A special session at the Boston Court-house, where the Supreme Court
is sitting under the protection of the militia. Free men are judging a
man-tool, the property of another man. Perhaps, under his black skin
and his woolly hair, the tool has a kind of soul--you never can tell:
but since he has run away, the tribunal ordains, in its sovereign
independence, that he shall be returned to the hands of his master.
If, weary of digging up your ground, a hoe for which you have paid
with your good money should take it into its head one fine evening to
scamper off, what would you say? The article that has vanished should
be restored to its rightful owner. The law is sacred and the judges
are there to apply it without flinching. There is no joking with these
respectable judges of the Boston Court-house. They have very grave
faces with white skins and not the least suggestion of wool on their
skulls. They represent His Majesty the Right and His Holiness the Moral.
Are you surprised? Then where do you come from? Don’t you know how
little it matters before the law whether you are innocent or guilty?
The important thing is not you but respect for the law. The judge is
there to grind out his judgments, the notes are printed in the record,
and at the end of the month the fees fall with all the precision
of music. And you fail to take this way of administering justice
seriously? You feel no respect for this machine?
Henry’s chief feeling was one of humiliation. He had never cherished
any great illusions about judges and justice, and in a similar case
three years before he had received a painful shock. But this judgment
was beyond anything. _Walden_ was appearing at this moment, and the
book was utterly forgotten in the thought of this negro whom they
were cold-bloodedly sending back to his master, like a package. The
solemnity of the judgment added to this redelivery of the stolen
article a sort of diabolical pomp. In any case, another theft had
been committed, for Henry perceived that they had taken from him an
essential part of himself. In vain had he tried to find among the
friendly fields forgetfulness of these unclean human beings; they had
lost their charm for him, for the baseness of men had blighted them.
The “enemy of the human race” came back from his walks utterly unable
to regain his serenity. He was haunted by the thought of those men
who were in prison for having tried to mob the court and snatch the
“package” out of its hands. He almost envied those fellows. An honest
man belonged in prison in these times of ignominy: at large, he felt
almost an accomplice in the legal crime. As he thought of it, Henry’s
hand went through the motions of touching off a bomb that would send
the machine and the machinists to the devil.
You strange fellow, what concern is it of yours--one negro more or less
from the plantations of the South? Are you mad? He is just as much
merchandise as a barrel of molasses; he can be sold and used up, but
he has got to stay in the shop of the man who has paid his good money
for him. Besides, all this business is going on a long way from your
village: leave Boston and that good Virginia to their own affairs.
Can’t you see that, after a passing flutter, the people around you go
on with their own little concerns? There is nothing so momentous in
this affair to interfere with the thoughts of a solitary walker.
To write a few pages in his Journal, in the privacy of his own soul,
is no relief. Faces, not white pages, are what he needs to have before
him in order to express his emotion. On the Fourth of July Henry goes
to Framingham, where the friends of the cause are holding a meeting,
and delivers there the most vigorous speech he has ever written (he
never speaks _ex tempore_), the richest in blood and fire. The Chief
Justice and the Governor of the State take part in the ceremony: the
orator has not failed to bring these puppets along in his bag to
produce them in his Punch and Judy show. The honourable Governor is
playing dummy. Bang! A good rousing whack on his ear. That will teach
him what it means to let the August Work of Justice follow its course.
The honourable Governor refuses to hand in his resignation. A good
smack in the face will root him out of his chair. The puppet catches
it for being Governor; there is very little of him left. He gets all
the raps on the nose that are intended for the slave-masters whose
interests His Nothingness serves. And to crown the festival, they
publicly burn the Constitution of the United States. The organizer of
the meeting is William Lloyd Garrison, the veteran abolitionist, whom
once the mob dragged through the streets of Boston at the end of a
rope. This brave man, who is ready for anything, asks Henry for the
text of the famous discourse so that he can publish it in his magazine,
the _Liberator_.
Always that fierceness in resistance. Friends who entirely approve
of Henry’s purposes regard this violence, this extremism, as very
unfortunate. Destroy, if you think it good to do so, but don’t bring
into it that savage conviction, as if you wanted to uproot the old tree
of the earth. Keep at least a touch of scepticism. You make no effort
to settle things by arrangement. Always this unsmiling gracelessness.
See what an accommodating smile your old friend Waldo keeps.... It’s
just like the time when you refused to pay your poll-tax and let
them put you in jail, and your friends said it was “mean and in bad
taste.” Is not tolerance the proper thing in a philosopher? He should
accept frauds, great and small, magnanimously, as one tolerates
the faults of old friends. One shouldn’t be so anti-Philistine as
to scout all the respectabilities. One shouldn’t declare, in this
virulent way, one’s utter contempt for the Church and the State. One
shouldn’t go about insisting that the State is the enemy of free, proud
men and the natural protector of the basest elements of a people:
officials, capitalists, flunkies, policemen, speculators, shopkeepers,
moneymakers, gospel-mongers. There are charming people in all these
groups who are offended by this wholesale censure. And suppose you do
consider this court-room--judges, lawyers, public, jury and all--just
as criminal as the accused, is that any reason for calling down thunder
on its head?
Do you never read the presidential messages in the newspapers? Perhaps
you despise the newspapers too? Of course those who produce them are
more interested in cultivating their subscribers than the truth, but is
that any reason to lump them all together, the liberal ones included,
as the “filthy press?” From your point of view, those sensational
events which our friend the saloon-keeper confounds under the one
name of “politics” are simply ridiculous beside a sunset watched from
Fairhaven Cliffs where you go to get your evening paper and the latest
news.
Just look at this pitiful specimen of a citizen who has nothing but a
ridiculous “no” for his country in time of war! A war that brings the
conqueror all sorts of booty is, he tells you bluntly, nothing but an
expedition of brigands, sufficiently well armed to impose their will. A
poor, silly isolated thief steals something and is put under lock and
key, but if he swells to the proportions of an army he comes back, with
flags flying and a band at the head of the procession, bombarded with
flowers and hurrahs by respectable men and women. An evil deed, you
see, becomes a great deed if it is conceived on a large enough scale:
the enthusiasm excited by a war is the rapture of a childish people
before this stupendous metamorphosis.
