Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/359

Rh old man." Again in the sickening fury of that fatal Monday, a white man and a black man found themselves standing with freedom before them. The white man was John Brown's truest companion and the black man Mas Shields Green. "I told him to come," said the white man afterward, "that we could do nothing more," but he simply said, "I must go down to the old man." And he went down to John Brown and to death.

If this was the attitude of the slave, what was that of the master? It was when John Brown faced the indignant, self-satisfied and arrogant slave power of the South, flanked by its Northern Vallandighams, that the mighty paradox and burning farce of the situation revealed itself. Picture the situation: An old and blood-bespattered man, half-dead from the wounds inflicted but a few hours before; a man lying in the cold and dirt, without sleep for fifty-five nerve-wrecking hours, without food for nearly as long, with the dead bodies of two sons almost before his eyes, the piled corpses of his seven slain comrades near and afar, a wife and a bereaved family listening in vain, and a Lost Cause, the dream of a lifetime, lying dead in his heart. Around him was a group of bitter, inquisitive Southern aristocrats and their satellites, headed by one of the foremost leaders of subsequent secession.

"Who sent you—who sent you?" these inquisitors insisted.

"No man sent me—I acknowledge no master in human form!"