his own age cruelly beaten, began to hate slavery and love the slaves so
intensely as "sometimes to raise the question, Is God their Father?" At
forty, "he conceived the idea of becoming a liberator of the Southern
slaves;" at the same time "determined to let them know that they had
friends, and prepared himself to lead them to liberty. From the moment
that he formed this resolution, he engaged in no business which he
could not, without loss to his friends and family, wind up in fourteen
days." His favorite texts of Scripture were, "Remember them that are in
bonds as bound with them;" "Whoso stoppeth his ear at the cry of the
poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard;" "Whoso mocketh
the poor reproacheth his Maker, and he that is glad at calamities shall
not be unpunished;" "Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when
it is in the power of thine hand to do it." His favorite hymns were,
"Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" and "Why should we start and fear to die?"
"I asked him," said a child, "how he felt when he left the eleven
slaves, taken from Missouri, safe in Canada? His answer was, 'Lord,
permit now thy servant to die in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy
salvation. I could not brook the idea that any ill should befall them,
or they be taken back to slavery. The arm of Jehovah protected us.'"
"Upon one occasion, when one of the ex-governors of Kansas said to him
that he was a marked man, and that the Missourians were determined,
sooner or later, to take his scalp, the old man straightened himself up,
with a glance of enthusiasm and defiance in his gray eye. 'Sir,' said
he, 'the angel of the Lord will camp round about me.'" On leaving his
family the first time he went to Kansas, he said, "If it is so painful
for us to part, with the hope of meeting again, how dreadful must be the
separation for life of hundreds of poor slaves." "He deliberately
determined, twenty years before his attack upon Harper's Ferry," says
Higginson, "that at some future period he would organize an armed party,
go into a slave State, and liberate a large number of slaves. Soon
after, surveying professionally in the mountains of Virginia, he chose
the very ground for the purpose. He said 'God had established the
Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one
day be a refuge for fugitive slaves. Visiting Europe afterward, he
studied military strategy for this purpose, even making designs for a
new style of forest fortifications, simple and ingenious, to be used by
parties of fugitive slaves when brought to bay. He knew the ground, he
knew his plans, he knew himself; but where should he find his men? Such
men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared.
John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore; he reared them in his
sons. Mrs. Brown had been always the sharer of his plans. 'Her husband
always believed,' she said, 'that he was to be an instrument in the
hands of Providence, and she believed it too.' 'This plan had occupied
his thoughts and prayers for twenty years.' 'Many a night he had lain
awake and prayed concerning it.'" "He believed in human brotherhood, and
in the God of Battles; he admired Nat Turner, the negro patriot, equally
with George Washington, the white American deliverer." "He secretly
despised even the ablest antislavery orators. He could see 'no use in
this talking,' he said. 'Talk is a national institution; but it does no
manner of good to the slave.'" The year before his attack, he uttered
these sentences in conversation: "Nat Turner, with fifty men, held
Virginia five weeks. The same number, well organized and armed, can
shake the system out of the State." "Give a slave a pike, and you make
him a man. Deprive him of the means of resistance, and you keep him
down." "The land belongs to the bondsman. He has enriched it, and been
robbed of its fruits." "Any resistance, however bloody, is better than
the system which makes every seventh woman a concubine." "A few men in
the right, and knowing they are, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the
Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "When the
bondsmen stand like men, the nation will respect them. It is necessary
to teach them this." About the same time he said, in another
conversation, "that it was nothing to die in a good cause, but an
eternal disgrace to sit still in the presence of the barbarities of
American slavery." "Providence," said he, "has made me an actor, and
slavery an outlaw." "Duty is the voice of God, and a man is neither
worthy of a good home here, or a heaven, that is not willing to be in
peril for a good cause." He scouted the idea of rest while he held "a
commission direct from God Almighty to act against slavery." After his
capture, and while he lay in blood upon the floor of the guard-house, he
was asked by a bystander upon what principle he justified his acts?
