Captain John Brown gave a good account of himself in the
Town Hall last night to a meeting of citizens. One of his good points was the
folly of the peace party in Kansas, who believed that their strength lay in the
greatness of their wrongs, and so discountenanced resistance. He wished to know
if their wrong was greater than the negro's, and what kind of strength that
gave to the negro? He believes, on his own experience, that one good,
believing, strong-minded man is worth a hundred — nay, twenty thousand — men
without character, for a settler in a new country, and that the right men will
give a permanent direction to the fortunes of a State. For one of these
bullying, drinking rowdies, he seemed to think cholera, smallpox, and consumption
were as valuable recruits. The first man who went into Kansas from Missouri to
interfere in the elections, he thought, “had a perfect right to be shot.” He
gave a circumstantial account of the battle of Black Jack, where twenty-three
Missourians surrendered to nine Abolitionists. Ho had three thousand sheep in
Ohio, and would instantly detect a strange sheep in his flock. A cowcan tell
its calf by secret siguals, he thinks, by the eye, to run away, to lie down,
and hide itself. He always makes friends with his horse or mule (or with the
deer that visit his Ohio farm); and when he sleeps on his horse, as he does as
readily as on his bed, his horse does not start or endanger him. Brown
described the expensiveness of war in a country where everything that is to be
eaten or worn by man or beast must be dragged a long distance on wheels. “God
protects us in winter,' he said; 'no Missourian can be seen in the country until
the grass comes up again.”
SOURCE: Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of
John Brown, p. 501
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