Ilion, New York, November 24.
Dear Brother in Christ: How I would like to spend this night with you in your cell, and converse for a season on the joys that await you beyond this world of sin and sorrow. I have tried to spend this day in prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God for the many blessings received at His hand the past year, but in spite of all my efforts in this direction, it has been a sorrowful day to my soul, as my mind has dwelt almost constantly on your death scene. I cannot be joyful; I mourn not so much for you, (for, like the hero of Tarsus, you seem ready to be offered,) but I mourn for my country. I spent the past winter in the South, spending four months in nine of the slave States; and more than once I had to press my lips and clinch my fists, to keep back the feelings of my soul. I saw Slavery in all its phases, and many a night I have wet my pillow with my tears, as I called to mind the sufferings of the poor slave. I had hard work to control my feelings, but did so, and cannot think but it was the best course. Among the slaveholders I found some of the noblest men I ever met with kind, obliging, hospitable, pious, and to all appearances without a fault; so I returned to my home to hate the sin and not the men. I made the acquaintance of Gov. Wise, and found that it was not Wise that killed Cilley; it was not Wise that fought for Slavery at the South; it was his education — for a nobler heart never filled the breast of man; and had he been favored with a birthplace on the shores of Lake Champlain, and a home among the Adirondack mountains, he might have been your general in this conflict, and lying wounded by your side to night.* Would to God these brethren could read our hearts. O, could they see how we love them; how we desire their present and future happiness; what a change would at once take place in their feelings towards us. Did Gov. Wise know Christ as did Paul when soundly converted, there would not be power enough in all the military force of Virginia to hang John Brown. But enough of this.
I have never believed that Virginia, for her own honor, would hang you; but she may, (my heart is too full, my tears flow too fast to write,) if she does, such a funeral as the sun never saw before, will follow.
Keep up good courage; a few more rising and setting suns, and the struggle will be over; and the thrice welcome words will reach your ears, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you."
I have been a resident of Washington County for thirty-eight years; left Fort Edward, New York, May, 1858, and am sure I have met you, but cannot tell where; but if faithful to the grace already given, I am sure I shall meet you again, and I know where. Praise the Lord, on that blissful shore, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are forever at rest. You will not be permitted, like Moses, to return after forty years to engage afresh in the struggle for freedom: but God will raise up others, in his own good time, to carry forward the work.
Farewell, till we meet in Heaven; for, when we reach the landing place,—
“In the realms of endless light,We’ll bid this world of noise and show
Good night, good night, good night;
We’ll stem the storm,” &c.
*What miserable cant! "Pious" trafficars in God's children; "pious" robbers of God's poor; "pious" brokers in the souls for whom Jesus died! "Kind, obliging, hospitable!" No doubt of it! To compel men and women to work without reward, is so kind; to barter for base gold the offspring of slave mothers, is so obliging; to rob a race of every social, civil, political, matrimonial, paternal, filial right, is so hospitable an act, that it is not surprising that the class who practise it should be “to all appearance without a fault!" And Wise, the assassin of Cilley, the representative murderer of John Brown, the laudator of the Slave Pens, the acknowledged head and champion of the vilest Commonwealth that the sun looks down on, of course, he deserves the eulogy bestowed on him, when the writer says, that a “nobler heart never filled the breast of man." There are no murderers, there are no assassins, there are no base, nor cowardly, nor wicked men, if the philosophy of the writer be correct. It was not Judas, then, but Judas's education?
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