Wendell Phillips on the Puritan Principle,* December 18, 1859

I THANK GOD for John Calvin. To be sure, he burned Servetus; but the Puritans, or at least, their immediate descendants, hung the witches; George Washington held slaves; and wherever you go up and down history, you find men, not angels. Of course, you find imperfect men; but you find great men; men who have marked their own age, and moulded the succeeding; men to whose might, daring, and to whose disinterested suffering for those about them, the succeeding generations owe the larger share of their blessings; men whose lips and lives God has made the channel through which his choicest gifts come to their fellow-beings. John Calvin was one of these — perhaps the profoundest intellect of his day; certainly, one of the largest statesmen of his generation. His was the statesmanlike mind that organized Puritanism, that put ideas into the shape of institutions, and in that way organized victory, when, under Loyola, Catholicism, availing itself of the shrewdest and keenest machinery, made its reactive assault upon the new idea of the Protestant religion. If in that struggle Western Europe came out victorious, we owe it more to the statesmanship of Calvin than to the large German heart of Luther. We owe to Calvin — at least it is not unfair to claim, nor improbable in the sequence of events to suppose, that a large share of those most eminent and excellent characteristics of New England, which have made her what she is, and saved her for the future, came from the brain of John Calvin.

Luther's biography is to be read in books. The plodding patience of the German intellect has gathered up every trait and every trifle — the minutest — of his life, and you may read it spread out with loving admiration on a thousand pages of biography. Calvin's life is written, in Scotland and New England, in the triumphs of the people against priestcraft and power. To him, more than to any other man, the Puritans owed Republicanism — the Republicanism of the Church. The instinct of his own day recognized that clearly distinguishing this element of Calvinism. You see it in the wit of Charles the Second, when he said, "Calvinism is a religion unfit for a gentleman." It was unfit for a gentleman of that day; for it was a religion of the people. It recognized — first since the earliest centuries of Christianity — that the heart of God beats through every human heart, and that when you mass up the millions, with their instinctive, fair-play sense of right, and their devotional impulses, you get nearer God's heart than from the second-hand scholarship and conservative tendency of what are called the thoughtful and educated classes. We owe this element, good or bad, to Calvinism.

Then we owe to it a second element, marking the Puritans most largely, and that is — action. The Puritan was not a man of speculation. He originated nothing. His principles are to be found broadcast in the centuries behind him. His speculations were all old. You might find them in the lectures of Abelard; you meet with them in the radicalism of Wat Tyler; you find them all over the continent of Europe. The distinction between his case and that of others was, simply, that he practised what he believed. He believed God. He actually believed him, just as much as if he saw demonstrated before his eyes the truth of the principle. For it is a very easy thing to say; the difficulty is to do. If you tell a man the absolute truth, that if he will plunge into the ocean, and only keep his eyes fixed on heaven, he will never sink you can demonstrate it to him — you can prove it to him by weight and measure — each man of a thousand will believe you, as they say; and then they will plunge into the water, and nine hundred and ninety-nine will throw up their arms to clasp some straw or neighbor, and sink; the thousandth will keep his hands by his body, believing God, and float — and he is the Puritan. Every other man wants to get hold of something to stay himself; not on faith in God's eternal principle of natural or religious law, but on his neighbor; he wants to lean on somebody; he wants to catch hold of something. The Puritan puts his hands to his side and his eyes upon heaven, and floats down the centuries Faith personified.

These two elements of Puritanism are, it seems to me, those which have made New England what she is. You see them every where developing into institutions. For instance, if there is any thing that makes us, and that made Scotland, it is common schools. We got them from Geneva. Luther said, "A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war." It was the essence of aristocracy: "Better submit to any evil from above than trust the masses." Calvin no sooner set his foot in Geneva than he organized the people into a constituent element of public affairs. He planted education at the root of the Republic. The Puritans borrowed it in Holland, and brought it to New England, and it is the sheet-anchor that has held us amid the storms and the temptations of two hundred years. We have a people that can think; a people that can read; and out of the millions of refuse lumber, God selects one in a generation, and he is enough to save a State. One man that thinks for himself is the salt of a generation poisoned with printing ink or cotton dust. The Puritans scattered broadcast the seeds of thought. They knew it was an error, in counting up the population, to speak of a million of souls because there were a million of bodies — as if every man carried a soul! — but they knew, trusting the mercy of God, that by educating all, the martyrs and the saints — that do not travel in battalions, nor ever come to us in regiments, but come alone, now and then one — would be reached and unfolded, and save their own times. Puritanism, therefore, is action; it is impersonating ideas; it is distrusting and being willing to shake off, at fitting times, what are called institutions. They were above words; they went out into the wilderness, outside of forms. The consequence was that, throughout their whole history, there is the most daring confidence in being substantially right. They asked not of safety; they never were frightened by appearances; they did the substantially right thing, and left the statesmen of a hundred years after, at a safe distance, to find out the reasons why they were right. The consequence is that, when conservatism comes together to-day, whether in the form of a "Union meeting" — dead men turning in their graves and pretending to be alive — whether it be in this form or any other, its occupation is to explain how, a hundred years ago, the course taken was right, and not to see the reflection of a hundred years ago staring them in the face to-day. Like the sitting figure on our coin, they are looking back-they have no eyes for the future. The souls that God touches have their brows gilded by the dawn of the future. A man present at the glorious martyrdom of the 2d of December, said of the hero-saint who marched out of the jail, "He seemed to come, his brow radiant with triumph." It was the dawn of a future day that gilded his brow. He was high enough, in the providence of God, to catch, earlier than the present generation, the dawn of the day that he was to inaugurate.

