Boston, November 29, 1859.
. . . The doings at Harper's Ferry have made an impression
which will long be felt. The execution of Brown, to take place on Friday, will
sadden and embitter the hearts of the great majority north of the Potomac. The
conduct of Wise has been, I think, weak and absurd; the course of the Court of
Appeals, harsh if not iniquitous. I know well the horrors of an apprehended
insurrection,1 and I can make large allowance for those who are
affected by them, for I remember the morbid fears which prevailed after the
Southampton tragedy. But it amazes me to find Governor Wise surrounding the
helpless prisoner by a cordon of more than one thousand soldiers, and
forbidding, as he has done, all approach to the place of execution.
I shall write you, dear Henry, by the steamer of Saturday.
We are all well. Mr. Savage, who has been slightly lamed, now walks out.
Hillard, since his return, has been suffering the effects of his very
boisterous passage. Charles Sumner looks well, but I think his disease is
rather healed over than eradicated. . . .
Congress is about to organize, and I fear with the prospect
of a session of extraordinary turbulence. Already Mason and other extreme men
of the South are applying the match to the magazine of combustibles gathered in
Washington, by calling for an investigation by Congress of the Harper's Ferry
invasion, as they call it. Throughout the Northern States, especially New
England and the Northwest, the effect of Brown's mistaken enterprise, with the
revelation of heroic self-renunciation which has accompanied it, has been to
deepen and extend the hostility to the slave power. The contrast between the
trembling fears of a whole State and the resolute bravery, for principle's
sake, of one man is most impressive. The purpose of Brown seems to have been to
liberate a large number of the slaves and assist them in escaping from the
State. But he forgot the horrors and crimes of a servile revolt, to which his
effort, if successful, would surely have led, and he must have been strangely
ignorant, or deceived, to believe that he could aid the general emancipation of
the slaves by such an attempt. He might have given occasion to an appalling
loss of life, perhaps almost to the extermination of the blacks in Virginia.
Perhaps the impression he has made in the South may hasten in Virginia, at
least, the adoption of some prospective cure for this most perilous evil. The
whole matter is full of sad suggestions to me. . . .
_______________
1 Of the slaves.
SOURCE: Emma
Savage Rogers & William T. Sedgwick, Life and Letters of
William Barton Rogers, Volume 2, p. 16-7
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