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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 253

France, and availed myself, for that purpose, of the permit so promptly and
civilly given by the French minister, had not news reached me from home of
the death of my beloved daughter Annie, the light and life of my house.
Deeply distressed by this bereavement, and acting upon the impulse of the
moment, regardless of the peril, I at once resolved to return home, and took
the first outgoing steamer for Portland, Maine. After a rough passage of
seventeen days, I reached home by way of Canada, and remained in my
house nearly a month before the knowledge got abroad that I was again in
this country. Great changes had now taken place in the public mind touching
the John Brown raid. Virginia had satisfied her thirst for blood. She had
executed all the raiders who had fallen into her hands. She had not given
Captain Brown the benefit of a reasonable doubt, but hurried him to the scaffold
in panic-stricken haste. She had made herself ridiculous by her fright,
and despisablc by her fury. Emerson's prediction that Brown's gallows
would become like the cross, was already being fulfilled. The old hero, in the
trial hour, had brhaved so grandly that men regarded him not as a murderer,
His body was in the dust, but his soul was marching on. His defeat was
already assuming the form and pressure of victory, and his death was giving
new life and power to the principles of justice and liberty. He had spoken
great words in the face of death and the champions of slavery. He had
quailed before neither. What he had lost by the sword, he had more than
gained by the truth. Had he wavered, had he retreated or apologized, the case
had been different. He did not even ask that the cup of death might pass from
him. To his own soul he was right, and neither "principalities nor powers, life
nor death, things present nor things to come" could shake his dauntless
spirit, or move him from his ground. He may not have stooped on his way to
the gallows s to kiss a little colored child, as it is reported he did, but the act
would have been in keeping with the tender heart, as well as with the heroic
spirit of the man. Those who looked for confession heard only the voice of
rebuke and warning.

Early after the insurrection at Harper's Ferry, an investigating committee
was appointed by Congress, and a "drag-net" was spread all over the country,
in the hope of inculpating many distinguished persons. They had imprisoned
Thaddeus Hyatt, who denied their right to interrogate him, and had
called many witnesses before them, as if the judicial power of the nation had
been confided to their committee, and not to the supreme court of the United
States. But Captain Brown implicated nobody. Upon his own head he invited
all the bolts of slaveholding vengeance. He said that he, and he alone, was

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