This is my idea of Puritan principles.

Nothing new in them. How are we to vindicate them? Eminent historians and patriots have told us that the pens of the Puritans are their best witnesses. It does not seem to me so. We are their witnesses. If they lived to any purpose, they produced a generation better than themselves. The true man always makes himself to be outdone by his child. The vindication of Puritanism is a New England bound to be better than Puritanism; bound to look back and see its faults and meet the exigencies of the present day, not with stupid imitation, but with that essential disinterestedness, that faith in right and God, with which they met the exigencies of their time. Take an illustration. When our fathers stood in London, under the corporation charter of Charles, the question was, "Have we a right to remove to Massachusetts?" The lawyers said, "No." The fathers said, "Yes; we will remove to Massachusetts, and let law find the reason fifty years hence." They knew that they had the substantial right. Their motto was not "Law and Order"; it was "God and Justice" — a much better motto. Unless you take "Law and Order" in the highest meaning of the words, it is a base motto — if it means only recognizing the majority. "Crime," says Victor Hugo, "comes to history gilded and crowned, and says, 'I am not crime; I am success." And history, written by a soul girded with parchments and stunned with half a dozen languages, says, "Yes, thou art success; we accept thee." But the faithful soul below cries out, "Thou art crime! Avaunt!" There is so much in words.

This is the lesson of Puritanism—how shall we meet it to-day? Every age stereotypes its ideas into forms. It is the natural tendency; and when it is done, every age grows old and dies. It is God's beneficent providence — death When ideas have shaped themselves and become fossil and still, God takes off the weight of the dead men from their age, and leaves room for the new bud. It is a blessed institution — death! But there are men running about who think that those forms, which the old and the experience of the past have left them, are necessarily right and indispensable. They are Conservatives. The men who hold their ears open for the message of the present hour, they are the Puritans.

I know these things seem very trite; they are very trite. All truth is trite. The difficulty is not in truth. Truth never stirs up any trouble mere speculative truth. Plato taught— nobody cared what he taught; Socrates applied truth in the streets, and they poisoned him. It is when a man throws himself against society that society is startled to persecute and to think. The Puritan did not stop to think. He recognized God in his soul, and acted. If he acted wrong, our generation would load down his grave with curses. He took the risk. He took the curses of the present, but the blessings of the future swept them away, and God's sunlight rests upon his grave. That is what every brave man does. It is an easy thing to say. The old fable is of Sysiphus rolling up a stone, and the moment he gets it up to the mountain top, it rolls back again. So each generation, with much trouble, and great energy and disinterestedness, vindicates for a few of its sons the right to think; and the moment they have vindicated the right, the stone rolls back again — nobody else must think! The battle must be fought every day, because the body rebels against the soul. It is the insurrection of the soul against the body-free thought. The gods piled Ætna upon the insurgent Titans. It is the emblem of the world piling mountains—banks, gold, cotton, parties, Everetts, Cushings, Couriers — every thing dull and heavy—to keep down thought. And ever again, in each generation, the living soul, like the bursting bud, throws up the incumbent soil, and finds its way to the sunshine and to God; and is the oak of the future, leafing out, spreading its branches, and sheltering the race and time that is to come.