As for soldiers, Henry has no flowers for an idiot who, whether he
is victor or vanquished, has allowed himself to be seduced by fine
feathers and high pay. He has nothing but a glance to give him, enough
to divine, under the automaton who fires to the right or left at
command and would shoot his brother just as readily, a vestige of a
man who is rather ashamed of the work he is made to do and would be
only too happy to desert if he dared. The instruction which they give a
soldier should logically lead him to distinguish his natural enemy, the
instructor. But this professional brave man is a coward. For the sake
of dressing up in a fine uniform, he has allowed himself to be stripped
of his dignity as a man, just as some young fellows throw their pride
to the winds for a foolish girl. Weak souls, unhappy souls. But in
spite of all this there is less contempt than pity in the look he
gives these fools, yes, even this masquerade of the militia with their
puppets’ gestures. Little as one may sympathise with their stupidity,
everything that debases man is a menace that touches you in your own
person.
You see how far a village good-for-nothing can carry his sarcasm--a
lover of wild flowers and beautiful trees and the unknown things that
might be equally beautiful. He is not responsible for his country,
this “land of liberty” which is subject to the omnipotences of money
and morality; he despises the majority and the ballot. He is no
pistareen-patriot. He ought to take a lesson from his friend Walt
Whitman, whom he has seen in Brooklyn and admires--Walt who stands
whole-heartedly for the flag and for war to a finish, brigand war or
holy war.... Henry has not read his articles in that wretched Brooklyn
sheet, for he never reads the papers at all. It’s a great pity. Walt is
not the man to belittle the National Honour and cynically ask to see
this interesting creature of which they are talking in the newspapers.
Henry had never met this famous bird on his walks, or that other
chanticleer, National Sentiment. Among his own people, among those
whom he would like to regard as his compatriots, even among those who
are nearest to him, he often feels as lost as among strangers. The
prejudices of colour and the flag do not correspond with anything in
his geography. Whether you are an American or a South Sea Islander,
whether you wear a cap or a turban, whether your hair is in a queue or
parted on the side is all one to him. All he asks is, Are you a man,
and what can you do? Play me a little of your music, and I shall know.
A man, you understand; that comes first, first. You can tell me later
what kind of dessert you like or what your nationality is, if you have
a moment to spare: those things are very interesting, of course, but
begin with essentials. Talk music.
You see?... How can anybody hit it off with a fellow who defends his
ideas in this revolutionary way? Henry has only one excuse. If there is
in his sarcasms something more than the pride of a solitary man and the
revolt of the individual, it is because he feels and speaks as a man
whose hands know certain things that philosophers do not know. He has
not allowed himself to be caught up in the machinery of the workaday
world, but he has had to drudge just the same. He knows better than by
hearsay what it means to be exploited. Of all those lies that other
people complacently accept, sweetening them with the honey of a lofty
philosophy, he has felt the effects in his own person ever since he
left college. A man who works with his hands for wages has definite
and personal reasons for criticising these lies a little more sharply
than a humanist in his study or a journalist at his editorial desk.
The elements and materials he has touched have given him a sensibility
of a subtler kind. “_The callous palms of the labourer are conversant
with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the
heart, than the languid fingers of idleness._” This quality, whether
he wills it or not, gives him the more fraternal accent of the comrade
of the poor. Is it a mere philosopher who, as he follows the railroad
that skirts Walden, can ask, as he places his foot on a sleeper, if
it is not going to rise up, if every sleeper is not going to take the
form of one of those hard-working Irishmen who have placed it there and
over whom the train passes at fixed hours, filled with people who roll
comfortably along while the others are rolled over?
The older he grows the more sensitive Henry becomes to the injuries
which, with the precision of a rite, the armed man inflicts upon the
unarmed. The experience of life avails nothing; instead of blunting,
it sharpens his susceptibility. That nameless one whom the Supreme
Court in Boston has just sent off like a package is an intolerable
humiliation--it is enough to blot out the five continents. It is the
State burying its fangs in the flesh of a fugitive. The victim may
not be a great philosopher, but he has nerves--like the distinguished
Governor himself. His thick lips cannot afford to keep smiling.
In an age swollen with the sense of its own importance, this negro
slavery was the most brutal form of the exploitation of man by man.
Since Uncle Tom had brought all the lovers of sentimental scenes and
tears-in-the-eyes flocking about his Cabin, the abolitionist propaganda
had made headway. Henry had joined in it from afar, in his own way. To
further the desertion of the blacks, it had developed a whole secret
organization, the Underground Railroad, with its system, its branches,
switches, waiting-rooms, regulating station. Henry had his share in
the administration. He was station-master at one of those little
halting-places in the country where only a few trains stop from time
to time but that are all the safer in the transit of smuggled goods.
Concord was only a middling-sized village, but it was one that counted
in no small way in the scheme of anti-slavery sympathies. At the very
dawn of the movement, when Henry was just preparing to enter college, a
society of women had been founded there for the abolition of slavery,
and several particular friends of the family were members of it. Ten
years later, Wendell Phillips came there, three winters in succession,
and aroused the most violent excitement in the village frog-pond by
denouncing a Constitution that openly supported the ignominy. If the
old people were outraged and scandalised by this audacity, the young
were enraptured by it; Henry, at that time secretary of the Lyceum,
sent the _Liberator_ a paper on the first lecture. On August 1st, 1844,
an abolitionist meeting was held in the Court-house at which Waldo had
spoken. William Lloyd Garrison was there, and Henry rang the bell to
fling to the winds the good news and the challenge.
