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Title: A Plea for Captain John Brown
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Release Date: March, 2001 [eBook #2567]
[Most recently updated: January 21, 2022]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by: Jason Filley and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN ***
A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN
By Henry David Thoreau
[Read to the citizens of Concord, Mass.,
Sunday Evening, October 30, 1859.]
I trust that you will pardon me for being here. I do not wish to force my
thoughts upon you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Captain Brown,
I would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the
newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and
actions. It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympathy
with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what I now propose
to do.
First, as to his history. I will endeavor to omit, as much as possible, what
you have already read. I need not describe his person to you, for probably most
of you have seen and will not soon forget him. I am told that his grandfather,
John Brown, was an officer in the Revolution; that he himself was born in
Connecticut about the beginning of this century, but early went with his father
to Ohio. I heard him say that his father was a contractor who furnished beef to
the army there, in the war of 1812; that he accompanied him to the camp, and
assisted him in that employment, seeing a good deal of military life, more,
perhaps, than if he had been a soldier, for he was often present at the
councils of the officers. Especially, he learned by experience how armies are
supplied and maintained in the field—a work which, he observed, requires
at least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. He said that
few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing
a single bullet in war. He saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with a
military life, indeed to excite in him a great abhorrence of it; so much so,
that though he was tempted by the offer of some petty office in the army, when
he was about eighteen, he not only declined that, but he also refused to train
when warned, and was fined for it. He then resolved that he would never have
anything to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty.
When the troubles in Kansas began, he sent several of his sons thither to
strengthen the party of the Free State men, fitting them out with such weapons
as he had; telling them that if the troubles should increase, and there should
be need of him, he would follow, to assist them with his hand and counsel.
This, as you all know, he soon after did; and it was through his agency, far
more than any other’s, that Kansas was made free.
For a part of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he was engaged in
wool-growing, and he went to Europe as an agent about that business. There, as
everywhere, he had his eyes about him, and made many original observations. He
said, for instance, that he saw why the soil of England was so rich, and that
of Germany (I think it was) so poor, and he thought of writing to some of the
crowned heads about it. It was because in England the peasantry live on the
soil which they cultivate, but in Germany they are gathered into villages, at
night. It is a pity that he did not make a book of his observations.
I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in respect for the Constitution,
and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery he deemed to be wholly
opposed to these, and he was its determined foe.
He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great common sense,
deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold more so. He was like the
best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Common, and on
Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher principled than any that I have
chanced to hear of as there. It was no abolition lecturer that converted him.
Ethan Allen and Stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were
rangers in a lower and less important field. They could bravely face their
country’s foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself, when
she was in the wrong. A Western writer says, to account for his escape from so
many perils, that he was concealed under a “rural exterior”; as if,
in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen’s
dress only.
He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He
was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, “I know
no more of grammar than one of your calves.” But he went to the great
university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for
which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he
finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know.
Such were his humanities, and not any study of grammar. He would have
left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.
He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part,
see nothing at all—the Puritans. It would be in vain to kill him. He
died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not?
Some of the Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in New
England. They were a class that did something else than celebrate their
forefathers’ day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. They
were neither Democrats nor Republicans, but men of simple habits,
straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear God,
not making many compromises, nor seeking after available candidates.
“In his camp,” as one has recently written, and as I have myself
heard him state, “he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals was
suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war. ‘I would
rather,’ said he, ‘have the small-pox, yellow fever, and cholera,
all together in my camp, than a man without principle.... It is a mistake, sir,
that our people make, when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or
that they are the fit men to oppose these Southerners. Give me men of good
principles,—God-fearing men,—men who respect themselves, and with a
dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford
ruffians.’” He said that if one offered himself to be a soldier
under him, who was forward to tell what he could or would do, if he could only
get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him.
He was never able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would
accept, and only about a dozen, among them his sons, in whom he had perfect
faith. When he was here, some years ago, he showed to a few a little manuscript
book,—his “orderly book” I think he called
it,—containing the names of his company in Kansas, and the rules by which
they bound themselves; and he stated that several of them had already sealed
the contract with their blood. When some one remarked that, with the addition
of a chaplain, it would have been a perfect Cromwellian troop, he observed that
he would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could have found
one who could fill that office worthily. It is easy enough to find one for the
United States army. I believe that he had prayers in his camp morning and
evening, nevertheless.