I hold in my hand the likeness of a child of seventeen summers, taken from the body of a boy, her husband, who lies buried on the banks of the Shenandoah. He flung himself against a State for an idea; the child of a father who lived for an idea; who said, "I know that Slavery is wrong; thou shalt do unto another as thou wouldst have another do to thee" — and flung himself against the law and order of his time. Nobody can dispute his principles. There are men who dispute his acts. It is exactly what he meant they should do. It is the collision of admitted principles with conduct which is the teaching of ethics; it is the Normal school of a generation. Puritanism went up and down England and fulfilled its mission. It revealed despotism. Charles the First and James, in order to rule, were obliged to persecute. Under the guise of what seemed government, they had hidden tyranny. Patriotism tore off the mask, and said to the enlightened conscience and sleeping intellect of England, "Behold! that is despotism!" It was the first lesson; it was the text of the English Revolution. Men still slumbered in submission to law. They tore off the semblance of law; they revealed despotism. John Brown has done the same for us to-day. The Slave system has lost its fascination. It had a certain picturesque charm for some. It called itself "chivalry," and "a state." One assault has broken the charm—it is Despotism! Look how barbarous it is! Take a single instance. A young girl throws herself upon the bosom of a Northern boy, who himself had shown mercy, and endeavors to save him from the Christian rifles of Virginia. They tore her off, and the pitiless bullet found its way to the brave young heart. She stands upon the streets of that very town, and dare not avow the motive—glorious, humane instinct—that led her to throw herself on the bosom of the hapless boy! She bows to the despotism of a brutal State, and makes excuses for her humanity! That is the Christian Virginia of 1859. In 1608, an Indian girl flung herself before her father's tomahawk on the bosom of an English gentleman, and the Indian refrained from touching the traveller whom his daughter's affection protected. Pocahontas lives to-day, the ideal beauty of Virginia, and her proudest names strive to trace their lin eage to the brave Indian girl. That was Pagan Virginia, two centuries and a half ago.

What has dragged her down from Pocahontas in 1608 to John Brown in 1859, when humanity is disgraceful, and despotism treads it out under its iron heel? — who revealed it? One brave act of an old Puritan soul, that did not stop to ask what the majority thought, or what forms were, but acted. The revelation of despotism is the great lesson which the Puritan of our month has taught us. He has flung himself, under the instinct of a great idea, against the institutions beneath which we sit; and he says, practically, to the world, as the Puritan did, "If I am a felon, bury me with curses. I will trust to a future age to judge betwixt you and me. Posterity will summon the State to judgment, and will admit my principle. I can wait." Men say it is anarchy; that this right of the individual to sit in judgment cannot be trusted. It is the lesson of Puritanism. If the individual, criticising law, cannot be trusted, then Puritanism is a mistake; for the sanctity of individual judgment is the lesson of Massachusetts history in 1620 and '30. We accepted anarchy as the safest. The Puritan said, "Human nature is sinful"; so the earth is accursed since the Fall; but I cannot find any thing better than this old earth to build on; I must put up my corner-stone upon it, cursed as it is; I cannot lay hold of the battlements of heaven." So Puritanism said, "Human nature is sinful; but it is the best basis we have got. We will build upon it, and we will trust the influences of God, the inherent gravitation of the race towards right, that it will end right."

I affirm that this is the lesson of our history: that the world is fluid; that we are on the ocean; that we cannot get rid of the people, and we do not want to; that the millions are our basis; and that God has set us this task: "If you want good institutions, do not try to bulwark out the ocean of popular thought—educate it. If you want good laws, earn them." Conservatism says, "I can make my own hearthstone safe: I can build a bulwark of gold and bayonets about it high as heaven and deep as hell, and nobody can touch me, and that is enough." Puritanism says, "It is a delusion; it is a refuge of lies; it is not safe. The waters of popular instinct will carry it away. If you want your own cradle safe, make the cradle of every other man safe and pure. Educate the people up to the law you want." How? They cannot stop for books—show them manhood—show them a brave act. What has John Brown done for us? The world doubted over the horrid word "insurrection," whether the victim had a right to arrest the course of his master, and, even at any expense of blood, to vindicate his rights; and Brown said to his neighbors in the old school-house at North Elba, sitting among the snows—where nothing grows but men—wheat freezes—"I can go South, and show the world that he has a right to rise and can rise." He went, girded about by his household, carrying his sons with him. Proof of a life devoted to an idea! Not a single spasmodic act of greatness, coming out with no background, but the flowering of sixty years. The proof of it, that every thing around him grouped itself harmoniously, like the planets around the central sun. He went down to Virginia, took possession of a town, and held it. He says, "You thought this was strength; I demonstrate it is weakness. You thought this was civil society; I show you it is a den of pirates." Then he turned around in his sublimity, with his Puritan devotional heart, and said to the millions, "Learn!" And God lifted a million hearts to his gibbet, as the Roman cross lifted a million of hearts to it, in that divine sacrifice of two thousand years ago. To-day, more than a statesman could have taught in seventy years, one act of a week has taught these eighteen millions of people.

