Many of its members openly expressed their pity for the zealot, whose rashness had led him to indefensible deeds and thence to the scaffold.

On the day of his execution, bells were tolled in many Northern towns -- not in approval of what Brown had done, but from compassion for the fate of an old man whose mind had become distempered by suffering, and by morbid reflection on the suffering of others; from a feeling that his sentence, in view of this fact, was severe; and lastly, and more markedly, as a Northern rebuke to the attempt on the part of the South to make a political issue from an occurrence which was as unforeseen and exceptional as it was deplorable.
The fear and agitation in the South were not feigned but real.
Instead of injuring the Republican party, this very fact increased its strength in the North.

The terror of the South at the bare prospect of a negro insurrection led many who had not before studied the slavery question to give serious heed to this phase of it.
The least reflection led men to see that a domestic institution must be very undesirable which could keep an entire community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy.

Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror.
Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them.
The conviction grew rapidly that if slavery could produce such alarm and such demoralization in a strong State like Virginia, inhabited by a race of white men whose courage was never surpassed, it was not an institution to be encouraged, but that its growth should be prohibited in the new communities where its weakening and baleful influence was not yet felt.
Sentiment of this kind could not be properly comprehended in the South.

It was honestly misrepresented by some, willfully misrepresented by others.