He was a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at
your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare
hard, as became a soldier or one who was fitting himself for difficult
enterprises, a life of exposure.
A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a
transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,—that was what
distinguished him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying
out the purpose of a life. I noticed that he did not overstate anything, but
spoke within bounds. I remember, particularly, how, in his speech here, he
referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the
least vent to his pent-up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue.
Also referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring
away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and
meaning, “They had a perfect right to be hung.” He was not in the
least a rhetorician, was not talking to Buncombe or his constituents anywhere,
had no need to invent anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate
his own resolution; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in
Congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. It was like the speeches of
Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king.
As for his tact and prudence, I will merely say, that at a time when scarcely a
man from the Free States was able to reach Kansas by any direct route, at least
without having his arms taken from him, he, carrying what imperfect guns and
other weapons he could collect, openly and slowly drove an ox-cart through
Missouri, apparently in the capacity of a surveyor, with his surveying compass
exposed in it, and so passed unsuspected, and had ample opportunity to learn
the designs of the enemy. For some time after his arrival he still followed the
same profession. When, for instance, he saw a knot of the ruffians on the
prairie, discussing, of course, the single topic which then occupied their
minds, he would, perhaps, take his compass and one of his sons, and proceed to
run an imaginary line right through the very spot on which that conclave had
assembled, and when he came up to them, he would naturally pause and have some
talk with them, learning their news, and, at last, all their plans perfectly;
and having thus completed his real survey he would resume his imaginary one,
and run on his line till he was out of sight.
When I expressed surprise that he could live in Kansas at all, with a price set
upon his head, and so large a number, including the authorities, exasperated
against him, he accounted for it by saying, “It is perfectly well
understood that I will not be taken.” Much of the time for some years he
has had to skulk in swamps, suffering from poverty and from sickness, which was
the consequence of exposure, befriended only by Indians and a few whites. But
though it might be known that he was lurking in a particular swamp, his foes
commonly did not care to go in after him. He could even come out into a town
where there were more Border Ruffians than Free State men, and transact some
business, without delaying long, and yet not be molested; for said he,
“No little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body
could not be got together in season.”
As for his recent failure, we do not know the facts about it. It was evidently
far from being a wild and desperate attempt. His enemy, Mr. Vallandigham, is
compelled to say, that “it was among the best planned and executed
conspiracies that ever failed.”
Not to mention his other successes, was it a failure, or did it show a want of
good management, to deliver from bondage a dozen human beings, and walk off
with them by broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace,
through one State after another, for half the length of the North, conspicuous
to all parties, with a price set upon his head, going into a court room on his
way and telling what he had done, thus convincing Missouri that it was not
profitable to try to hold slaves in his neighborhood?—and this, not
because the government menials were lenient, but because they were afraid of
him.
Yet he did not attribute his success, foolishly, to “his star,” or
to any magic. He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers
quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they
lacked a cause—a kind of armor which he and his party never
lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives
in defence of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be
their last act in this world.
But to make haste to his last act, and its effects.
The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ignorant of the fact, that
there are at least as many as two or three individuals to a town throughout the
North who think much as the present speaker does about him and his enterprise.
I do not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing party. We
aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read
history and our bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe
in. Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and
five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise, but their very anxiety to
prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still
dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the
fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free
inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They
at most only criticise the tactics. Though we wear no crape, the thought of
that man’s position and probable fate is spoiling many a man’s day
here at the North for other thinking. If any one who has seen him here can
pursue successfully any other train of thought, I do not know what he is made
of. If there is any such who gets his usual allowance of sleep, I will warrant
him to fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or
purse. I put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when I could
not sleep, I wrote in the dark.
On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a
million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way
in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an
ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual “pluck,”—as the
Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the
cock-pit, “the gamest man he ever saw,”—had been caught, and
were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the governor
thought he looked so brave. It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or
hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he
was dead, one of my townsmen observed that “he died as the fool
dieth”; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him
dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that
“he threw his life away,” because he resisted the government. Which
way have they thrown their lives, pray?—Such as would praise a man
for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers. I hear another
ask, Yankee-like, “What will he gain by it?” as if he expected to
fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this
worldly sense. If it does not lead to a “surprise” party, if he
does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure.