What shall it teach us? "Go thou and do likewise." Do it, by a resolute life. Do it, by a fearless rebuke. Do it, by preaching the sermon of which this act is the text. Do it, by standing by the great example which God has given us. Do it, by tearing asunder the veil of respectability which covers brutality, calling itself law. We had a "Union meeting" in this city a while ago. For the first time for a quarter of a century, political brutality dared to enter the sacredness of the sick chamber, and visit with ridicule the broken intellect, sheltered from criticism under the cover of sickness. Never, since I knew Boston, has any lip, however embittered, dared to open the door which God's hand had closed, making the inmate sacred, as he rested in broken health. The four thousand men who sat beneath the speaker are said to have received it in silence. If so, it can only be that they were not surprised at the brutality from such lips. And those who sat at his side—they judge us by our associates—they criticise us, in general, for the loud word of any comrade—shall we take the scholar of New England, and drag him down to the level of the brutal Swiss of politics, and judge him indecent because his associates were indecent? Gladly do I seize the opportunity of protesting, in the name of Boston decency, against the brutal language of a man,—thank God, not born on our peninsula,—against the noble and benighted intellect of Gerrit Smith, whom God bless with new health.

On that occasion, too, a noble island was calumniated. The New England scholar, bereft of every thing else on which to arraign the great movement in Virginia, takes up a lie about St. Domingo, and hurls it in the face of an ignorant audience—ignorant, because no man ever thought it worth while to do justice to the negro. Edward Everett would be the last to allow us to take an English version of Bunker Hill, to take an Englishman's account of Hamilton and Washington, when they ordered the scaffold of Andre, and read it to an American audience as a faithful description of the scene. But when he wants to malign a race, he digs up from the prejudice of an enemy they had conquered a forgotten lie—showing how weak was the cause he espoused, when the opposite must be assailed with falsehood, for it could not be assailed with any thing else. I said that they had gone to sleep, and only turned in their graves — those men in Faneuil Hall. It was not wholly true. The chairman came down from the heart of the Commonwealth, and spoke to Boston safe words in Faneuil Hall, for which he would have been lynched at Richmond, had he uttered them there that evening. I rejoice that a hunker cannot live in Massachusetts, without being wider awake than he imagines. He must imbibe fanaticism. Insurrection is epidemic in the State; treason is our inheritance. The Puritans planted it in the very structure of the State; and when their children try to curse a martyr, like the prophet of old, half the curse, at least, turns into a blessing. I thank God for that Massachusetts! Let us not blame our neighbors too much. There is something in the very atmosphere that stands above the ashes of the Puritans, that prevents the very most servile of hearts from holding a meeting which the despots of Virginia can relish. It is a hard task to be servile within forty miles of Plymouth. They have not learned the part; with all their wish, they play it awkwardly. It is the old, stiff Puritan trying to bend, and they do it with a marvellous lack of grace. I read encouragement in the very signs—the awkward attempts made to resist this very effort of the glorious martyr of the Northern hills of New York. Virginia herself looks into his face and melts; she has nothing but praises. She tries to scan his traits; they are too manly, and she bows. Her press can only speak of his manhood. One must get outside the influence of his personal presence before the slaves of Virginia can dig up a forgotten Kansas lie, and hurl it against the picture which Virginian admiration has painted. That does not come from Virginia. Northern men volunteer to do the work which Virginia, lifted for a moment by the sight of martyrdom, is unable to accomplish. A Newburyport man comes to Boston, and says that he knows John Brown was at the massacre of Pottawattomie. He was only twenty-five miles off! The Newburyport orator gets within thirty miles of the truth, and that is very near — for him! But Virginia was unable—mark you!—Virginia was unable to criticise. She could only bow. It is the most striking evidence of the majesty of the action.

