who are not always our best citizens, mutter terrible oaths, especially
in the month of October, because the South is not yet wholly
regenerate, because not all which sprang from the ashes of the
slave-pen were angels of light.
But let us be patient while the world moves on. Forty years ago not
only the banks of the Yazoo and the Chattahoochee, but those of the
Hudson, and the Charles, and the Wabash, were under the lash. On the
eve of John Brown's hanging not half a dozen men in the city of
Concord, the most intellectual town in New England, the home of
Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Alcott, dared say that they felt any
respect for the man or sympathy for the cause for which he died.
I wish to quote a few passages from this "Plea for Captain John Brown."
To fully realize its power, you should read it all for yourselves. You
must put yourselves back into history, now already seeming almost
ancient history to us, to the period when Buchanan was President--the
terrible sultry lull just before the great storm. You must picture the
audience of the best people in Massachusetts, half-sympathizing with
Captain Brown, half-afraid of being guilty of treason in so doing. You
must picture the speaker, with his clear-cut, earnest features and
penetrating voice. No preacher, no politician, no professional
reformer, no Republican, no Democrat; a man who never voted; a
naturalist whose companions were the flowers and the birds, the trees
and the squirrels. It was the voice of Nature in protest against
slavery and in plea for Captain Brown.
"My respect for my fellow-men," said Thoreau, "is not being increased
these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way in which men speak of
this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual pluck,
'the gamest man I ever saw,' the Governor of Virginia said, had been
caught and was about to be hung. He was not thinking of his foes when
the Governor of Virginia thought he looked so brave.
"It turns what sweetness I have to gall to hear the remarks of some of
my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my
townsmen observed that 'he dieth as the fool dieth,' which, 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?
"I hear another ask, Yankee-like, 'What will he gain by it?' as if he
expected to fill his pockets by the enterprise. 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 get anything. Well, no; I
don't suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take
the year around, but he stands a chance to save his soul--and such a
soul!--which you do not. You can get more in your market for a quart
of milk than a quart of blood, but yours is not the market 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; 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, it does not ask
our leave to germinate.
"A man does a brave and humane deed, and 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 fairly be inferred from my past career.'
Ye need n't take so much pains, my friends, to wash your skirts of him.
No one 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.'
"'All is quiet in 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 simply as brute force. It is more manifest
than ever that tyranny rules. I see this Government to be effectually
allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind.
"The only government that I recognize--and it matters not how few are
at the head of it, or how small its army,--is the 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?
"Treason! Where does such treason take its rise? I cannot help
thinking of you as ye deserve, ye governments! Can you dry up the
fountain of thought? High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny
here below, has its origin in the power that makes and forever
re-creates man. When you have caught and hung all its human rebels,
you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt. You have not struck
at the fountain-head. The same indignation which cleared the temple
once will clear it again.
"I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the
good and the brave ever in the 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, called
out of many thousands, if not millions. 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 the country; for their leader, no doubt, had
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 their 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 enlisted for
this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for
months, if not years, 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 monotonously
and wearisomely playing the same old tune and then passing around the
hat, it would have been fatal to his efficiency. If he had acted in
such a way 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.
"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. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival,
it will be the severest possible satire on words and acts 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 generous
blood in her veins than any number of years of what is called political
and commercial prosperity. How many a man who was lately contemplating
suicide has now something to live for!
"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 it 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 the 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 you 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 promptings 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.
I have yet to learn that God is any respecter of persons.
"'I pity the poor in bondage, who have none to help them; that is why I
am here, not to gratify personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive
spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged that are
as good as you are, and as precious in the sight of God.
"'I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all of 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 now very
easily--I am nearly disposed of already,--but this question is still to
be settled, this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.'"
"I foresee the time," said Thoreau, "when the painter will paint that
scene, no longer going to Rome for his 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."
A few years ago, while on a tramp through the North Woods, I came out
through the forests of North Elba, to the old "John Brown Farm." Here
John Brown lived for many years, and here he tried to establish a
colony of freed slaves in the pure air of the mountains. Here, too,
his family remained through the stirring times when he took part in the
bloody struggles that made and kept Kansas free.