The friends of the cause did not forget Concord in their rounds. One of
them, whom a friend introduced to him in March, 1857, made a profound
impression on Henry. A big fellow in his fifties, round-shouldered,
grizzled, rough-hewn, with the rugosity that went with the frontier
type; he came from Kansas, in fact, where with his sons he led,
in those hazardous regions, the far from rose-coloured existence
of a defender of the cause. And what a face he had.... That mouth
like a sabre-cut, the metal of those eyes, that stiff, projecting
hair planted thick on the low, determined brow, those perpendicular
wrinkles between the eyebrows, how much they told.... You could imagine
unforgettable figures like this in old times on a rowers’ bench,
chained by the feet.... That astonishing face, hard as steel, stood out
so magnificently from the crowd of weak masks--the face of a pirate, a
condottiere or a martyr. Another one who did not smile.
Henry felt at once that he was in the presence of a member of his
own family. They talked. But he did not need to be convinced by
the arguments or the stories of what was going on out there on the
frontier. This presence was enough for him: it carried conviction
with it. What did it matter if the man talked like an illiterate,
narrow-minded, old sanctimonious Puritan pietist? Henry looked at
that face, that naked grandeur, that pure force of heroism and
self-sacrifice. He drank in the wind that had swept that brow from its
childhood, saw all that the horizon of the prairie had left in that
glance. It was arranged that the man should come back to Concord and
give a lecture. His name was John Brown--in other words, he was as good
as nameless. You felt like saying simply the man, for short.
The little station-master acquitted himself of his duties with the
decision and the punctuality which, as a ne’er-do-well, he always put
into his work. They signalled to you that someone was on the way; you
had to be there to receive the “package,” before dawn or at nightfall,
put him up if necessary, and in great mystery (the whole family was
in the conspiracy and protected the fugitive, but evil tongues and
spies were not lacking at Concord any more than elsewhere), then
quietly ship him off again, to a safe place over the Canadian border.
Pass the ball. One more Southern planter would have to make the best
of his loss. Henry, a veteran with a sure eye, had the qualities of
a smuggler. You had charge of a man with the police on his tracks,
stimulated by a “good reward,” and while you were on the way to
get a ticket for him at the station you would notice a man with a
gallows-face roaming about, looking very much like a sleuth from
Boston; so you would decide to wait for the next train. The runaway
could stay a little longer at the house, where he was in good hands.
While he was living at Walden, Henry had put one of them up in his
cabin. There were certainly risks in this smuggling business. But when
did risks ever weaken the resolution of an honest man? They strengthen
it.
For the rest, Henry was an abolitionist of an altogether special kind,
very far from orthodox. If the exploitation of the negroes was the most
patent form of slavery, how many other slaves there were beyond the
horizon of the cotton-fields, everywhere, to infinity, whom he would
have liked to free.... The views of the Boston friends were limited by
the famous Cabin. They didn’t see them increasing among the people of
the North, those white-skinned, thin-lipped, fair or chestnut-haired
slaves with heads anything but woolly! Henry saw them all around him,
innumerable and more brutalized than he would have been able to say. He
reckoned fully a million of them in Massachusetts, without the least
suspicion of their state, poor souls--which was the saddest part of the
whole business.
When are you going to start a campaign to enable all these white
negroes to escape, these slaves who are so busy under the eye of their
overseers growing the evil cotton from which the web of our days is
woven? To make them want to bid farewell for good and all to their
servile habits and gestures? If people would listen to you, Henry,
Canada would be so full that there would be no place to house them.
* * * * *
One morning such a big piece of news spread abroad that a man who never
read the newspapers could not help glancing at it. It was the paper for
October 18th, 1859. Henry read it. A handful of men, almost unarmed,
had seized the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia during
the night and intrenched themselves there, after making a prisoner of
a colonel, the great-grand-nephew of George Washington; they had held
it for twenty-four hours. A regular siege had been necessary to get
the better of the rebels, or rather the survivors, for more than half
of them had been killed. It was his friend John Brown’s work.... That
morning and for days to come, Henry could devour more newspapers than
his good father had nibbled in a whole lifetime.
But if John Brown had struck, it was not solely to enable his friend
Thoreau to give at last the full measure of his egoism. Old Brown had
more substantial reasons than that.
Henry saw again the face of the old peasant or galley-slave, the
expression of the bluish eyes that brightened up when the man spoke
of the cause. It was not six months since he had seen him the last
time, and his image was as fresh as yesterday. Old Brown was wearing
now a long white beard that gave him a patriarchal look. They had
dined together at Henry’s. Waldo had come over and the three had found
themselves there together. In the evening Old Brown had spoken at the
Town Hall; and as he told them how his son had been made prisoner by
the Border Ruffians, he had even shown them the chain which the latter
had made him wear. The effect was a little crude, but this man so
excluded the idea of anything theatrical that you couldn’t look at this
gesture ironically. As for his plans, Henry had no anxiety at the time;
you could have entire faith in such a figure as that.
Old Brown’s plans.... That was what had been suddenly revealed by the
incident of the Arsenal, the long, long story of which that low brow
and those inexorable eyes had spoken. Born in Connecticut, of good
English and Dutch stock, he had found himself, a boy of five, cast in
the middle of Ohio, whither his father, a penniless tanner, had come
from New England to seek his fortune. A boy who grew up in buckskin
trousers, among the animals and the friendly Indians; a sensitive boy
who remained inconsolable after losing the only marble he had ever
possessed; a boy who, at twelve, was already conducting cattle long
distances and had learned just enough to read and reckon a little.