“But he won’t gain anything by it.” Well, no, I don’t
suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year
round; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his
soul,—and such a soul!—when you do not. No doubt you
can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but
that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.
Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world,
when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our
watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a
crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality,
that it does not ask our leave to germinate.
The momentary charge at Balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command,
proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been
celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part
successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery,
in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than
that, as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you
think that that will go unsung?
“Served him right”—“A dangerous
man”—“He is undoubtedly insane.” So they proceed to
live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their
Plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of Putnam, who was let down
into a wolf’s den; and in this wise they nourish themselves for brave and
patriotic deeds some time or other. The Tract Society could afford to print
that story of Putnam. You might open the district schools with the reading of
it, for there is nothing about Slavery or the Church in it; unless it occurs to
the reader that some pastors are wolves in sheep’s clothing.
“The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions” even,
might dare to protest against that wolf. I have heard of boards, and of
American boards, but it chances that I never heard of this particular lumber
till lately. And yet I hear of Northern men, and women, and children, by
families, buying a “life membership” in such societies as these. A
life-membership in the grave! You can get buried cheaper than that.
Our foes are in our midst and all about us. There is hardly a house but is
divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both
head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice;
and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of
all kinds. We are mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of
hearts. The curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the
worshipper into a stone image himself; and the New Englander is just as much an
idolater as the Hindoo. This man was an exception, for he did not set up even a
political graven image between him and his God.
A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists!
Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take
a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will
save you, and defend our nostrils.
The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the
liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly
afterward. All his prayers begin with “Now I lay me down to sleep,”
and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his
“long rest.” He has consented to perform certain old
established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of
any new-fangled ones; he doesn’t wish to have any supplementary articles
added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. He shows the whites of
his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is
not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. Many, no doubt,
are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot
conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly
they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act
as he does, as long as they are themselves.
We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at
a distance in history or space; but let some significant event like the present
occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness
between us and our nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias, and Chinas,
and South Sea Islands. Our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once,
clean and handsome to the eye, a city of magnificent distances. We discover why
it was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with them before; we
become aware of as many versts between us and them as there are between a
wandering Tartar and a Chinese town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the
thoroughfares of the market-place. Impassable seas suddenly find their level
between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. It is the difference
of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains,
that make the true and impassable boundaries between individuals and between
states. None but the like-minded can come plenipotentiary to our court.
I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after this event, and I do
not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these men. I have
since seen one noble statement, in a Boston paper, not editorial. Some
voluminous sheets decided not to print the full report of Brown’s words
to the exclusion of other matter. It was as if a publisher should reject the
manuscript of the New Testament, and print Wilson’s last speech. The same
journal which contained this pregnant news, was chiefly filled, in parallel
columns, with the reports of the political conventions that were being held.
But the descent to them was too steep. They should have been spared this
contrast, been printed in an extra at least. To turn from the voices and deeds
of earnest men to the cackling of political conventions! Office seekers
and speech-makers, who do not so much as lay an honest egg, but wear their
breasts bare upon an egg of chalk! Their great game is the game of straws, or
rather that universal aboriginal game of the platter, at which the Indians
cried hub, bub! Exclude the reports of religious and political
conventions, and publish the words of a living man.
But I object not so much to what they have omitted, as to what they have
inserted. Even the Liberator called it “a misguided, wild, and
apparently insane ... effort.” As for the herd of newspapers and
magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will
deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently
reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would be
expedient. How then can they print truth? If we do not say pleasant things,
they argue, nobody will attend to us. And so they do like some travelling
auctioneers, who sing an obscene song in order to draw a crowd around them.
Republican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning
edition, and accustomed to look at everything by the twilight of politics,
express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men “deluded
fanatics”—“mistaken men”—“insane,”
or “crazed.” It suggests what a sane set of editors we are
blessed with, not “mistaken men”; who know very well on
which side their bread is buttered, at least.
A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people
and parties declaring, “I didn’t do it, nor countenance him
to do it, in any conceivable way. It can’t be fairly inferred from my
past career.” I, for one, am not interested to hear you define your
position. I don’t know that I ever was, or ever shall be. I think it is
mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. Ye needn’t take so much pains
to wash your skirts of him. No intelligent man will ever be convinced that he
was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he himself informs us,
“under the auspices of John Brown and nobody else.” The Republican
party does not perceive how many his failure will make to vote more
correctly than they would have them. They have counted the votes of
Pennsylvania & Co., but they have not correctly counted Captain
Brown’s vote. He has taken the wind out of their sails, the little wind
they had, and they may as well lie to and repair.
