Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/367

 Trial of John Brown. 361

his object in coming into the State with armed men and committing violence, he said that he had received aid and comfort and had the sympathy of a large number of people in the North. This Mr. Griswold flatly and unqualifiedly denied and as a Northern man repudiated. Mr. Chilton followed Mr. Griswold and made a very forcible argument, mostly on the law points raised by Mr. Griswold, particularly on the law of treason.

Then Mr. Hunter closed for the State in a calm, clear, forcible, and unanswerable argument on the law and the facts an applica- tion of the facts to the law such as would have done credit to any advocate in any age. He made no appeal to passion or prejudice. In his speech during the third day of the trial, on the motion to post- pone, he had said: " I do not rise for the purpose of protracting the argument, or interposing the slightest impediment in the way of a fair trial. This is fair. * * and so far as I am concerned, I have studiously avoided suggesting anything to the court which would in the slightest degree interfere with it." And this sentiment pervaded his whole conduct of the case. Among those with whom he lived, who cherish his memory and mourn his loss as people mourn for a great and good man taken from amongst them, no further evidence of his fairness in all things, particularly in a matter involving the life of a human being, need be given, but there are people 'in the United States, unfortunately too many of them, who have fallen into the same error that Dr. Von Hoist has, and it is to convince them, if possible, of their great mistake that we have given so much time to this point. And we are not done with witnesses. It will be remem- bered that Hon. D. W. Voorhees, now United States Senator from Indiana, then one of the rising young men of the times, and whose eminence and eloquence have fulfilled the promises of early manhood, appeared for one of the prisoners, John E. Cook, and made such a plea for mercy as is rarely heard in a court of justice. In a letter to Miss Florence Hunter, of date January 7, 1889, Mr. Voorhees says: "The court itself was a model of judicial decorum, dignity and fairness. If justly represented by the pen of the historian, it would pass into history as the most temperate and conservative judicial tribunal ever convened, when all the surrounding circumstances are considered." " Throughout all this great historic scene your father was a grand, consulting, concurring, and to a great extent, a guiding spirit. He prosecuted, it is true, the picket line, as it were, of the war that was coming on between the sections, but he did it in the spirit of the Christian gentleman, without a single tone of malevo-