As a big lad of twenty, strong and serious, working in a tannery with
his father, he appeared very shy and rather haughty. The Bible and the
Church absorbed him, together with an anxious fear for the salvation
of his soul, even suggesting to him for a while the idea of becoming
a preacher. He married, moved his tannery to Pennsylvania, where he
had no very brilliant success, ran into debt, remarried, returned to
Ohio and set up in business with a partner. Another failure. He threw
himself into land-speculation, went into bankruptcy, then, a poor,
uncertain soul, tried any and every means of conjuring away his ill
fortune. Long journeys took him across country, buying and selling
cattle and sheep. In spite of everything, divine Providence did not
assist John the Shepherd and his thirteen children--whom, as a brutally
fierce believer, he ruled with a rod of iron: little matter whether
they had any education or not as long as they feared the Lord and
his representative, their father. The wholesale sheep-trade which
he followed for ten years with a partner still failed to bring him
prosperity, and at the end of their enterprise left him the same poor
John as before. In incessant litigation with his creditors, always
clumsy in business, he found himself lost in a maze of speculations,
plans, combines, and was not entirely free from those barely honest
little trickeries to which the perfect devotee does not refuse to stoop
in order to save his worldly goods along with his soul.
It was in the midst of these vicissitudes, as he was approaching his
fortieth year, that an idea took possession of him, an idea that he
revealed to his family, one evening, in the kitchen of the old farm
in Ohio--to “break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of
his teeth.” What he meant in his pietistic jargon was to free the
blacks from slavery, and to free them by violence. From that moment
John the Shepherd underwent a gradual transformation into Old Brown,
Partisan and Freebooter. In Springfield, Massachusetts, he rented a
little wooden house where he stored his wool; his principal object
in coming there was to place himself in touch with the militants of
Boston, whose debating societies and philosophic views, for the rest,
interested him very little. Words, nothing but words. The sheep-raiser
explained his programme to them. Brother Brown was going to strike with
a vengeance, rise openly against the authorities and crush those who
resisted. The direct route this time, no more Underground Railroads.
It was in the South, on its own ground, that the slave-power must be
attacked. Towards the time of his first visit to Concord, Old Brown,
without taking anybody into his confidence, was already thinking,
among the important points he had in view, of that Arsenal which was
so well situated at the intersection of the three States of Maryland,
Pennsylvania and Virginia. After this, he pondered his plan, perfected
it, minutely prepared to carry it out. But in the meantime, as he had
to live, and the market-price of wool had fallen because of the war,
he embarked for Europe, where he hoped to make an advantageous sale.
London--Paris--Brussels--Hamburg: it was a very fine journey for a
Westerner, but the traveller had carried his old bad luck along with
him in his bag; he was obliged to sell his bales of wool at ridiculous
prices. From Europe he returned with a loss of $40,000 for his partner
and himself and the still more firmly fixed reputation of a man who had
no understanding of business.
Then, one fine day, he bade farewell to trade and went off and
established his family in the midst of the solitude of the Adirondacks,
at North Elba. He would go and see them up there when he had the time,
for he was almost always in Kansas, where three of his older sons
were settled and his mission claimed him. The Border was his sphere;
he was at the front there, in contact with the enemy--the slaver.
Business, litigation, cattle, the price of wool, all these things
counted for nothing now in Old Brown’s mind: it was as if the victim
of eternal combines, the old veteran upon whom earthly fortune had
been unwilling to smile, was meditating a last stroke of business, a
supreme speculation, in which he would risk everything, even his skin,
without regret, for the triumph of a great cause--would sacrifice
as a visionary the rest of his mortal life, the rest of this rough,
storm-tossed, agitated life, for a beautiful share of eternity....
Thanks to all this travelling about, managing men and animals and hides
and wool and pushing his famous plan, he was clothed with a kind of
authority that impressed people. He was going to find this useful
enough in holding his own with the Border Ruffians who roamed about
the country, well-armed, in their red or blue flannel shirts, with a
dagger boldly thrust through their leather belts, with an unspeakably
villainous air--cut-throats in the pay of the planters, who were
determined to remain the masters in their own house and protect the
free disposal of their black work-hands. To earn his living, he did
surveying, a trade that permitted him to study the ground in more ways
than one. Between whiles, there were surprises--hangings, lynchings,
tar-and-featherings, raids, cold-blooded butcheries with the sabre--all
work for a soldier.
Old Brown was appropriately free from sentimentality. For instance,
to avenge the abominable sacking of Lawrence, when the partisans of a
Free Kansas had allowed themselves to be trampled upon like cowards by
their enemies, he arranged a little party of his own. With a sort of
company of which he was captain and cook, he intended to show these
swine that they were not always going to triumph with impunity and
spread among the band a wholesome terror. In the old man’s camp, they
sharpened the cutlasses on the grindstone and got ready for business. A
list had been drawn up of the condemned persons who were to pay for all
the rabble. While he was getting ready, one of his companions who was
a little anxious came and recommended caution to the chief. The latter
replied: “Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing that
word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.” The chief was
greatly excited and ready for anything. Forward, men; let the cowards
stay behind.
They were soon there; the little troop collected for a moment not
far from Pottawatomie, where the birds they were going to catch
had their nest. There were three brothers here, Germans by birth,
known for their pro-slavery sympathies--big brutes with whom he had
already had a bone to pick as a neighbour, together with a family of
poor devils from Tennessee, a father and his two grown sons, who had
followed the lead of the Germans. There was also a member of that
pseudo-Legislative Assembly which claimed to rule the State in the name
of the slave-holders. At ten o’clock in the evening the little troop
got under way, taking all precautions. They knocked at the door of the
Tennesseeans, made the father and his two sons come out, conducted
them two hundred yards from the house and cold-bloodedly put them to
the sword. A bullet in the father to finish the business and make it
surer. One of the two brothers who had offered resistance had his
arms cut off, his body mangled, his skull torn open, a hole in the
jaw. All this made less noise than a musket volley; it was a thorough
job, swift and stimulating. A little further away, at midnight, at
the “Representative’s” house, a similar scene. The wife was ill with
measles; the condemned man asked to be allowed to stay with her till
they found someone to look after her. “It matters not,” said Old Brown;
“you have neighbours.” And he did not even allow the man to pull on
his boots. Off with him. Shortly afterwards the “Representative” lay
in a thicket, with his head and side run through; they had sent him to
represent his friends the slave-holders in the Legislative Assembly on
high. There remained the three Germans, one of whom turned out to be
spending the night with neighbours. The same ceremonial. The next day
he was found in the ravine, with his skull split in two places and half
emptied, a hole in his chest, his right hand cut off, hanging to the
wrist by a rag of skin. The work finished, they went off and washed
their sabres in the river and the butchers started for home, rather
disgusted. They needed some good hot coffee to settle their nerves. But
it was all in the day’s work and Old Brown regretted nothing.
