A Plea for Captain John Brown | Page 4

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