A Plea for Captain John Brown | Page 8

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,