All who were supposed to have been any way connected with John Brown were to be hunted down and surrendered to the tender mercies of slaveholding and panic-stricken Virginia, and there to be tried after the fashion of John Brown’s trial, and of course to be summarily executed.
Douglass recounts the immediate and severe reaction to John Brown's raid, where anyone associated with him faced summary justice in Virginia.
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Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.
Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.