The hand of the Lord had smitten these infidels a little roughly. These
were the ways of the frontier, where sober notions of good and evil
were not in vogue. But one of the sons of Old Brown who took part in
the expedition lacked the iron nerves of the old man, although his
Christian name was John also. The night after the deed, returning half
out of his wits to the house of an uncle, he cried to his brother Owen,
who had joined him: “Out with you, you filthy murderer ...” and then
wandered off into the brush, his poor mind gone.... With Jason, another
of his brothers, the demented man was soon captured by the Ruffians,
who had hurried out in search of them. Jason saw the rope that was
about to encircle his neck hanging from a tree over his head. But for
days and days, both of them, chained together by their ankles, their
hands tied like convicts, were led about the roads, while John, who
had not recovered his right mind, imagined that he was the officer in
charge of the troop, shouted his commands and told his keepers how they
ought to kill his brother, the stammerer. And the Ruffians of the guard
bullied and tortured their prisoners with all the more zest because
they thought the poor madman was pretending. During all this time they
were scouring the region to dislodge Old Brown, who was actually not
far away. He was roaming about in the neighbourhood, waiting for an
opportunity to free his two boys. But it was impossible to lay hands
on him. With four of his other sons and a few faithful followers, he
had gained the brush. He had also gained the reputation of a bird
whose feathers it was not good to stroke and who could not be safely
approached without plenty of precautions. Be sufficiently energetic
and people will respect you. When they shouted in the fields: “Look
out! There’s Old Brown!” well-armed people whom you would have supposed
were brave, if only because of their numbers, ran as if the devil were
coming out of the bushes. Old Brown had become a bugbear. And years
followed, full of guerilla warfare, raids and forays, and through them
passed a man on horseback or marching along with bent shoulders beside
a wagon, who was now here, now there, but never where you expected
to catch him. You could burn, destroy the village where he had his
headquarters, but to catch the Old Man was another pair of breeches.
A new stage in the march towards the goal which Old Brown had fixed.
He published a tract in which he urged the army to disobey orders,
“respectfully and amicably offered to the Officers and Soldiers of the
American Army in Kansas.” He summed up his argument in these words: “It
is as much the duty of the common soldier of the U. S. Army, according
to his ability and opportunity, to be informed upon all subjects in any
way affecting the political or general welfare of his country, and to
watch with jealous vigilance the course and management of all public
functionaries both civil and military; and to govern his actions as a
citizen soldier accordingly: as though he were President of the United
States.” This appeal, signed “A Soldier,” did not win the approval
of the friends in Boston; but the Old Man could get along without
their approval. The Old Man was collecting his wits for a still more
serious action. He set to work, quietly, to instruct a little troop of
voluntary followers. His war budget was not very heavy, and often he
had not enough to eat. Then, on a brief raid in Missouri, he entered
a planter’s house, revolver in hand, killed another man, freed the
slaves, ransacked the dwelling, took two prisoners. All this just to
keep his hand in. In mid-winter, with a single companion, the Old Man
travelled more than six hundred miles escorting to Canada a wagon full
of negro women and children; his fingers and his ears were frozen,
but his skin was tough and he could stand it. There was a constant
reward of $3000 for anyone who arrested him. It was worth the effort,
but no one interfered with him, even when on one occasion Old Brown
calmly entered a town, made a speech, and calmly went off again, after
a glance at the handbills in big letters in which his admirers were
invited to capture him. Didn’t anyone want $3000?
Much later, on the night of October 16th-17th, a wagon descended the
hill which, on the Maryland side, leads to the peninsula where Harper’s
Ferry rises, formed by the confluence of the two rivers. The horse
stiffened its legs, for the wagon was full of pikes and ammunition.
A round-shouldered old man with a white beard and eighteen other men
accompanied the convoy. The plan, matured through long years, was
being executed. It had definitely ceased to be a question of Uncle Tom
and his Cabin; it was a question now of bayonets and bullets. Do you
understand, Boston friends?
The plan was to surprise and carry the place, cost what it might. And
then, who could say?... Once masters of this important point, they
could fortify themselves in the mountains, the blacks would rise, they
would run from all the cotton fields; they would arm (they had pikes--a
thousand of them, specially made), and there would be a general
conflagration, the war carried into Africa. They would establish a
provisional government, of which the constitution was already drawn up
on paper and the principal parts were assigned. There was $600 in the
treasury.
Meanwhile, the little troop advanced, made a prisoner of the watchman
on the bridge, who thought it was a joke, a few passers-by, and then
the janitor of the armory, which they entered with the game all in
their own hands. John Brown’s company were masters of the Arsenal,
in the dead of night. The hardest part was over; from this point
they could strike out. Five miles off, on the heights of Bolivar,
there lived a landed proprietor, a slave-holder who was no other than
Colonel Lewis Washington, a descendant of the great man. He had in his
possession the pistol given by Lafayette and the sword presented by
Frederick the Great to the Liberator. At midnight, by the flickering
light of a torch, the colonel saw, outlined against the door of his
bedroom, four armed men who informed him that he was their prisoner and
ordered him to hand to one of them--a black--the sword of the Great
Frederick. Then they courteously conducted the colonel away in his own
carriage, made the slaves climb into a big wagon, and the procession
turned towards the Arsenal. They stopped on the way at a neighbour’s,
where the scene was repeated. The latter was also treated to a ride,
with his six blacks. At the Arsenal Old Brown distributed the pikes to
the negroes, placed them in charge of their former masters and thus
addressed the colonel: “I shall be very attentive to you, sir, for I
may get the worst of it in my first encounter, and if so, your life is
worth as much as mine.” Then the Old Man calmly girded himself with the
sword of Frederick the Great. The trains were stopped on the bridge
where he had placed a guard. The alarm was given. The fire-bell rang.
