Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/142

134 how dreadful must be the feelings of hundreds of poor slaves who are separated for life.

So John Brown reached Kansas to strike the blow for freedom. Not that he was the central figure of Kansas territorial history so far as casual eyes could see, or the acknowledged leader of men and measures; rather he seemed and was but a humble co-worker, appearing and disappearing here and there,—now startling men with the grim decision of his actions, now lost and hidden from public view. But it is not always the apparent leaders who do the world's work. More often those who sit in high places, whom men see and hear, do but represent or mask public opinion and the social conscience, while down in the blood and dust of battle stoop those who delivered the master-stroke—the makers of the thoughts of men. So in Kansas Robinson, Lane, Atchison and Geary were the conspicuous public leaders: Robinson, the canny Yankee, whose astute reading of the signs of the times proved in the end wise and correct but left him always the opportunist and politician; Lane, whose impetuous daring and rough devotion led thousands of immigrants out of the North and drove hundreds of slaveholders back to Missouri; Atchison, who led the determination and ruffianism of the South; and Geary, who voiced the saner nation. And yet one cannot read Kansas history without feeling that the man who in all this bewildering broil was least the puppet of circumstances—the man who most