What though he did not belong to your clique! Though you may not approve of his
method or his principles, recognize his magnanimity. Would you not like to
claim kindredship with him in that, though in no other thing he is like, or
likely, to you? Do you think that you would lose your reputation so? What you
lost at the spile, you would gain at the bung.
If they do not mean all this, then they do not speak the truth, and say what
they mean. They are simply at their old tricks still.
“It was always conceded to him,” says one who calls him
crazy, “that he was a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor,
apparently inoffensive, until the subject of Slavery was introduced, when he
would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.”
The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new cargoes are
being added in mid ocean; a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large
body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the
politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be
obtained, is by “the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of
humanity,” without any “outbreak.” As if the sentiments of
humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds, and you could disperse
them, all finished to order, the pure article, as easily as water with a
watering-pot, and so lay the dust. What is that that I hear cast overboard? The
bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. That is the way we are
“diffusing” humanity, and its sentiments with it.
Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of
an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted “on the
principle of revenge.” They do not know the man. They must enlarge
themselves to conceive of him. I have no doubt that the time will come when
they will begin to see him as he was. They have got to conceive of a man of
faith and of religious principle, and not a politician or an Indian; of a man
who did not wait till he was personally interfered with, or thwarted in some
harmless business, before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed.
If Walker may be considered the representative of the South, I wish I could say
that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did
not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize
unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out
of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood.
No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the
dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and
all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. He needed no
babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match
for all the judges that American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade,
can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his
peers did not exist. When a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and
vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally by a whole
body,—even though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has
settled that matter with himself,—the spectacle is a sublime
one,—didn’t ye know it, ye Liberators, ye Tribunes, ye
Republicans?—and we become criminal in comparison. Do yourselves the
honor to recognize him. He needs none of your respect.
As for the Democratic journals, they are not human enough to affect me at all.
I do not feel indignation at anything they may say.
I am aware that I anticipate a little, that he was still, at the last accounts,
alive in the hands of his foes; but that being the case, I have all along found
myself thinking and speaking of him as physically dead.
I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts,
whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but I would rather
see the statue of Captain Brown in the Massachusetts State-House yard, than
that of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am
his contemporary.
What a contrast, when we turn to that political party which is so anxiously
shuffling him and his plot out of its way, and looking around for some
available slaveholder, perhaps, to be its candidate, at least for one who will
execute the Fugitive Slave Law, and all those other unjust laws which he took
up arms to annul!
Insane! A father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several more men
besides,—as many at least as twelve disciples,—all struck with
insanity at once; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer gripe than ever his
four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving
their country and their bacon! Just as insane were his efforts in Kansas. Ask
the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane? Do the
thousands who know him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have
afforded him material aid there, think him insane? Such a use of this word is a
mere trope with most who persist in using it, and I have no doubt that many of
the rest have already in silence retracted their words.
Read his admirable answers to Mason and others. How they are dwarfed and
defeated by the contrast! On the one side, half brutish, half timid
questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their
obscene temples. They are made to stand with Pilate, and Gessler, and the
Inquisition. How ineffectual their speech and action! and what a void their
silence! They are but helpless tools in this great work. It was no human power
that gathered them about this preacher.
What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to
Congress for, of late years?—to declare with effect what kind of
sentiments? All their speeches put together and boiled down,—and probably
they themselves will confess it,—do not match for manly directness and
force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown, on the
floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are
about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you
there. No, he was not our representative in any sense. He was too fair a
specimen of a man to represent the like of us. Who, then, were his
constituents? If you read his words understandingly you will find out. In his
case there is no idle eloquence, no made, nor maiden speech, no compliments to
the oppressor. Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his
sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp’s rifles, while he retained
his faculty of speech,—a Sharp’s rifle of infinitely surer and
longer range.
And the New York Herald reports the conversation verbatim! It
does not know of what undying words it is made the vehicle.
I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of
that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. It has the ring
of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an
ordinary organization, secure. Take any sentence of it—“Any
questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise. So far as I am
myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word,
sir.” The few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really
admire his heroism, have no test by which to detect a noble man, no amalgam to
combine with his pure gold. They mix their own dross with it.