The good citizens of the little town took down their shot-guns, since
the more formidable weapons were in the hands of the rebels. The Old
Man, very much master of himself, ordered breakfast for forty-five
persons at the hotel nearby. And the day rose on this astonishing
victory, as clean as the Liberator’s sword.
Twenty-four hours later, in the engine-room, Old Brown, his body torn
with bayonet thrusts, his head gashed, his hair matted and his face
stained with blood, was stretched out with his son Oliver, who had
ceased to beg them to kill him, motionless at his side, and his other
son Watson dying. Of the twenty-one men involved in the raid only four
remained who were alive. Seven had escaped, including those who had
remained at the farm to guard the stock of arms and two of those who
had occupied the Arsenal, who had succeeded in getting away during the
night. And on a rock, in the middle of the Potomac, was the huddled
body of the youngest of the company, a boy of eighteen who, while he
was attempting to escape by swimming, had been overtaken and riddled
with bullets. There his body was, perched in mid-stream, a fine target
for the troops that had passed in the afternoon. It was altogether
too tempting for everybody not to take a shot at it before dropping
in for a drink at the hotel, which had made a lot of money to-day. In
the bed of the river lay another corpse, and as it was not very deep
in that spot they could see it clearly, with its face drawn in death
and seeming to move with the water. Another fine target for the clever
sharpshooters: this man too was one of the companions of the raid.
In the Arsenal they were waiting for the Governor of Virginia. Already
officers, reporters, congressmen, curiosity-seekers were filing past
the Rebel, lying there on his mattress. Old Brown did not look at all
like a man who had been beaten; he spoke calmly, weighing his words,
as if he were at home on his old farm. Meanwhile, the town began to
be filled with shouts, brawls and a general fanfaronade in preparation
for the saturnalia when the militia and the brave population would be
fraternizing in an orgy of victory.
* * * * *
Henry was agitated to the depths of his soul, depths that one might
have supposed were better sheltered from squalls. Agitated at the
thought of the gallows-rope strangling the tough neck of his friend Old
Brown. Agitated by the cowardice of the worthy disciples with all their
good intentions who, since the raid, the crime against the safety of
the State, had run for cover, desperately disavowing the rebel.... No,
gentlemen, no, gentlemen, we hadn’t the faintest suspicion of it; you
can see we are as white as snow.... It was a stampede of runaways, a
chorus of denials. Even the _Liberator_ treated the raid as an act of
madness. Not one of these people was capable of seeing how beautiful
it was, just because it was mad--with a madness that purged the world
of its reasonable reason! The Knight of the Umbrella and the Bundle
had always been for madnesses like this against the niggardly prudence
of the sham humanitarians. That obstinate, that furious old lunatic,
with his hobby of carrying the war into Africa, had actually carried it
there. That old Trojan who continued to believe, with a belief as tough
as a stump, in other realities than the price of wool, who was ready
to sacrifice himself for an idea.... He himself had staked his fortune
on a folly. John Brown, murderer or madman, was a brother. And that
brother was going to be hanged.
In Henry’s innermost sanctuary there was no security left--the gods
were tottering on their socles. It was no longer possible to think of
anything else, to resume the thread of one’s dear old thoughts. Nothing
but a few passages from the greatest poems corresponded with the
obsession of this hour and seemed to meet the circumstances. When he
went out his ramble was finished before it had begun: what was waiting
for him at the end of his solitary walk rose up, from the moment he
set out, to demand its due. His eyes no longer saw what they had seen;
when he lifted his head, he saw rising against the woods a face with a
low brow and bluish grey eyes, the hard face of the old cattle-driver,
the driver of a whole people towards the Promised Land, the face of the
martyr, imposing silence on all nature. The sun set behind a gibbet.
Wachusett, over there, was like a judge delivering a sentence. The
beauty of the world could no longer vie with this beauty of the man who
was dying for a mad cause.
Henry was unable to sleep. At night, he would relight his candle,
seize a scrap of paper within reach of his hand and cover it with
lines. No event, near or far, had ever inflamed him to this degree.
He was another Henry, unknown to himself. Old Brown, what have you
done to a man who had such a beautiful equanimity and such a disdain
for the affairs of the world? What power is this within you that can
arouse such a mad passion? You have thrown him into a pitiable state.
He is much less strong than another fellow who lives in Brooklyn and
whom your fate does not prevent from eating and sleeping. For this
latter at least a man who is going to be hanged for his crime does not
blot out the universe; luckily for him, he remains the master of his
serenity. He is not like Henry, astonished at the sight of all these
villagers, these good citizens who have the heart to go about their
little affairs, as if nothing were burning their vitals. For him the
whole life of the world seems to be in abeyance, as on the eve of a
cataclysm. Will it not rise in one mass to free this upright man and
avenge his defeat? The wildness in Henry’s soul is boiling up, boiling
over with rebellion; it runs to Harper’s Ferry and bars the exits of
the Arsenal.
He must speak, and at once, dissociate himself from these wavering
souls, these cowards, utter all his admiration for the criminal, while
the latter is still alive. For they have condemned him hastily, in all
the heat of public indignation, as an altogether special criminal.
They have actually had to carry him into court on a stretcher because
of his wounds, of which those in his head have made him half deaf. And
they are waiting, from one day to another, to pronounce the sentence.
It is vain to tell Henry that he is mad, that he is almost alone in
his opinion, for a man who, alone, rushes to the defence of a friend,
marches surrounded by a whole army. To counsels of caution he replies
as Old Brown replied at Pottawatomie. To hell with your caution, you
skulkers.
Henry announced that he would speak the following Sunday, October 30th,
in the vestry of the parish church. At the last moment, when some
advisers still tried to stop him, he replied roughly: “I did not send
to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” And he spoke.