The little old brown farmhouse stands on the edge of the great woods, a
few miles to the north of the highest peaks of the Adirondacks. There
is nothing unusual about the house. You will find a dozen such in a
few hours' walk almost anywhere in the mountain parts of New England or
New York. It stands on a little hill, "in a sightly place," as they
say in that region, with no shelter of trees around it.
[Illustration: The John Brown Homestead, North Elba, N.Y.]
At the foot of the hill in a broad curve flows the River Au Sable,
small and clear and cold, and full of trout. It is not far above that
the stream takes its rise in the dark Indian Pass, the only place in
these mountains where the ice of winter lasts all summer long. The
same ice on the one side sends forth the Au Sable, and on the other
feeds the fountain head of the infant Hudson River.
In the little dooryard in front of the farmhouse is the historic spot
where John Brown's body still lies moldering. There is not even a
grave of his own. His bones lie with those of his father, and the
short record of his life and death is crowded on the foot of his
father's tombstone. Near by, in the little yard, lies a huge,
wandering boulder, torn off years ago by the glaciers from the granite
hills that hem in Indian Pass. The boulder is ten feet or more in
diameter, large enough to make the farmhouse behind it seem small in
comparison. On its upper surface, in letters two feet long, which can
be read plainly for a mile away, is cut the simple name--
JOHN BROWN.
This is John Brown's grave, and the place, the boulder; and the
inscription are alike fitting to the man he was.
[Illustration: John Brown's Grave.]
Dust to dust; ashes to ashes; granite to granite; the last of the
Puritans!
[1] Address before the California State Normal School, at San José,
1892.
A KNIGHT OF THE ORDER OF POETS.[1]
"In London I saw two pictures. One was of a woman. You would not
mistake it for any of the Greek goddesses. It had a splendor and
majesty such as Phidias might have given to a woman Jupiter. But not
terrible. The culmination of the awful beauty was in an expression of
matchless compassion. If there had been other figures, they must have
been suffering humanity at her feet.
"The other was also of a woman. Whose face it is hard to say. Not the
Furies, not Lady Macbeth, not Catherine de Medici, not Phillip the
Second, not Nero, not any face you have ever seen, but a gathering up
from all the faces you have seen--the greatness, the splendor, the
savagery, the greed, the pride, the hate, the mercilessness, into one
colossal, terrifyingly Satanic woman-face. The first was clothed in a
simple, soft, white robe; the other in a befitting tragic splendor,
mostly blood-red. I looked from one to the other. What immeasurable
distance between them! What single point have they in common? But as
I look back and forth I seem to see a certain formal similarity. It
grows upon me. I am incredulous. I am appalled. Then one touches me
and whispers: 'They are the same. It is the Church.' In London I saw
this--in the air."--WILLIAM LOWE BRYAN.
Four centuries ago began the great struggle for freedom of thought
which has made our modern civilization possible. I wish here to give
something of the story of a man who in his day was not the least in
this conflict--a man who dared to think and act for himself when
thought and act were costly--Ulrich von Hutten.
Near Frankfort-on-the-Main, on a sharp pinnacle of rock above the
little railway station of Vollmerz, may still be found the scanty ruins
of an old castle which played a brave part in German history before it
was destroyed in the Thirty Years War.
In this castle of Steckelberg, in the year 1488, was born Ulrich von
Hutten. He was the last of a long line of Huttens of Steckelberg,
strong men who knew not fear, who had fought for the Emperor in all
lands whither the imperial eagle had flown, and who, when the empire
was at peace, had fought right merrily with their neighbors on all
sides. Robber-knights they were, no doubt, some or all of them; but in
those days all was fair in love and in war. And this line of warriors
centered in Ulrich von Hutten, and with him it ended. "The wild
kindred has gone out with this its greatest."
