Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/32

 or thirty men in range of his rifle fled to shelter, while a hundred guns were turned upon him. The balls severed the limb upon which he was resting and he fell to the ground. With a parting shot he turned sadly away and joined his companions in retreat to the mountains.

Volumes have been written in this country and Europe on John Brown the liberator and martyr, who gave his life without a murmur to free the slaves. The noblest men and women of his generation have paid tributes to his unselfish life and his fidelity to duty as he saw it—a fidelity which led him to the scaffold. His name will live in history for all time. But little is known of his twenty-two followers who, in the early morning of their lives, actuated by the same spirit of self-sacrifice, enlisted in his “forlorn hope” and bravely marched to heroic deeds and almost certain death. In the world’s history no more desperate and apparently hopeless undertaking has ever been entered upon by sane men. The chances for success were not one in a thousand and yet these young men were so imbued with their leader’s abhorrence of slavery, a fierce and fearless determination to devote their lives to its destruction, that they stopped not to count the cost or to calmly consider the chances of success. They had such confidence in the wisdom, courage and invincibility of their leader, that, where he commanded, they marched without a murmur; where he led, they hesitated not to follow.

Not one of them could have been actuated by selfish motives. There was no hope of reward, even in case of success. There were no honors to be won; there was no glory to be achieved. They fully realized that death was far more likely to meet them than was success. And yet twenty-two men in the fervor of youth, freely offered their services and their lives, if need be, to strike a blow at American slavery, which, they firmly believed would, in some way not clearly developed, result in its final overthrow. As unlikely as it appeared to all the world besides,