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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Henry David Thoreau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+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 _you_ to _make 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.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN ***
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Henry David Thoreau</div>
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+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: A Plea for Captain John Brown</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Henry David Thoreau</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: March, 2001 [eBook #2567]<br />
+[Most recently updated: January 21, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
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+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Jason Filley and David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN ***</div>
+
+<h1> A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN </h1>
+
+<h2> By Henry David Thoreau </h2>
+
+<h4>[Read to the citizens of Concord, Mass.,<br/>
+Sunday Evening, October 30, 1859.]</h4>
+
+<p>
+<br/><br/>
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s, that Kansas was made free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rural exterior&rdquo;; as if,
+in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen&rsquo;s
+dress only.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;I know
+no more of grammar than one of your calves.&rdquo; 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 <i>his humanities</i>, and not any study of grammar. He would have
+left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part,
+see nothing at all&mdash;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&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In his camp,&rdquo; as one has recently written, and as I have myself
+heard him state, &ldquo;he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals was
+suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war. &lsquo;I would
+rather,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;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,&mdash;God-fearing men,&mdash;men who respect themselves, and with a
+dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford
+ruffians.&rsquo;&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;his &ldquo;orderly book&rdquo; I think he called
+it,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a
+transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,&mdash;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, &ldquo;They had a perfect right to be hung.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;It is perfectly well
+understood that I will not be taken.&rdquo; 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,
+&ldquo;No little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body
+could not be got together in season.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;it was among the best planned and executed
+conspiracies that ever failed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?&mdash;and this, not
+because the government menials were lenient, but because they were afraid of
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he did not attribute his success, foolishly, to &ldquo;his star,&rdquo; 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
+<i>lacked a cause</i>&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to make haste to <i>his</i> last act, and its effects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s position and probable fate is spoiling many a man&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pluck,&rdquo;&mdash;as the
+Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the
+cock-pit, &ldquo;the gamest man he ever saw,&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;he died as the fool
+dieth&rdquo;; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him
+dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that
+&ldquo;he threw his life away,&rdquo; because he resisted the government. Which
+way have they thrown <i>their</i> lives, pray?&mdash;Such as would praise a man
+for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers. I hear another
+ask, Yankee-like, &ldquo;What will he gain by it?&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;surprise&rdquo; party, if he
+does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure.
+&ldquo;But he won&rsquo;t gain anything by it.&rdquo; Well, no, I don&rsquo;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,&mdash;and <i>such</i> a soul!&mdash;when <i>you</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Served him right&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;A dangerous
+man&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;He is undoubtedly insane.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 <i>wolves</i> in sheep&rsquo;s clothing.
+&ldquo;The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions&rdquo; even,
+might dare to protest against <i>that</i> 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 &ldquo;life membership&rdquo; in such societies as these. A
+life-membership in the grave! You can get buried cheaper than that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;Now I lay me down to sleep,&rdquo;
+and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his
+&ldquo;<i>long</i> rest.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 <i>they</i> could never act
+as he does, as long as they are themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. <i>They</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 <i>cackling</i> 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 <i>hub, bub!</i> Exclude the reports of religious and political
+conventions, and publish the words of a living man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I object not so much to what they have omitted, as to what they have
+inserted. Even the <i>Liberator</i> called it &ldquo;a misguided, wild, and
+apparently insane ... effort.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;deluded
+fanatics&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;mistaken men&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;insane,&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;crazed.&rdquo; It suggests what a <i>sane</i> set of editors we are
+blessed with, <i>not</i> &ldquo;mistaken men&rdquo;; who know very well on
+which side their bread is buttered, at least.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people
+and parties declaring, &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t do it, nor countenance <i>him</i>
+to do it, in any conceivable way. It can&rsquo;t be fairly inferred from my
+past career.&rdquo; I, for one, am not interested to hear you define your
+position. I don&rsquo;t know that I ever was, or ever shall be. I think it is
+mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. Ye needn&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;under the auspices of John Brown and nobody else.&rdquo; The Republican
+party does not perceive how many his <i>failure</i> will make to vote more
+correctly than they would have them. They have counted the votes of
+Pennsylvania &amp; Co., but they have not correctly counted Captain
+Brown&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was always conceded to him,&rdquo; <i>says one who calls him
+crazy</i>, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of
+humanity,&rdquo; without any &ldquo;outbreak.&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;diffusing&rdquo; humanity, and its sentiments with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of
+an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted &ldquo;on the
+principle of revenge.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>by a whole
+body</i>,&mdash;even though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has
+settled that matter with himself,&mdash;the spectacle is a sublime
+one,&mdash;didn&rsquo;t ye know it, ye Liberators, ye Tribunes, ye
+Republicans?&mdash;and we become criminal in comparison. Do yourselves the
+honor to recognize him. He needs none of your respect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Insane! A father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several more men
+besides,&mdash;as many at least as twelve disciples,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few <i>sane</i> representatives to
+Congress for, of late years?&mdash;to declare with effect what kind of
+sentiments? All their speeches put together and boiled down,&mdash;and probably
+they themselves will confess it,&mdash;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&rsquo;s Ferry engine-house,&mdash;that man whom you are
+about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent <i>you</i>
+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, <i>were</i> 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&rsquo;s rifles, while he retained
+his faculty of speech,&mdash;a Sharp&rsquo;s rifle of infinitely surer and
+longer range.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the <i>New York Herald</i> reports the conversation <i>verbatim!</i> It
+does not know of what undying words it is made the vehicle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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,&rdquo; (I leave that part to Mr. Wise) &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The testimony of Mr. Vallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same
+purport, that &ldquo;it is vain to underrate either the man or his
+conspiracy.... He is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary ruffian,