Ulrich was the eldest son, and bore his father's name. But he was not
the son his father had dreamed of. Slender of figure, short of
stature, and weak of limb, Ulrich seemed unworthy of his burly
ancestry. The horse, the sword, and the lute were not for him. He
tried hard to master them and to succeed in all things worthy of a
knight. But he was strong only with his books. At last to his books
his father consigned him, and, sorely disappointed, he sent Ulrich to
the monastery of Fulda to be made a priest.
A wise man, Eitelwolf von Stein, became his friend, and pointed out to
him a life braver than that of a priest, more noble than that of a
knight, the life of a scholar. To Hutten's father Eitelwolf wrote:
"Would you bury a genius like that in the cloister? He must be a man
of letters." But the father had decided once for all. Ulrich must
never return to Steckelberg unless he came back as a priest. And the
son took his fate in his own hands, and fled from Fulda, to make his
way as a scholar in a world in which scholarship received scanty
recognition.
At the same time another young man whose history was to be interwoven
with his own, Martin Luther, fled from the wickedness and deceit of
this same world to the solitude of the monastery of Erfurth. By very
different paths they came at last to work in the same cause, and their
modes of action were not less different.
To the University of Cologne Hutten went, and with the students of that
day he was trained in the mysteries of scholasticism, and in the Latin
of the schoolmen and the priests. Wonderful problems they pondered
over, and they used to write long arguments in Latin for or against
propositions which came nowhere within the domain of fact. That
scholarship stood related to reality, and that it must find its end and
justification in action was no part of the philosophy of those times.
But Hutten and his friends cared little for scholastic puzzles and they
gave themselves to the study of the beauties of Latin poetry and to the
newly opened mine of the literature of Greece. They delighted in
Virgil and Lucian, and still more in Homer and Aeschylus.
The Turks had conquered Constantinople, and the fall of the Greek
Empire had driven many learned Greeks to the West of Europe. There
some of the scholars received them with open arms, and eagerly learned
from them to read Homer and Aristotle in the original tongue, and the
New Testament also. Those who followed these studies came to be known
as Humanists. But most of the universities and the monasteries in
Germany looked upon this revival of Greek culture as pernicious and
antichristian. Poetry they despised. The Latin Vulgate met their
religious needs, and Greek was only another name for Paganism. The
party name of Obscurantists ("Dunkelmänner") was given to these, and
this name has remained with them on the records of history.
In the letters of one of Hutten's comrades we find this confession of
faith, which is interesting as expressing the feelings of young men of
that time: "There is but one God, but he has many forms, and many
names--Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ, Luna, Ceres, Proserpine,
Tellus, Mary. But be careful how you say that. One must disclose
these things in secret, like Eleusinian mysteries. In matters of
religion, you must use the cover of fables and riddles. You, with
Jupiter's grace (that is, the grace of the best and greatest god), can
despise the lesser gods in silence. When I say Jupiter, I mean Christ
and the true God. The coat and the beard and the bones of Christ I
worship not. I worship the living God, who wears no coat nor beard,
and left no bones upon the earth."
Hutten wished to know the world, not from books only, but to see all
cities and lands; to measure himself with other men; to rise above
those less worthy. The danger of such a course seemed to him only the
greater attraction. Content to him was laziness; love of home but a
dog's delight in a warm fire. "I live," he said, "in no place rather
than another; my home is everywhere."
So he tramped through Germany to the northward, and had but a sorry
time. In his own mind he was a scholar, a poet, a knight of the
noblest blood of Germany; to others he was a little sickly and forlorn
vagrant. Never strong of body, he was stricken by a miserable disease
which filled his life with a succession of attacks of fever. He was
ship-wrecked on the Baltic Sea, sick and forlorn in Pomerania, and at
last he was received in charity in the house of Henning Lötz, professor
of law at Greifeswald.
This action has given Lötz's name immortality, for it is associated
with the first of those fiery poems of Hutten which, in their way, are
unique in literature. For Hutten was restless and proud, and was not
to be content with bread and butter and a new suit of clothes. This
independence was displeasing to the professor, who finally, in utter
disgust, turned Hutten out of doors in midwinter. When the boy had
tramped a while in storm and slush, two servants of Lötz overtook him
on the road and robbed him of his money and clothing. In a wretched
plight he reached a little inn in Rostock, in Mecklenberg. Here the
professors in the university received him kindly, and made provision
for his needs. Then he let loose the fury of his youthful anger on
Lötz. As ever, his poetic genius rose with his wrath, and the more
angry he became the greater was he as a poet.
