and has undoubtedly helped to keep his memory alive. John Brown had been for some time a keen anti-*slavery agitator, and when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed he carried out a scheme of his own for helping to hide and establish fugitives in a stronghold he had built in the mountains of Virginia. For an armed raid which he made into that State with slaves, in which he captured an arsenal, he was brought up on the charge of high treason and hanged.
Garrison thought John Brown courageous and disinterested, but he also thought the raid wild and useless; but then Garrison's views of war and bloodshed were very different from John Brown's. One thing he did see was the wonderful change that thirty years of fighting against slavery had brought about in the tremendous outburst of sympathy for Brown, for great indignation was shown and felt at his fate.
Up to this time it would have been almost impossible for a President to be chosen who was not loyal to slavery. But times had changed, and Garrison, if he had not been entirely responsible, had been the principal cause of the change in people's views; the sympathies of Lincoln, who was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, were known—he was against slavery, and he was elected by the North, for the hearts of the people had been moved.
Garrison for the first time saw the results of his life's work, and it is more than some reformers have done. In the election of Lincoln as President he could
