718.
While John Brown's ability for military leadership was too insignificant even for comment, his moral and personal courage compelled the admiration of his enemies.

Arraigned before a Virginia court, the authorities hurried through his trial for treason, conspiracy, and murder, with an unseemly precipitancy, almost calculated to make him seem the accuser, and the commonwealth the trembling culprit.

He acknowledged his acts with frankness, defended his purpose with a sincerity that betokened honest conviction, bore his wounds and met his fate with a manly fortitude.

Eight years before, he had written, in a document organizing a band of colored people in Springfield, Massachusetts, to resist the fugitive-slave law: "Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery.

The trial for life of one bold, and to some extent successful, man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored population." Even now, when mere Quixotic knight-errantry and his own positive violation of the rights of individuals and society had put his life in forfeit, this sympathy for his boldness and misfortune came to him in large measure.