La Crosse,
Wisconsin, Nov. 20.
Dear Cousin: Little
did I think when I parted with you and other friends in Hudson twenty years ago
that I should ever address you a prisoner under sentence of death. But such are
the mysterious ways of that inscrutable Providence that directs our steps,
however we may devise our ways. I have for years watched your strange, eventful
history. I have wept for your griefs, and my soul has burned within me when I
have read the tale of wrongs endured by your family in Kansas. And when I now
read, in a venial partisan press those heartless slanders, many of which,
extending back to former years, I know to be as base as can be invented by the
Father of Lies, and see you held up before the world in a character not only
impossible to you, but to any one brought up and educated by the sainted Oliver
Brown, my indignation can scarcely be repressed. It is for this I feel that,
ere you must undergo the sentence meted out to you by a false and wicked
System, I must write a word, simply to express to you my confidence in your
sincerity, and my belief that you have acted according to your convictions of
duty. Looking at the matter from my own stand-point, I should not conceive it
my duty to have done as you did. Place me in your circumstances, and I am
wholly unable to say what I should have done. I have but one son! Were I called
to see him wantonly sacrificed to the extension of a System, founded, nurtured,
and perpetuated only in wrong, I know not what it would make me. In a
conversation with you at your father's house, twenty-two years since, when some
of our friends imbibed the strange notion that they had become perfectly holy,
you remarked:
"We never know
ourselves till thoroughly tried. As heating of old smooth coin will make the
effaced stamp visible again, so the fire of temptation reveals what is latent
even to ourselves."
I will not at this
distance, and under your circumstances, even venture an opinion as to the right
or wrong of your act. If your sentence is executed, you are too near the bar of
that God who will judge righteous judgment, who, as you have said, "is no
respecter of persons," for me to pretend to sit in judgment. Rather would
I commend you to that mercy that "will not break a bruised reed." But
this I will say, that I would sooner take the place you must take before Him
than that of the noblest in the world's esteem, who has robbed the least of
God's poor of his right. I shall cherish your memory while God spares you here,
as one I formerly esteemed very highly, and whom I never can believe would have
done a known wrong, even to save your life. I know it will take another and a
better generation to do justice to your memory. Yet I feel an earnest desire to
do what I can to set you before the world in the true light. I shall endeavor
to open correspondence with your family, and gather all the facts, both for my
own satisfaction and that of other friends. If this shall reach you in time,
may I beg of you a word, though it be but a word, that I may know that it was
received, I shall observe the day that man has fixed to terminate your earthly
career as a day of fasting and prayer, in which I shall endeavor in my
imperfect way to remember not only you and your deeply-afflicted family, but
also bear upon my heart before a compassionate Saviour, the oppressed and
downtrodden, "remembering them that are in bonds as bound with them."
And now, cousin
John, farewell, till we meet in eternity. And may we then be permitted, with
those venerable fathers who taught us in youth to love and serve a God of truth
and righteousness, to join in the new song to Him that loved us and bought us
with his own precious blood.
* Cousin of John
Brown, son of Frederick Brown & Chloe S. Pettibone.
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