It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his more
truthful, but frightened, jailers and hangmen. Governor Wise speaks far more
justly and appreciatingly of him than any Northern editor, or politician, or
public personage, that I chance to have heard from. I know that you can afford
to hear him again on this subject. He says: “They are themselves mistaken
who take him to be a madman.... He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it
is but just to him to say, that he was humane to his prisoners.... And he
inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a
fanatic, vain and garrulous,” (I leave that part to Mr. Wise) “but
firm, truthful, and intelligent. His men, too, who survive, are like him....
Colonel Washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in
defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot
through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle
with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging
them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. Of the three
white prisoners, Brown, Stephens, and Coppoc, it was hard to say which was most
firm....”
Almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect!
The testimony of Mr. Vallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same
purport, that “it is vain to underrate either the man or his
conspiracy.... He is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary ruffian,
fanatic, or madman.”
“All is quiet at Harper’s Ferry,” say the journals. What is
the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder
prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with
glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus
assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a
government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to
maintain Slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a
merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force. It is the head of the
Plug Uglies. It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. I see this
government to be effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing
mankind. There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves; here
comes their heroic liberator. This most hypocritical and diabolical government
looks up from its seat on the gasping four millions, and inquires with an
assumption of innocence: “What do you assault me for? Am I not an honest
man? Cease agitation on this subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or
else hang you.”
We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a
government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the
whole heart, are not represented. A semi-human tiger or ox,
stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot
away. Heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off,
but I never heard of any good done by such a government as that.
The only government that I recognize,—and it matters not how few are at
the head of it, or how small its army,—is that power that establishes
justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we
think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are
enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that
pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!
Treason! Where does such treason take its rise? I cannot help thinking of you
as you deserve, ye governments. Can you dry up the fountains of thought? High
treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is
first committed by, the power that makes and forever recreates man. When you
have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but
your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountain head. You presume to
contend with a foe against whom West Point cadets and rifled cannon
point not. Can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn
against its maker? Is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more
essential than the constitution of it and of himself?
The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined
to keep them in this condition; and Massachusetts is one of the confederated
overseers to prevent their escape. Such are not all the inhabitants of
Massachusetts, but such are they who rule and are obeyed here. It was
Massachusetts, as well as Virginia, that put down this insurrection at
Harper’s Ferry. She sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the
penalty of her sin.
Suppose that there is a society in this State that out of its own purse and
magnanimity saves all the fugitive slaves that run to us, and protects our
colored fellow-citizens, and leaves the other work to the government,
so-called. Is not that government fast losing its occupation, and becoming
contemptible to mankind? If private men are obliged to perform the offices of
government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government
becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services.
Of course, that is but the shadow of a government whose existence necessitates
a Vigilant Committee. What should we think of the oriental Cadi even, behind
whom worked in secret a Vigilant Committee? But such is the character of our
Northern States generally; each has its Vigilant Committee. And, to a certain
extent, these crazy governments recognize and accept this relation. They say,
virtually, “We’ll be glad to work for you on these terms, only
don’t make a noise about it.” And thus the government, its salary
being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the Constitution with it,
and bestows most of its labor on repairing that. When I hear it at work
sometimes, as I go by, it reminds me, at best, of those farmers who in winter
contrive to turn a penny by following the coopering business. And what kind of
spirit is their barrel made to hold? They speculate in stocks, and bore holes
in mountains, but they are not competent to lay out even a decent highway. The
only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the
Vigilant Committee. They have tunnelled under the whole breadth of the
land. Such a government is losing its power and respectability as surely as
water runs out of a leaky vessel, and is held by one that can contain it.
I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and
the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time
came?—till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no
rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from
ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found
worthy to pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and
oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions;
apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity, ready to
sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow man. It may be
doubted if there were as many more their equals in these respects in all the
country—I speak of his followers only—for their leader, no doubt,
scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone were
ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they were the
very best men you could select to be hung. That was the greatest compliment
which this country could pay them. They were ripe for her gallows. She has
tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but never found the right one
before.
