
which returned the indictment he urged that all feeling and 
prejudice should be laid aside and that above all other things 
the commonwealth owed it to the prisoner to be fair with him. 
The men who defended him were abler perhaps than the prose- 
cutors, and nowhere in the course of the trial did they com- 
plain of unfairness or lack of courtesy. The commonwealth’s 
attorney threw open his own office and library to them, and 
extended to them every courtesy consistent with his own 
duties. It may be charged that Brown was railroaded to the 
gallows and executed with unseemly haste. In answer, it may 
be stated that the regular term of court began in Jefferson 
County, where Harper’s Ferry is situated, only two days after 
Brown’s capture, and in cases of this kind the law of Vir- 
ginia required a trial within five days after an indictment was 
returned. If he had not been indicted and tried at that term 
of court it would have been necessary to wait for a trial until 
the following spring with an excited populace and “yellow” 
newspapers thruout the state clamoring for a lynching. This 
would have been both imprudent and unwise. It is difficult 
to see what else could have been done than to pursue the 
course which the state took or what verdict could have been 
rendered except the one brought in by the jury.^^ Brown 
himself said, ‘T feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I 
have received in my trial. 
As the days went by the eye and ear of the nation was 
turned toward Charlestown, Va. Thousands admired the cour- 
age and fortitude of the old man who was ready to give his life 
for what he thought was a just cause. Letters with expres- 
sions of sympathy poured in upon him. Many of them con- 
tained one-dollar gold pieces. In a letter to his brother he 
said, ‘T am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any 
Hermann E. von Holst, The Constitutimial and Political History of the United 
States (8 vols., Chicago, 1881-1892), VH, 44, 45, 48 ff. 
General Marcus J. Wright, “The Trial and Execution of John Brown”, in Papers 
of the American Historical Association (New York, 1890), IV, 121. 
See his remarks to Ihe court just before he was sentenced, in Villard, op. cit., 499. 