There is one picture which stands out in bright relief in this event. On that mountain-side of the Adirondack, up among the snows, there is a plain cottage — "plain living, and high thinking," as Wordsworth says. Grouped there are a family of girls and boys, hardly over twenty; sitting supreme, the majestic spirit of a man just entering age—life one purpose. Other men breed their sons for ambition, avarice, trade; he breeds his for martyrdom, and they accept serenely their places. Hardly a book under its roof but the Bible. No sound so familiar as prayer. He takes them in his right hand and in his left, and goes down to the land of bondage. Like the old Puritans of two hundred years ago, the muskets are on one side and the pikes upon the other; but the morning prayer goes up from the domestic altar, as it did from the lips of Brewster and Carver, and no morsel is ever tasted without that same grace which was made at Plymouth and Salem; and at last he flings himself against the gigantic system, which trembles under his single arm. You measure the strength of a blow by the force of the rebound. Men thought Virginia a Commonwealth; he reveals it a worse than Austrian despotism. Neighbors dare not speak to each other; Courts cannot wait for the slow step of Saxon forms and safeguards; startled Judges have no time to take notes of testimony; no man can travel on the highway without a passport; the telegraph wires are sealed, except with a permit; the State shakes beneath the tramp of cannon and armed men. What does she fear? Conscience. The apostle has come to torment her, and he finds the weakest spot herself. She dares not trust the usual forms of justice. Arraigned in what she calls her court, is a wounded man, on a pallet, unable to stand. The civilized world stands aghast. She says, "It is necessary." Why? "I stand on a volcano. The Titans are heaving beneath the mountains. Thought—the earthquake of conscience—is below me." It is the acknowledgment of defeat. The Roman thought, when he looked upon the Cross, that it was the symbol of infamy — only the vilest felon hung there. One sacred sacrifice, and the cross nestles in our hearts, the emblem of every thing holy. Virginia erects her gibbet, repulsive in name and form. One man goes up from it to God, with two hundred thousand broken fetters in his hands, and henceforth it is sacred forever.

I said, that to vindicate Puritanism, the children must be better than the fathers. Lo, this event! Brewster, and Carver, and Bradford, and Winthrop faced a New England winter and defied law for themselves. For us, their children, they planted and sowed. They said, "Lo! our rights are trodden under foot; our cradles are not safe; our prayers may not ascend to God." They formed a State, and achieved that liberty. John Brown goes a stride beyond them. Under his own roof, he might pray at liberty; his own children wore no fetters. In the catalogue of Saxon heroes and martyrs, the Ridleys and the Latimers, he only saw men dying for themselves; in the brave souls of our own day, he saw men good as their fathers; but he leaped beyond them, and died for a race whose blood he did not share. This child of seventeen years gives her husband for a race into whose eyes she never looked. Braver than Carver or Winthrop, more disinterested than Bradford, broader than Hancock or Washington, pure as the brightest names on our catalogue — nearer God's heart, for, with a divine magnanimity he comprehended all races - Ridley and Latimer minister before him. He sits in that heaven of which he showed us the open door, with the great men of Saxon blood ministering below his feet. And yet they have a right to say, "We created him."

Lord Bacon, as he takes his march down the centuries, may put one hand on the telegraph and the other on the steam engine, and say, "These are mine, for I taught you to invent." So the Puritans may bless John Brown, and say, "You are ours, though you have gone beyond us, for we taught you to believe in God. We taught you to say, God is God, and trample wicked laws under your feet." And now, from that Virginia gibbet, he says to us, "The maxim I taught you, practise it! The principle I have shown you, apply it! If the crisis becomes sterner, meet it! If the battle is closer, be true to my memory! Men say my act was a failure. I showed what I promised, that the slave ought to resist, and could. Sixteen men I placed under the shelter of English law, and then I taught the millions. Prove that my enterprise was not a failure, by showing a North ready to stand behind it, I am willing, in God's service, to plunge with ready martyrdom into the chasm that opens in the forum, only show yourselves worthy to stand upon my grave!"

It seems to me that this is the lesson of Puritanism, as it is read to us to-day. "Law" and "order" are only names for the halting ignorance of the last generation. John Brown is the impersonation of God's order and God's law, moulding a better future, and setting for it an example.

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* A Discourse delivered before the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, (Rev. Theodore Parker's,) in the Music Hall, Boston, on Sunday, December 18, 1859.

SOURCE: James Redpath, Editor, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, pp. 105-18

Diary of Adam Gurowski, November 1861

THE season is excellent for military operations, such as any Napoleon could wish it. And we, lying not on our oars or arms, but in our beds, as our spes patriæ is warmly and cosily established in a large house, receiving there the incense and salutations of all flunkeys. Even cabinet ministers crowd McClellan's antechambers!

The massacre at Ball's Bluff is the work either of treason, or of stupidity, or of cowardice, or most probably of all three united.

No European government and no European nation would thus coolly bear it. Any commander culpable of such stupidity would be forever disgraced, and dismissed from the army. Here the administration, the Cabinet, and all the Scotts, the McClellans, the Thomases, etc., strain their brains and muscles to whitewash themselves or the culprit—to represent this massacre as something very innocent.