When I think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the
others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to
work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and
wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience,
while almost all America stood ranked on the other side—I say again that
it affects me as a sublime spectacle. If he had had any journal advocating
“his cause,” any organ, as the phrase is, monotonously and
wearisomely playing the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it would
have been fatal to his efficiency. If he had acted in any way so as to be let
alone by the government, he might have been suspected. It was the fact that the
tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from
all the reformers of the day that I know.
It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by
force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.
They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by
the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked
by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in
his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave
when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy
which neither shoots me nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not think it is
quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this
matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and I have not done so. A man may
have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I
can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me
unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty
violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at
the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are
hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So
we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the
mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of
Sharp’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are
insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with
them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp’s rifles and the
revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of
one who could use them.
The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it
again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use
it. No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow man so well,
and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him. He took up his life and he laid
it down for him. What sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by
soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of
the gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so
much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?
This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death—the
possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in
America before; for in order to die you must first have lived. I don’t
believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they have had. There was
no death in the case, because there had been no life; they merely rotted or
sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. No
temple’s veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. Let the dead bury
their dead. The best of them fairly ran down like a clock.
Franklin,—Washington,—they were let off without dying; they were
merely missing one day. I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die;
or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I’ll defy them
to do it. They haven’t got life enough in them. They’ll deliquesce
like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off.
Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began. Do you think that you
are going to die, sir? No! there’s no hope of you. You haven’t got
your lesson yet. You’ve got to stay after school. We make a needless ado
about capital punishment,—taking lives, when there is no life to take.
Memento mori! We don’t understand that sublime sentence which some
worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. We’ve interpreted it in a
grovelling and snivelling sense; we’ve wholly forgotten how to die.
But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know
how to begin, you will know when to end.
These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to
live. If this man’s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be
the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news
that America has ever heard. It has already quickened the feeble pulse of the
North, and infused more and more generous blood into her veins and heart, than
any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity
could. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to
live for!
One writer says that Brown’s peculiar monomania made him to be
“dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.” Sure enough,
a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that thing.
He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.
“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”
Newspaper editors argue also that it is a proof of his insanity that he
thought he was appointed to do this work which he did,—that he did not
suspect himself for a moment! They talk as if it were impossible that a man
could be “divinely appointed” in these days to do any work
whatever; as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any
man’s daily work; as if the agent to abolish Slavery could only be
somebody appointed by the President, or by some political party. They talk as
if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of
whatever character, were a success.
When I reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously,
and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily
and fluently devote themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens
and earth are asunder.
The amount of it is, our “leading men” are a harmless kind
of folk, and they know well enough that they were not divinely
appointed, but elected by the votes of their party.
Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hung? Is it indispensable
to any Northern man? Is there no resource but to cast these men also to the
Minotaur? If you do not wish it, say so distinctly. While these things are
being done, beauty stands veiled and music is a screeching lie. Think of
him,—of his rare qualities!—such a man as it takes ages to make,
and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A
man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose
making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer
of those in captivity. And the only use to which you can put him is to hang him
at the end of a rope! You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider
what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four
millions of men.
Any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot
enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly
punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of
his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its
own dissolution. Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a
government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or
declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there
any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his
better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-makers that good
men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the
letter, and not the spirit? What right have you to enter into a compact
with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you?
Is it for youtomake up your mind,—to form any resolution
whatever,—and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and
which ever pass your understanding? I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode
of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his
own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence
whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases.
Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were the interpreters
of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing.
A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free!
What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that?
I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his
character,—his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is
not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified;
this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a
chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an
Angel of Light.
I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the
country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear that I
may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any
life, can do as much good as his death.
“Misguided”! “Garrulous”! “Insane”!
“Vindictive”! So ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded
responds from the floor of the Armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the
voice of nature is: “No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and
that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form.”
And in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, addressing his captors, who
stand over him: “I think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong
against God and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to
interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in
bondage.”
And referring to his movement: “It is, in my opinion, the greatest
service a man can render to God.”
“I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am
here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It
is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and
as precious in the sight of God.”
You don’t know your testament when you see it.
“I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and
weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave power, just as much as I do
those of the most wealthy and powerful.”
“I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the
South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question, that must come up
for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared
the better. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but
this question is still to be settled,—this negro question, I mean; the
end of that is not yet.”
I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to
Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with
the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the
ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of
Slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain
Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.
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