The defence had succeeded in causing a postponement of the sentence,
but there was no doubt what it would be. Henry’s object, however, was
not to save Old Brown’s neck; it was merely to celebrate the beauty of
his character and his act. Henry Thoreau, fool of nature and the beauty
in man, as Hokusai in his Japan was the fool of drawing, was ready to
maintain against the whole world that John Brown, his friend, convicted
of high treason, was right, and this to the very foot of the gallows if
they judged him worthy of being hanged also. That is what beauty means,
that is what friendship means. It does not consist in lending you
half a dollar in case of need or an umbrella if it happens to rain. It
consists in accepting blows of your own free will and bearing witness
at any risk. In not letting go of your own kind if he has fallen into
the hands of the enemy. Henry spoke. His listeners were all ears. It
was no philosophical lecture this time. There may have been a few
stifled growls in certain corners of the hall. But no one protested. It
was as if his conviction had stirred that soft dough. When it was over,
the few rabid people were no longer talking of the gallows for John
Brown: they held their peace. The general impression was excellent. One
good mark for Concord.
Henry was very anxious to repeat his “plea” at Worcester, where
his friend Blake lived. He would have liked to repeat it without
remuneration in every county in New England. Meanwhile, he spoke in
Boston, two days after Concord. It was November 1st; the sentence had
not yet been pronounced. Perhaps it would be to-morrow. Half an hour
before the moment set for the lecture, the hall was full. For an hour
and a half the people listened religiously to this fervent little man
who, far from attempting to excuse the crime, celebrated it. Henry had
more expression and enthusiasm than usual. He was no longer a man bored
with the necessity of uttering fine-spun sarcasms and over-concise
aphorisms before rows and rows of eyes that could not make him out at
all: he was an embattled soul, stirred by friendship and emotion. There
was electricity in the air and in the applause. Even in his casual
remarks before and after the lecture it was as if he had lost all his
old savage shyness and discovered how to communicate with men. Henry
spoke fluently, in a tone of exaltation, thundered against the Union,
the President, the State. It was as if there were no more barriers
left.
As for Old Brown, in his prison at Charlestown, nothing remained for
him, after the sittings of the court, but to lend himself to the little
ceremony that was being arranged in his honour. He was preparing for
it with no ill grace; was it not the final touch of the great plan
that bore his signature? He had formally refused to countenance any
attempt of his followers to enable him to escape. If they left the
prison door wide open he would not go out; he had made this statement
to the warden, who was a very kind man. John Brown was an obstinate
old soul. Even his wife, who had come down from North Elba and was in
the neighbourhood, was obliged, the first time, to go away without
seeing him, broken-hearted but well aware that nothing could avail
against the will of the Old Man; this will might have weakened at the
farewell scene. He had only consented to see her yesterday, at the last
extremity. The warden had invited them both to his own family table.
When the time came to part, after these too happy moments, the Old
Man would have liked to keep her longer. But they had had to bid each
other good-bye, agreeing to meet again at Harper’s Ferry; she was going
to wait there for his body, which was to be turned over to her. The
condemned man had spent his time, since the sentence, writing letters
in his peasant hand to his friends. “Yesterday Nov. 2nd I was sentenced
to be hanged on Dec. 2nd next. Do not grieve on my account. I am still
quite cheerful. God bless you all.” It was a whole month now since he
had been condemned to death; his wounds were healed, and it would have
been good not to be lying idle in prison. A true old stager is bored by
this inactivity.
On December 2nd, in the morning, he left his cell, surrounded by
uniforms. It was a clear dawn and mild enough for the season. As far
as he could see, on all sides, there were massed troops as if for the
arrival of some great personage. Old Brown was a little surprised; he
had had no idea he was so important. A van was waiting for him. He was
only fifty-nine years old, but as he climbed into the wagon he had the
air of a very old man; his white beard, which he had clipped a little
for the raid, completed his patriarchal appearance. That box there in
the van was quite long enough to serve as a bench for three persons,
and he sat down between his friend the warden and the sheriff on his
coffin.
The man they had come for was as calm as a traveller who had come out
to see the country after having kept in his room for six weeks. Perhaps
he was thinking that his last great combine was not ending so badly for
him, on the whole, since, at the cost of a few seconds of fluttering at
the end of a rope, he could see as far as the eye could reach fields
golden as glory. But nothing actually lay before him save the winter
landscape of the valley. “What a beautiful country this is,” he said.
“I have never been down this way before.” The journey was not long.
They were there at last. Old Brown climbed down, more briskly than he
had climbed up, and ascended the steps of the scaffold, from which he
descried the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a spectacle to fill eyes that
had taken in many horizons during their lifetime. When he became once
more aware of the scaffold, he shook hands with the warden and the
sheriff. Then they pulled the cap over his head, tied his arms behind
his back and passed the noose around his neck, taking care not to let
it catch in his beard. In his old trousers, in his old slippers, Old
Brown stood upright there, as if he were in command of the three parade
companies who were taking ten minutes to find their places. Perhaps he
was counting these minutes, but nothing appeared from under his cap. In
a natural voice, he merely said: “Be quick,” and stood there, without a
tremor, awaiting his reward. A signal, the floor gaped, and at the end
of the rope a great body hung, oscillated a moment and was still.
But Old Brown had come out of his prison that morning with the prospect
of a much longer journey than those few hundred yards to the scaffold.
His wife was waiting for him at Harper’s Ferry. Fifteen men escorted
his remains, which were not unpunctual at the rendezvous. And then the
pine coffin set out, accompanied by the widow and a few friends. In the
towns where the train stopped, the crowds surged about the station,
the bells rang, the reception committees stepped forward, a guard of
honour watched the corpse all night in the court-house. The body of the
condemned man seemed to be armed with an even more formidable strength
than that of the Old Man when his head had had a price on it out there
in Kansas. At last there remained only twenty-five miles to be covered,
feet foremost, by the Old Man who had so often travelled them with his
great peasant strides. And then he was at home, after his five days’
pilgrimage, at the family farm, under a great rock opposite White Face
Mountain, and very calm as the hymns that he had loved, sung about the
grave by the blacks of the neighbourhood, faded away in the silence of
the mountains.