"Upon the Golden Rule," he answered. "I pity the poor in bondage that
have none to help them. That is why I am here; it is not to gratify any
personal animosity, or feeling of 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. I want you to understand,
gentlemen, that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the
colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do
those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved
me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of
endeavoring to do for those in distress--the greatly oppressed--as we
would be done by. The cry of distress, of the oppressed, is my reason,
and the only thing that prompted me to come here. I wish to say,
furthermore, that you had better, all you people of the South, prepare
yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for
settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you
commence that preparation, the better for you. 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." In
his "last speech," before sentence was passed upon him, he said, "This
court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see
a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the
New Testament. That teaches me that all things 'whatsoever I would that
men should do unto me I should do even so to them.' It teaches me
further, to 'remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I
endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to
understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have
interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done,
in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is
deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of
the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my
children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose
rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I
submit: so let it be done." In a postscript to a letter to a
half-brother, written in prison, he said, "Say to my poor boys never to
grieve for one moment on my account; and should any of you live to see
the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown,
it will not be more strange than many things that have happened." In a
letter to his old school-master, he said, "I have enjoyed much of life,
as I was enabled to discover the secret of this somewhat early. It has
been in making the prosperity and happiness of others my own; so that
really I have had a great deal of prosperity." To another he wrote, "I
commend my poor family to the kind remembrance of all friends, but I
well understand that they are not the only poor in our world. I ought to
begin to leave off saying our world." In his last letter to his family,
he said, "I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure
of mind and cheerfulness, feeling the strong assurance that in no other
possible way could I be used to so much advantage to the cause of God
and of humanity, and that nothing that I or all my family have
sacrificed or suffered will be lost. Do not feel ashamed on my account,
nor for one moment despair of the cause, or grow weary of well-doing. I
bless God I never felt stronger confidence in the certain and near
approach of a bright morning and glorious day than I have felt, and do
now feel, since my confinement here." In a previous letter to his
family, he said, "Never forget the poor, nor think anything you bestow
on them to be lost to you, even though they may be as black as
Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian eunuch, who cared for Jeremiah in the pit of
the dungeon, or as black as the one to whom Philip preached Christ.
'Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.'" As he stepped out
of the jail-door, on his way to the gallows, "a black woman, with a
little child in her arms, stood near his way. The twain were of the
despised race for whose emancipation and elevation to the dignity of the
children of God he was about to lay down his life. His thoughts at that
moment none can know except as his acts interpret them. He stopped for a
moment in his course, stooped over, and with the tenderness of one whose
love is as broad as the brotherhood of man, kissed it affectionately. As
he came upon an eminence near the gallows, he cast his eye over the
beautiful landscape, and followed the windings of the Blue Ridge
Mountains in the distance. He looked up earnestly at the sun, and sky,
and all about, and then remarked, 'This is a beautiful country. I have
not cast my eyes over it before.'" "You are more cheerful than I am,
Captain Brown," said the undertaker, who sat with him in the wagon.
"Yes," answered the old man, "I ought to be." "'Gentlemen, good-by,' he
said to two acquaintances, as he passed from the wagon to the scaffold,
which he was first to mount. As he quietly awaited the necessary
arrangements, he surveyed the scenery unmoved, looking principally in
the direction of the people, in the far distance. 'There is no faltering
in his step, wrote one who saw him, 'but firmly and erect he stands
amid the almost breathless lines of soldiery that surround him. With a
graceful motion of his pinioned right arm he takes the slouched hat from
his head and carelessly casts it upon the platform by his side. His
elbows and ankles are pinioned, the white cap is drawn over his eyes,
the hangman's rope is adjusted around his neck.' 'Captain Brown,' said
the sheriff, 'you are not standing on the drop. Will you come forward?'
'I can't see you, gentlemen,' was the old man's answer, unfalteringly
spoken; 'you must lead me.' The sheriff led his prisoner forward to the
centre of the drop. 'Shall I give you a handkerchief,' he then asked,
'and let you drop it as a signal?' 'No; I am ready at any time; but do
not keep me needlessly waiting.'"
"Give the corpse a good dose of arsenic, and make sure work of it!"
exclaimed a captain of Virginia militia.
"The saint, whose martyrdom will make the gallows glorious like the
cross!" exclaimed the Massachusetts sage and seer.
Froude's reflections upon the death of John Davis, the navigator, one of
England's Forgotten Worthies, may well be applied to John Brown: "A
melancholy end for such a man--the end of a warrior, not dying
Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in a poor brawl or
ambuscade. Life with him was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice
offered up to duty, and what his Master sent was welcome." It was "hard,
rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life
of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this
side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is
won; and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of man.
Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has
been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really
highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or
Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings,
slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same: the same bitter cup
has been given to them to drink."
"Whether on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle's van,
The fittest place where man can die
Is where he dies for man."
V.
REWARDS.
The Bishop of Llandaff was standing in the House of Lords, in company
with Lords Thurlow and Loughborough, when Lord Southampton accosted him:
"I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make
him get forward in the world?" "I know of but one way," replied the
bishop; "give him parts and poverty." Poussin, being shown a picture by
a person of rank, remarked, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to
make you a good painter."
"The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with
the heir." Yet, says Froude, "The man who with no labor of his own has
inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his father
who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest
pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first who made
the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The nearer to
the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor, who has
soiled his fingers by labor, is no better than a parvenu."
Labor, curse though we call it, as things are, seems to be life's
greatest blessing. "There is more fatigue," says Tom Brown, "and trouble
in a lady than in the most laborious life; who would not rather drive a
wheelbarrow with nuts about the streets, or cry brooms, than be
Arsennus?" (a fine gentleman). When Sir Horace Vere died, it was asked
what had occasioned his death; to which some one replied, "By doing
nothing." "Too much idleness," said Burke, "fills up a man's time much
more completely, and leaves him less his own master than any sort of
employment whatsoever." What to do? how to do? become distressing
questions to him, and he finds himself in as great extremity as the man
in the story of the Persian poet: "I saw," says Saadi, "an Arab sitting
in a circle of jewelers of Basrah, and relating as follows: 'Once on a
time having missed my way in the desert, and having no provisions left,
I gave myself up for lost; when I happened to find a bag full of pearls.
