Part 8 (1/2)
And not the politicians alone, but the teachers and preachers, took their turn in paying tribute to Caesar. We were told that the Bible itself was a champion of slavery. Two of our greatest theologians in the North declared, in the name of the Higher Law, that slavery was a holy thing, which the Lord, who cursed Canaan, would ever uphold.
In those days there came a man from the West--a tall, gaunt, grizzly, s.h.a.ggy-haired, G.o.d-fearing man, a son of the Puritans, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. A dangerous fanatic or lunatic, he was called, and, with the aid of a few poor negroes whom he had stolen from slavery, he defied the power of this whole slave-catching United States. A little square brick building, once a sort of car-shop, stands near the railway station in the town of Harper's Ferry, with the mountain wall not far behind it, and the Potomac River running below.
And from this building was fired the shot which pierced the heart of slavery. And the Governor of Virginia captured this man, and took him out and hung him, and laid his body in the grave, where it still lies moldering. But there was part of him not in the jurisdiction of Virginia, a part which they could neither hang nor bury; and, to the infinite surprise of the Governor of Virginia, his soul went marching on.
[Ill.u.s.tration: John Brown.]
When they heard in Concord that John Brown had been captured, and was soon to be hung, Th.o.r.eau sent notice through the city that he would speak in the public hall on the condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all to be present.
The Republican Committee and the Committee of the Abolitionists sent word to him that this was no time to speak; to discuss such matters then was premature and inadvisable. He replied: ”I did not send to you for advice, but to tell you that I am going to speak.” The selectmen of Concord dared neither grant nor refuse him the hall. At last they ventured to lose the key in a place where they thought he could find it.
This address of Th.o.r.eau, ”A Plea for Captain John Brown,” should be a cla.s.sic in American history. We do not always realize that the time of American history is now. The dates of the settlement of Jamestown, and Plymouth, and St. Augustine do not const.i.tute our history. Columbus did not discover us. In a high sense, the true America is barely thirty years old, and its first President was Abraham Lincoln.
We in the North are a little impatient at times, and our politicians, 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 pa.s.sages 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 Th.o.r.eau, ”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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sisted 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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.