Since December 2nd, Henry had been haunted by the feeling that his
friend was the only living man in New England. The others did not need
to have a rope passed round their necks in order to die; they did not
exist. In a number of towns, to celebrate this living man, they fired
a salute of a hundred shots at the hour when he at last received
his full reward--towns where enormous crowds gathered in the church
to pray in memory of him. Concord was a village, but Henry had been
chosen by a few people to request the Selectmen to allow the parish
bell to be rung at the hour of the execution. Did not Concord owe this
attention to John Brown, who had twice been a visitor there? But the
authorities refused for fear of compromising themselves; these people
were among those million slaves who carried Virginia into the very
heart of Massachusetts. So they met in the afternoon at the Town Hall,
among themselves, Waldo, Alcott, William, Sanborn and those of the
Concordians who were not dead, in solemn commemoration of the condemned
man who had already judged his judges. Some words were spoken by Henry
and Waldo, and they all sang a funeral hymn. After the ceremony,
William and Henry vanished into the fields, their minds full of a
figure that would go so well in a triptych, as Henry sometimes thought,
between those of ruddy Walt in Brooklyn and Joe the Indian.
That same evening, on his return, Henry found his good friend Sanborn
waiting at the house with a word for him: “To-morrow morning, Emerson’s
covered wagon and mare will be hitched up at sunrise. Will you call for
it, pick up a traveller at my door, take him to the station at South
Acton and put him on the first train for Canada? He is a friend, but
he’s a queer chap. Pay no attention to what he says to you.” Henry
did not inquire further. It froze hard that night, but at the hour
mentioned he was at Sanborn’s with the rig, and was soon on his way
with the queer fellow, who was quite a young lad. He had put him on the
back seat of the wagon as a precaution. Starting so early, the poor
fellow had not had time to brush his teeth, and this made him feel
ill. In short, this brother seemed to be a little cracked. He rambled
on in a steady stream. He absolutely insisted that his driver was Mr.
Emerson; and on the way he suddenly flung himself out of the wagon
insisting that he was going back to Concord. Henry, who was bent upon
carrying out his mission, was obliged to place his hand on his shoulder
and force him, with the little arts one uses with a man who is not in
his right mind, to get back into the wagon. Hastening the mare, they
at last reached the station, which was only three or four miles away.
There was scarcely anyone about, the train arrived and the traveller
started off. Then Henry returned the wagon and the mare to the stable,
and before going home for breakfast stopped at his friend’s house to
tell him that everything had gone well. There was no need for either
of them to know more. If someone asked you to do a friendly service
and you were employed in the system of the Underground Railroad, what
difference did it make to you to know whether you had taken to the
station on a December morning someone who had escaped in a raid with a
price on his head or a mere traveller who thought you were Mr. Emerson?
Henry said nothing whatever at home about his early morning drive, and
everything passed quietly, as it should. There would be plenty of time
to tell about these things some day.
Three months later, his friend Sanborn himself was obliged to decamp to
Canada. Summoned to appear before the committee of the Senate charged
with investigating the great conspiracy, he had not presented himself
and was threatened with arrest as a defaulting witness. As he refused
to testify, there was nothing for him to do but to disappear. After a
short absence he returned, and one fine day in April a police-sergeant
with five men came out from Boston to arrest him at his house in
Concord. The fire-alarm rang and the village was instantly up in arms;
they were not going to allow Sanborn to be kidnapped. The helpless
sergeant and his men were obliged to leave their prisoner in the
custody of a guard of citizens. Another good mark for Concord.
The following day, he appeared before the court in Boston. The friends
were there, ready for anything, to save Frank Sanborn if the case went
against him. And look over there, by the door, at that big bearded
fellow with a greenish coat: what a florid complexion he has, and how
attentively he is following the discussion! In the name of all the
gods, it’s Walt! Happening to be in Boston, to see through the press
the third edition of his _Leaves_, which Thayer and Eldridge are going
to bring out (these Boston guys are beginning to swallow the satyr
whole), he has turned up to give his comrades a strong hand if there is
any need for it. But there is no occasion to intervene, for the court
declares the arrest of Sanborn illegal, and he returns home in triumph.
It was through his friend Sanborn, who had once been introduced to
Henry by Waldo and who kept a little school in the village, as Henry
himself had done at twenty, that the latter had met Old Brown at the
time of his first visit to Concord. But all the “confederates” in the
plot, or those at least who were accused of having aided it, were not
of the same stripe as Sanborn. Seized with panic, some of them had
placed the frontier between themselves and their responsibility, real
or supposed. There was even one of them, an old friend of John Brown,
whose constitution had been so little able to endure the uproar of the
raid and the fear of being compromised that he had had to be shut up as
a lunatic.
And a year and a half after the raid--scarcely ten months after the
commemoration of the Fourth of July at North Elba, before the rock
under which the tough carcass of the Old Man rested in the solitude of
the Adirondacks (Henry, who was invited, was unable to go, but he had
sent a few pages that were read)--the same Governor of Virginia who
had come to see the traitor and conspirator lying, a prisoner, on his
mattress at the Arsenal seized the same Arsenal himself, and the next
day, April 10th, 1861, the decree of Secession was voted. War was on.
The troops of Massachusetts, defiling through the streets of Boston,
sang the song of John Brown, the song of the soldiers. The dead of
Antietam were strewn over the earth on the outskirts of the town which
the Old Man had entered with his eighteen companions, armed with pikes.
It was war, and thousands of young fellows were going to kill one
another for ... for ... for.... You, Walt, you know what it’s all
about, don’t you?... And you, Henry?... Mark you, this is no war of
conquest: it is civil war, holy war.