Studies in American History 
251 
rection, which would bring about conditions worse than 
anarchy or death itself. 
On the other hand, to idealists like Louisa M. Alcott, Victor 
Hugo, R. W. Emerson, and Thoreau, he was a hero and a 
martyr, who deliberately sacrificed his own life in a cause 
which to them was most sacred and just. To the more moder- 
ate people whose sentiments were anti-slavery, his method was 
not to be approved, and, while they did not abuse him, they 
felt that the cause for which he stood had been advanced by 
at least one decade. Perhaps a just estimate lies between these 
great extremes. John Brown was the type of man whose real 
contemporaries lived in the age of Oliver Cromwell and John 
Knox, or of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. In the 
world of that day he might have been a hero or a saint, but the 
world at the middle of the nineteenth century had entirely 
outgrown the stern ideals of two hundred years before. If 
he had been killed at Harper’s Ferry, his place in history 
would have been a very small one. If his purposes and mo- 
tives on the whole were worthy, his methods were those of a 
fanatic who was near to “the fringe of lunacy”. If it be true 
that his soul went marching on after his death, it is equally 
true that John Brown himself was not the “liberator of Kan- 
sas and Martyr of Virginia”,®- but only a historic failure. 
Part of the title of Mr. Sanborn’s biography of John Brown. 
