Mr. F. B. Sanborn, in his _Familiar Letters of Thoreau_, says that he
introduced John Brown to Thoreau in March, 1857, and Thoreau introduced
him to Emerson. This was at the time when Brown came on to awaken the
people of Massachusetts to the outrages which the settlers and their
families were suffering, and procure aid for them. His clear-cut face,
smooth-shaven and bronzed, his firmly shut mouth and mild but steady
blue eyes, gave him the appearance of the best type of old New England
farmers; indeed he might well have passed for a rustic brother of Squire
Hoar. Mr. Emerson was at once interested in him and the story of the
gallant fight that the Free-State men in Kansas were making, though Brown
was very modest about his own part and leadership. Indeed he claimed only
to be a fellow worker and adviser. I think that soon after this time, on
one of his visits to Concord, he stayed at Mr. Emerson’s house; certainly
he spent the evening there. The last time he came to Concord he was a
changed man; all the pleasant look was gone. His gray hair, longer and
brushed upright, his great gray beard and the sharpening of his features
by exposure and rude experiences gave him a wild, fierce expression. His
speech in the Town Hall was excited, and when he drew a huge sheath-knife
from under his coat and showed it as a symbol of Missouri civilization,
and last drew from his bosom a horse-chain and clanked it in air,
telling that his son had been bound with this and led bareheaded under
a burning sun beside their horses, by United States dragoons, and in
the mania brought on by this inhuman treatment had worn the rusty chain
bright,—the old man recalled the fierce Balfour of Burley in Scott’s
_Old Mortality_. It was a startling sight and sent a thrill through
his hearers. Yet on earlier occasions his speech had been really more
effective, when a quiet farmer of mature years, evidently self-contained,
intelligent, truthful and humane, simply told in New England towns what
was going on in Kansas, the outrages committed upon the settlers, the
violation of their elementary rights under the Constitution,—and all this
connived at by the general government. He opened the eyes of his hearers,
even against their wills, to the alarming pass into which the slave power
had brought the affairs of the country.
But now wrong and outrage, not only on others but terribly suffered in
his own family, had made Brown feel that not he but “Slavery was an
outlaw” against which he “held a commission direct from God Almighty” to
act. A friend quoted him as having said, “The loss of my family and the
troubles in Kansas have shattered my constitution, and I am nothing to
the world but to defend the right, and that, by God’s help, I have done
and will do.”
The people were not ready to follow him in revolutionary measures,
but when on his own responsibility he had precipitated the inevitable
conflict by breaking with a government, then so unrighteous, and offered
his life as a sacrifice for humanity, they could not but do homage to him
as a hero, who was technically a traitor. He had cut the Gordian knot
which they had suffered to be tied tighter.
Of course Mr. Emerson had known nothing of John Brown’s plan for a raid
into the slave states. It was the motive and courage he honored, not the
means. He wrote: “I wish we should have health enough to know virtue when
we see it, and not cry with the fools and the newspapers, ‘Madman!’ when
a hero passes.”
On the first day of November, John Brown had been sentenced to death.
This meeting in Boston, to give aid to his family, was held on the
eighteenth, just two weeks before his execution.
The verses which serve as motto are from Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman’s
poem written at the time, which Mr. Emerson used to read aloud to his
family and friends with much pleasure.
[151] _Page 269, note 1._ “This court acknowledges, 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 which 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 that 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.” From the Speech of John Brown to
the Court.
[152] _Page 270, note 1._ Among the sheets of the lecture “Courage” is
one which seems to have been used at that time:—
“Governor Wise and Mr. Mason no doubt have some right to their places.
It is some superiority of working brain that put them there, and the
aristocrats in every society. But when they come to deal with Brown,
they find that he speaks their own speech,—has whatever courage and
directness they have, and a great deal more of the same; so that they
feel themselves timorous little fellows in his hand; he outsees,
outthinks, outacts them, and they are forced to shuffle and stammer in
their turn.
“They painfully feel this, that he is their governor and superior, and
the only alternative is to kneel to him if they are truly noble, or else
(if they wish to keep their places), to put this fact which they know,
out of sight of other people, as fast as they can. Quick, drums and
trumpets strike up! Quick, judges and juries, silence him, by sentence
and execution of sentence, and hide in the ground this alarming fact.
For, if everything comes to its right place, he goes up, and we down.”
[153] _Page 271, note 1._ Commodore Hiram Paulding, in 1857, had broken
up Walker’s filibustering expedition at Nicaragua. The arrest of Walker
on foreign soil the government did not think it wise wholly to approve.
[154] _Page 272, note 1._ The allusion is to the trials of the fugitives
Shadrach, Sims and Burns in Boston. The story of these humiliations is
told in full and in a most interesting manner in the diary of Richard H.
Dana,[H] whose zeal in the cause of these poor men did him great honor.
During the trial of Sims, a chain was put up, as a barrier against the
crowd, around the United States Court-House, and the stooping of the
judges to creep under this chain in order to enter the court-house was
considered symbolic of their abject attitude towards the aggressive slave
power.