MR. CHAIRMAN: I have been struck with one fact, that the best orators who
have added their praise to his fame,—and I need not go out of this house
to find the purest eloquence in the country,—have one rival who comes off
a little better, and that is JOHN BROWN. Everything that is said of him
leaves people a little dissatisfied; but as soon as they read his own
speeches and letters they are heartily contented,—such is the singleness
of purpose which justifies him to the head and the heart of all. Taught
by this experience, I mean, in the few remarks I have to make, to cling
to his history, or let him speak for himself.
John Brown, the founder of liberty in Kansas, was born in Torrington,
Litchfield County, Connecticut, in 1800. When he was five years old his
father emigrated to Ohio, and the boy was there set to keep sheep and to
look after cattle and dress skins; he went bareheaded and barefooted,
and clothed in buckskin. He said that he loved rough play, could never
have rough play enough; could not see a seedy hat without wishing to pull
it off. But for this it needed that the playmates should be equal; not
one in fine clothes and the other in buckskin; not one his own master,
hale and hearty, and the other watched and whipped. But it chanced that
in Pennsylvania, where he was sent by his father to collect cattle, he
fell in with a boy whom he heartily liked and whom he looked upon as his
superior. This boy was a slave; he saw him beaten with an iron shovel,
and otherwise maltreated; he saw that this boy had nothing better to
look forward to in life, whilst he himself was petted and made much of;
for he was much considered in the family where he then stayed, from the
circumstance that this boy of twelve years had conducted alone a drove of
cattle a hundred miles. But the colored boy had no friend, and no future.
This worked such indignation in him that he swore an oath of resistance
to slavery as long as he lived. And thus his enterprise to go into
Virginia and run off five hundred or a thousand slaves was not a piece of
spite or revenge, a plot of two years or of twenty years, but the keeping
of an oath made to heaven and earth forty-seven years before. Forty-seven
years at least, though I incline to accept his own account of the matter
at Charlestown, which makes the date a little older, when he said, “This
was all settled millions of years before the world was made.”
He grew up a religious and manly person, in severe poverty; a fair
specimen of the best stock of New England; having that force of thought
and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness. Our
farmers were Orthodox Calvinists, mighty in the Scriptures; had learned
that life was a preparation, a “probation,” to use their word, for a
higher world, and was to be spent in loving and serving mankind.[155]
Thus was formed a romantic character absolutely without any vulgar
trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of self-indulgence or
compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent and thoughtful men
we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly and reproachfully,
but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle as a child in the
house. And, as happens usually to men of romantic character, his fortunes
were romantic. Walter Scott would have delighted to draw his picture
and trace his adventurous career. A shepherd and herdsman, he learned
the manners of animals, and knew the secret signals by which animals
communicate.[156] He made his hard bed on the mountains with them; he
learned to drive his flock through thickets all but impassable; he had
all the skill of a shepherd by choice of breed and by wise husbandry to
obtain the best wool, and that for a course of years. And the anecdotes
preserved show a far-seeing skill and conduct which, in spite of adverse
accidents, should secure, one year with another, an honest reward, first
to the farmer, and afterwards to the dealer. If he kept sheep, it was
with a royal mind; and if he traded in wool, he was a merchant prince,
not in the amount of wealth, but in the protection of the interests
confided to him.
I am not a little surprised at the easy effrontery with which political
gentlemen, in and out of Congress, take it upon them to say that there
are not a thousand men in the North who sympathize with John Brown.
It would be far safer and nearer the truth to say that all people, in
proportion to their sensibility and self-respect, sympathize with him.
For it is impossible to see courage, and disinterestedness, and the love
that casts out fear, without sympathy. All women are drawn to him by
their predominance of sentiment. All gentlemen, of course, are on his
side. I do not mean by “gentlemen,” people of scented hair and perfumed
handkerchiefs, but men of gentle blood and generosity, “fulfilled with
all nobleness,” who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of
their bed; like the dying Sidney, pass the cup of cold water to the dying
soldier who needs it more. For what is the oath of gentle blood and
knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong
oppressor?
Nothing is more absurd than to complain of this sympathy, or to complain
of a party of men united in opposition to slavery. As well complain
of gravity, or the ebb of the tide. Who makes the abolitionist? The
slave-holder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws
of the universe provide to protect mankind from destruction by savage
passions. And our blind statesmen go up and down, with committees of
vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They
will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a
very strong force to root it out. For the arch-abolitionist, older than
Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name
is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before slavery, and
will be after it.[157]