A Plea for Captain John Brown | Page 9

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