+fanatic, or madman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All is quiet at Harper&rsquo;s Ferry,&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We talk about a <i>representative</i> government; but what a monster of a
+government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the
+<i>whole</i> heart, are not <i>represented</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The only government that I recognize,&mdash;and it matters not how few are at
+the head of it, or how small its army,&mdash;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>point</i> 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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s Ferry. She sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the
+penalty of her sin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll be glad to work for you on these terms, only
+don&rsquo;t make a noise about it.&rdquo; 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 <i>free</i> road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the
+Vigilant Committee. <i>They</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?&mdash;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&mdash;I speak of his followers only&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;I say again that
+it affects me as a sublime spectacle. If he had had any journal advocating
+&ldquo;<i>his cause</i>,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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 <i>this</i> 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rifles and the
+revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of
+one who could use them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death&mdash;the
+possibility of a man&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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,&mdash;Washington,&mdash;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&rsquo;ll defy them
+to do it. They haven&rsquo;t got life enough in them. They&rsquo;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&rsquo;s no hope of you. You haven&rsquo;t got
+your lesson yet. You&rsquo;ve got to stay after school. We make a needless ado
+about capital punishment,&mdash;taking lives, when there is no life to take.
+<i>Memento mori!</i> We don&rsquo;t understand that sublime sentence which some
+worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. We&rsquo;ve interpreted it in a
+grovelling and snivelling sense; we&rsquo;ve wholly forgotten how to die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to
+live. If this man&rsquo;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One writer says that Brown&rsquo;s peculiar monomania made him to be
+&ldquo;dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Unless above himself he can<br/>
+Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Newspaper editors argue also that it is a proof of his <i>insanity</i> that he
+thought he was appointed to do this work which he did,&mdash;that he did not
+suspect himself for a moment! They talk as if it were impossible that a man
+could be &ldquo;divinely appointed&rdquo; in these days to do any work
+whatever; as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any
+man&rsquo;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&rsquo;s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of
+whatever character, were a success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The amount of it is, our &ldquo;<i>leading men</i>&rdquo; are a harmless kind
+of folk, and they know <i>well enough</i> that <i>they</i> were not divinely
+appointed, but elected by the votes of their party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;of his rare qualities!&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>not</i> good? Is there
+any necessity for a man&rsquo;s being a tool to perform a deed of which his
+better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-makers that <i>good</i>
+men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the
+letter, and not the spirit? What right have <i>you</i> to enter into a compact
+with yourself that you <i>will</i> do thus or so, against the light within you?
+Is it for <i>you</i> to <i>make up</i> your mind,&mdash;to form any resolution
+whatever,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his
+character,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>almost fear</i> that I
+may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if <i>any</i>
+life, can do as much good as his death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Misguided&rdquo;! &ldquo;Garrulous&rdquo;! &ldquo;Insane&rdquo;!
+&ldquo;Vindictive&rdquo;! 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: &ldquo;No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and
+that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, addressing his captors, who
+stand over him: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And referring to his movement: &ldquo;It is, in my opinion, the greatest
+service a man can render to God.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You don&rsquo;t know your testament when you see it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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,&mdash;this negro question, I mean; the
+end of that is not yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN ***</div>
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+Project Gutenberg's A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Henry David Thoreau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Plea for Captain John Brown
+
+Author: Henry David Thoreau
+
+Posting Date: December 6, 2008 [EBook #2567]
+Release Date: March, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jason Filley
+
+
+
+
+
+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 his 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 his, 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
+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 figureheads
+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 slave holder, 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 Gesler,
+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 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 Coppic, 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 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
+this man 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 you to make 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
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Plea for Captain John Brown, by
+Henry David Thoreau
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN ***
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+Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Thoreau
+#4 in our series by Henry David Thoreau
+
+
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+Title:  A Plea for Captain John Brown
+
+Author:  Henry David Thoreau.
+
+March, 2001  [Etext #2567]
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Thoreau
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+This etext was prepared by Jason Filley, St. Louis, Missouri.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 his 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 his, 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 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 figureheads 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 slave holder, 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 Gesler, 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 Sharpe's
+rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharpe'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 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
+Coppic, 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 who
+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 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 this man 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 you to make
+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 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 your 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Thoreau
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Thoreau
+#4 in our series by Henry David Thoreau
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+Title:  A Plea for Captain John Brown
+
+Author:  Henry David Thoreau.
+
+Release Date: March 1, 2001 [EBook #2567]
+[Most recently updated on August 4, 2007]
+
+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Thoreau
+*******This file should be named apcjb11.txt or apcjb11.zip******
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+This etext was prepared by Jason Filley, St. Louis, Missouri.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 his 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 his, 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 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 figureheads 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 slave holder, 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 Gesler, 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 Sharpe's
+rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharpe'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 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
+Coppic, 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 who
+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 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, for 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 this man 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 you to make
+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 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 your 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Thoreau
+
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