I shall never forget the relish and delight that I felt on supposing it
to be fried wheat; nor the bitterness and despair which I suffered on
discovering that the bag contained pearls.'"
In the executive chamber one evening, there were present a number of
gentlemen, among them Mr. Seward. A point in the conversation suggesting
the thought, the president said, "Seward, you never heard, did you, how
I earned my first dollar?" "No," rejoined Mr. Seward. "Well," continued
Lincoln, "I was about eighteen years of age; I belonged, you know, to
what they call down South the 'scrubs;' people who do not own slaves are
nobody there. But we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor,
sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the
river to sell. After much persuasion, I got the consent of mother to go,
and constructed a little flat-boat, large enough to take a barrel or two
of things that we had gathered, with myself and little bundle, down to
New Orleans. A steamer was coming down the river. We have, you know, no
wharves on the Western streams; and the custom was, if passengers were
at any of the landings, for them to go out in a boat, the steamer
stopping and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new flat-boat,
wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any
particular, when two men came down to the shore in carriages, with
trunks, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and
asked, 'Who owns this?' I answered, somewhat modestly, 'I do.' 'Will
you,' said one of them, 'take us and our trunks out to the steamer?'
'Certainly,' said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning
something. I supposed that each of them would give me two or three bits.
The trunks were put on my flat-boat, the passengers seated themselves on
the trunks, and I sculled them out to the steamboat. They got on board,
and I lifted up their heavy trunks, and put them on deck. The steamer
was about to put on steam again, when I called out that they had
forgotten to pay me. Each of them took from his pocket a silver
half-dollar, and threw it on the floor of my boat. I could scarcely
believe my eyes as I picked up the money. Gentlemen, you may think it
was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me a trifle; but
it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit
that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day,--that by
honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer
before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time."
Only such persons interest us, it has been said, who have stood in the
jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might extricated themselves,
and made man victorious. Young and old, all of us, have been intensely
interested in knowing what Robinson Crusoe was to do with his few small
means. Wonderful Robert Burns! "While his youthful mother was still on
the straw, the miserable clay cottage fell above her and the infant
bard, who both narrowly escaped, first being smothered to death, and
then of being starved by cold, as they were conveyed through frost and
snow by night to another dwelling." While he was yet a child, the
poverty of the family increased to wretchedness. The "cattle died, or
were lost by accident; the crops failed, and debts were accumulating. To
these buffetings of misfortune the family could oppose only hard labor
and the most rigid economy. They lived so sparingly that butcher-meat
was a stranger in their dwelling for years." "The farm proved a ruinous
bargain," said the poet; "and to clinch the misfortune, we fell into the
hands of a factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my
tale of Twa Dogs. My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the
scoundrel factor's insolent letters, which used to set us all in tears.
This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing
moil of a galley-slave--brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before
which period I first committed the sin of rhyme.... My passions, when
once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme;
and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into
quiet."
Edmund Kean's early life was very wretched. It was after his marriage
that we find him "strolling in the old misery, giving an entertainment
at Dumfries to pay his lodging. One six-penny auditor alone came."
(Once, we are told, he absented himself from his home in Exeter for
three days. To the question of where he had been, he replied,
grandiloquently, "I have been doing a noble action; I have been drinking
these three days with a brother actor who is leaving Exeter, to keep up
his spirits.") After rehearsal, and before his appearance at Drury Lane,
he exclaimed prophetically, "My God! if I succeed I shall go mad!" Drunk
with delight, he rushed home, and with half-frenzied incoherency poured
forth the story of his triumph. "The pit rose at me!" he cried. "Mary,
you shall ride in your carriage yet!" "Charles," lifting the child from
his bed, "shall go to Eton." Then his voice faltered, and he murmured,
"If Howard (his recently deceased child) had but lived to see it!"
Among the companions of Reynolds, when he was studying his art at Rome,
was a fellow-pupil of the name of Astley. They made an excursion, with
some others, on a sultry day, and all except Astley took off their
coats. After several taunts he was persuaded to do the same, and
displayed on the back of his waistcoat a foaming waterfall. Distress had
compelled him to patch his clothes with one of his own landscapes.
Henderson, the actor, after a simple reading of a newspaper, repeated
such an enormous portion of it as seemed utterly marvelous. "If you had
been obliged, like me," he said, in reply to the surprise expressed by
his auditors, "to depend during many years for your daily bread on
getting words by heart, you would not be so much astonished at habit
having produced the facility." Amyot was a servant at college, and
studied, like Ramus, by the light of burning charcoal from want of
candles; but his translations earned him a mitre as well as renown.
Duchatel rose from being reader in a printing-office to be grand almoner
of France; and was paid by the king to talk to him during his meals.