Two volumes he published, ringing the changes of his contempt and
hatred of Lötz, at the same time praising the virtues of those who had
found in him a kindred spirit. A "knight of the order of poets," he
styles himself, and to all Humanists, to the "fellow-feeling among free
spirits" ("_Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern_") he appeals for
sympathy in his struggle with Lötz.
He had, indeed, not found a foeman worthy of his steel, but he had
shown what a finely tempered blade he bore. Foemen enough he found in
later times, and his steel had need of all its sharpness and temper.
And it never failed him to the last.
Meanwhile he wandered to Vienna, giving lectures there on the art of
poetry. But poetry was abhorred by the schoolmen everywhere, and the
students of the university were forbidden to attend his lectures. He
then went to Italy. When he reached Pavia, he found the city in the
midst of a siege, surrounded by a hostile French army. He fell ill of
a fever, and giving himself up for dead, he composed the famous epitaph
for himself, of which I give a rough translation:
Here, also be it said, a life of ill-fortune is ended;
By evil pursued on the water; beset by wrong upon land.
Here lie Hutten's bones; he, who had done nothing wrongful,
Was wickedly robbed of his life by the sword in a Frenchman's hand.
By Fate, decided that he should see unlucky days only;
Decided that even these days could never be many or long;
Hemmed in by danger and death, he forsook not serving the muses,
And as well as he could, he rendered this service in song.
The Frenchman's sword did not rob him of his life. The Frenchman's
hand took only his money, which was not much, and again sent him
adrift. He now set his pen to writing epigrams on the Emperor, wherein
Maximilian was compared to the eagle which should devour the frogs in
the swamps of Venice. Meanwhile he enlisted as a common soldier in
Maximilian's army.
In Italy, the abuses of the Papacy attracted his attention. Officials
of the Church were then engaged in extending the demand for
indulgences. The sale of pardons "straight from Rome, all hot," was
becoming a scandal in Christendom. All this roused the wrath of
Hutten, who attacked the Pope himself in his songs:
"Heaven now stands for a price to be peddled and sold,
But what new folly is this, as though the fiat of Heaven
Needed an earthly witness, an earthly warrant and seal!"
More prosperous times followed, and we find Hutten honored as a poet,
living in the court of the Archbishop of Mainz. At this time a cousin,
Hans Hutten, a young man of great courage and promise, was a knight in
the service of Ulrich, Duke of Wurtemberg. He was a favorite of the
Duke, and he and his young wife were the life of the Würtemburg court.
And Duke Ulrich once came to Hans and threw himself at his feet,
begging that this wife, whom he loved, should be given over wholly to
him. Hans Hutten answered the Duke like a man, and the Duke arose with
murder in his heart. Afterward, when they were hunting in a wood, he
stabbed Hans Hutten in the back with his sword.
All this came to the ear of Ulrich Hutten in Mainz. Love for his
cousin, love for his name and family, love for freedom and truth, all
urged him to avenge the murdered Hans. The wrongs the boy had suffered
from the coarse-hearted Professor Lötz became as nothing beside this
great crime against the Huttens and against manhood.
In all the history of invective, I know of nothing so fierce as
Hutten's appeal against Duke Ulrich In five different pamphlets his
crime was described to the German people, and all good men, from the
Emperor down, were called on to help him in his struggle against the
Duke of Würtemberg.
"I envy you your fame, you murderer," he wrote. "A year will be named
for you, and there shall be a day set off for you. Future generations
shall read, for those who are born this year, that they were born in
the year stained by the ineffaceable shame of Germany. You will come
into the calendar, scoundrel. You will enrich history. Your deed is
immortal, and you will be remembered in all future time. You have had
your ambition, and you shall never be forgotten."