Victoria! Victoria! Old Scott, Old Mischief, gone overboard! So vanished one of the two evil genii keeping guard over Mr. Lincoln's brains. But it will not be so easy to redress the evil done by Scott. He nailed the country's cause to such a turnpike that any of his successors will perhaps be unable to undo what Old Mischief has done. Scott might have had certain, even eminent, military capacity; but, all things considered, he had it only on a small scale. Scott never had in his hand large numbers, and hundreds of European generals of divisions would do the same that Scott did, even in Mexico. Any one in Europe, who in some way or other participated in the events of the last forty years, has had occasion to see or participate in one single day in more and better fighting, to hear more firing, and smell more powder, than has General Scott in his whole life.

Scott's fatal influence palsied, stiffened, and poisoned every noble or higher impulse, and every aspiration of the people. Scott diligently sowed the first seeds of antagonism between volunteers and regulars, and diligently nursed them. Around his person in the War Department, and in the army, General Scott kept and maintained officers, who, already before the inauguration, declared, and daily asserted, that if it comes to a war, few officers of the army will unite with the North and remain loyal to the Union.

He never forgot to be a Virginian, and was filled with all a Virginian's conceit. To the last hour he warded off blows aimed at Virginia. To this hour he never believed in a serious war, and now requiescat in pace until the curse of coming generations.

McClellan is invested with all the powers of Scott. McClellan has more on his shoulders than any man—a Napoleon not excepted—can stand; and with his very limited capacity McClellan must necessarily break under it. Now McClellan will be still more idolized. He is already a kind of dictator, as Lincoln, Seward, etc., turn around him.

In a conversation with Cameron, I warned him against bestowing such powers on McClellan. "What shall we do?" was Cameron's answer; "neither the President nor I know anything about military affairs." Well, it is true; but McClellan is scarcely an apprentice.

Again the intermittent fear, or fever, of foreign intervention. How absurd! Americans belittle themselves talking and thinking about it. The European powers will not, and cannot. That is my creed and my answer; but some of our agents, diplomats, and statesmen, try to made capital for themselves from this fever which they evoke to establish before the public that their skill preserves the country from foreign intervention. Bosh!

All the good and useful produced in the life and in the economy of nations, all the just and the right in their institutions, all the ups and downs, misfortunes and disasters befalling them, all this was, is, and forever will be the result of logical deductions from pre-existing dates and facts. And here almost everybody forgets the yesterday.

A revolution imposes obligations. A revolution makes imperative the development and the practical application of those social principles which are its basis.

The American Revolution of 1776 proclaimed self-government, equality before all, happiness of all, etc.; it is therefore the peremptory duty of the American people to uproot domestic oligarchy, based upon living on the labor of an enslaved man; it has to put a stop to the moral, intellectual, and physical servitude of both, of whites and of colored.

Eminent men in America are taunted with the ambition to reach the White House. In itself it is not condemnable; it is a noble or an ignoble ambition, according to the ways and means used to reach that aim. It is great and stirring to see one's name recorded in the list of Presidents of the United States; but there is still a record far shorter, but by far more to be envied—a record venerated by our race—it is the record of truly great men. The actually inscribed runners for the White House do not think of this.

No one around me here seems to understand (and no one is familiar enough with general history) that protracted wars consolidate a nationality. Every day of Southern existence shapes it out more and more into a nation, with all the necessary moral and material conditions of existence.

Seeing these repeated reviews, I cannot get rid of the idea that by such shows and displays McClellan tries to frighten the rebels in the Chinaman fashion. The collateral missions to England, France, and Spain, are to add force to our cause before the public opinion as well as before the rulers. But what a curious choice of men! It would be called even an unhappy one. Thurlow Weed, with his offhand, apparently sincere, if not polished ways, may not be too repulsive to English refinement, provided he does not buttonhole his interlocutionists, or does not pat them on the shoulder. So Thurlow Weed will be dined, wined, etc. But doubtless the London press will show him up, or some "Secesh" in London will do it. I am sure that Lord Lyons, as it is his paramount duty, has sent to Earl Russell a full and detailed biography of this Seward's alter ego, sent ad latus to Mr. Adams. Thurlow Weed will be considered an agreeable fellow; but he never can acquire much weight and consideration, neither with the statesmen, nor with the members of the government, nor in saloons, nor with the public at large.

Edward Everett begged to be excused from such a false position offered to him in London. Not fish, not flesh. It was rather an offence to proffer it to Everett. The old patriot better knows Europe, its cabinets, and exigencies, than those who attempted to intricate him in this ludicrous position. He is right, and he will do more good here than he could do in London—there on a level with Thurlow Weed!

Archbishop Hughes is to influence Paris and France,—but whom? The public opinion, which is on our side, is anti-Roman, and Hughes is an Ultra Montane—an opinion not over friendly to Louis Napoleon. The French clergy in every way, in culture, wisdom, instruction, theology, manners, deportment, etc., is superior to Hughes in incalculable proportions, and the French clergy are already generally anti-slavery. Hughes to act on Louis Napoleon! Why! the French Emperor can outwit a legion of Hugheses, and do this without the slightest effort. Besides, for more than a century European sovereigns, governments, and cabinets, have generally given up the use of bishops, etc., for political, public, or confidential missions. Mr. Seward stirs up old dust. All the liberal party in Europe or France will look astonished, if not worse, at this absurdity.

All things considered, it looks like one of Seward's personal tricks, and Seward outwitted Chase, took him in by proffering a similar mission to Chase's friend, Bishop McIlvaine. But I pity Dayton. He is a high-toned man, and the mission of Hughes is a humiliation to Dayton.

Whatever may be the objects of these missions, they look like petty expedients, unworthy a minister of a great government.

Mason and Slidell caught. England will roar, but here the people are satisfied. Some of the diplomats make curious faces. Lord Lyons behaves with dignity. The small Bremen flatter right and left, and do it like little lap-dogs.

Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, ex-Governor Boutwell, are tip-top men—men of the people. The Blairs are too heinous, too violent, in their persecution of Fremont. Warned M. Blair not to protect one whom Fremont deservedly expelled. But M. Blair, in his spite against Fremont, took a mean adventurer by the hand, and entangled therein the President.

The vessel and the crew are excellent, and would easily obey the hand of a helmsman, but there is the rub, where to find him? Lincoln is a simple man of the prairie, and his eyes penetrate not the fog, the tempest. They do not perceive the signs of the times - cannot embrace the horizon of the nation. And thus his small intellectual insight is dimmed by those around him. Lincoln begins now already to believe that he is infallible; that he is ahead of the people, and frets that the people may remain behind. Oh simplicity or conceit!

Again, Lincoln is frightened with the success in South Carolina, as in his opinion this success will complicate the question of slavery. He is frightened as to what he shall do with Charleston and Augusta, provided these cities are taken.

It is disgusting to hear with what superciliousness the different members of the Cabinet speak of the approaching Congress—and not one of them is in any way the superior of many congressmen.

When Congress meets, the true national balance account will be struck. The commercial and piratical flag of the secesh is virtually in all waters and ports. (The little cheese-eater, the Hollander, was the first to raise a fuss against the United States concerning the piratical flag. This is not to be forgotten.) 2d. Prestige, to a great extent, lost. 3d. Millions upon millions wasted. Washington besieged and blockaded, and more than 200,000 men kept in check by an enemy not by half as strong. 4th. Every initiative which our diplomacy tried abroad was wholly unsuccessful, and we are obliged to submit to new international principles inaugurated at our cost; and, summing up, instead of a broad, decided, general policy, we have vacillation, inaction, tricks, and expedients. The people fret, and so will the Congress. Nations are as individuals; any partial disturbance in a part of the body occasions a general chill. Nature makes efforts to check the beginning of disease, and so do nations. In the human organism nature does not submit willingly to the loss of health, or of a limb, or of life. Nature struggles against death. So the people of the Union will not submit to an amputation, and is uneasy to see how unskilfully its own family doctors treat the national disease.

Port Royal, South Carolina, taken. Great and general rejoicing. It is a brilliant feat of arms, but a questionable military and war policy. Those attacks on the circumference, or on extremities, never can become a death-blow to secesh. The rebels must be crushed in the focus; they ought to receive a blow at the heart. This new strategy seems to indicate that McClellan has not heart enough to attack the fastnesses of rebeldom, but expects that something may turn up from these small expeditions. He expects to weaken the rebels in their focus. I wish McClellan may be right in his expectations, but I doubt it.

Officers of McClellan's staff tell that Mr. Lincoln almost daily comes into McClellan's library, and sits there rather unnoticed. On several occasions McClellan let the President wait in the room, together with other common mortals.

The English statesmen and the English press have the notion deeply rooted in their brains that the American people fight for empire. The rebels do it, but not the free men.

Mr. Seward's emphatical prohibition to Mr. Adams to mention the question of slavery may have contributed to strengthen in England the above-mentioned fallacy. This is a blunder, which before long or short Seward will repent. It looks like astuteness—ruse; but if so, it is the resource of a rather limited mind. In great and minor affairs, straightforwardness is the best policy. Loyalty always gets the better of astuteness, and the more so when the opponent is unprepared to meet it. Tricks can be well met by tricks, but tricks are impotent against truth and sincerity. But Mr. Seward, unhappily, has spent his life in various political tricks, and was surrounded by men whose intimacy must have necessarily lowered and unhealthily affected him. All his most intimates are unintellectual mediocrities or tricksters.

Seward is free from that infamous know-nothingism of which this Gen. Thomas is the great master (a man every few weeks accused of treason by the public opinion, and undoubtedly vibrating between loyalty here and sympathy with rebels).

All this must have unavoidably vitiated Mr. Seward's better nature. In such way only can I see plainly why so many excellent qualities are marred in him. He at times can broadly comprehend things around him; he is good-natured when not stung, and he is devoted to his men.

As a patriot, he is American to the core—were only his domestic policy straight-forward and decided, and would he only stop meddling with the plans of the campaign, and let the War Department alone.

Since every part of his initiative with European cabinets failed, Seward very skilfully dispatches all the minor affairs with Europe—affairs generated by various maritime and international complications. Were his domestic policy as correct as is now his foreign policy, Seward would be the right man.

Statesmanship emerges from the collision of great principles with important interests. In the great Revolution, the thus called fathers of the nation were the offsprings of the exigencies of the time, and they were fully up to their task. They were vigorous and fresh; their intellect was not obstructed by any political routine, or by tricky political praxis. Such men are now needed at the helm to carry this noble people throughout the most terrible tempest. So in these days one hears so much about constitutional formulas as safeguards of liberty. True liberty is not to be virtually secured by any framework of rules and limitations, devisable only by statecraft. The perennial existence of liberty depends not on the action of any definite and ascertainable machinery, but on continual accessions of fresh and vital influences. But perhaps such influences are among the noblest, and therefore among the rarest, attributes of man.

Abroad and here, traitors and some pedants on formulas make a noise concerning the violation of formulas. Of course it were better if such violations had been left undone. But all this is transient, and evoked by the direst necessity. The Constitution was made for a healthy, normal condition of the nation; the present condition is abnormal. Regular functions are suspended. When the human body is ruined or devoured by a violent disease, often very tonic remedies are used—remedies which would destroy the organism if administered when in a healthy, normal condition. A strong organism recovers from disease, and from its treatment. Human societies and institutions pass through a similar ordeal, and when they are unhinged, extraordinary and abnormal ways are required to maintain the endangered society and restore its equipoise.

Examining day after day the map of Virginia, it strikes one that a movement with half of the army could be made down from Mount Vernon by the two turnpike roads, and by water to Occoquan, and from there to Brentsville. The country there seems to be flat, and not much wooded. Manassas would be taken in the rear, and surrounded, provided the other half of the army would push on by the direct way from here to Manassas, and seriously attack the enemy, who thus would be broken, could not escape. This, or any plan, the map of Virginia ought to suggest to the staff of McClellan, were it a staff in the true meaning. Dybitsch and Toll, young colonels in the staff of Alexander I., 1813-'14, originated the march on Paris, so destructive to Napoleon. History bristles with evidences how with staffs originated many plans of battles and of campaigns; history explains the paramount influence of staffs on the conduct of a war. Of course Napoleon wanted not a suggestive, but only an executive staff; but McClellan is not a Napoleon, and has neither a suggestive nor an executive staff around him. A Marcy to suggest a plan of a campaign or of a battle, to watch over its execution!

I spoke to McDowell about the positions of Occoquan and Brentsville. He answered that perhaps something similar will be under consideration, and that McClellan must show his mettle and capacity. I pity McDowell's confidence.

Besides, the American army as it was and is educated, nursed, brought up by Gen. Scott, —the army has no idea what are the various and complicated duties of a staff. No school of staff at West Point; therefore the difficulty to find now genuine officers of the staff. If McClellan ever moves this army, then the defectiveness of his staff may occasion losses and even disasters. It will be worse with his staff than it was at Jena with the Prussian staff, who were as conceited as the small West Point clique here in Washington.

West Point instructs well in special branches, but does not necessarily form generals and captains. The great American Revolution was fought and made victorious by men not from any military schools, and to whom were opposed commanders with as much military science as there was possessed and current in Europe. Jackson, Taylor, and even Scott, are not from the school.

I do not wish to judge or disparage the pupils from West Point, but I am disgusted with the supercilious and ridiculous behavior of the clique here, ready to form prætorians or anything else, and poisoning around them the public opinion. Western generals are West Point pupils, but I do not hear them make so much fuss, and so contemptuously look down on the volunteers. These Western generals pine not after regulars, but make use of such elements as they have under hand. The best and most patriotic generals and officers here, educated at West Point, are numerous. Unhappily a clique, composed of a few fools and fops, overshadows the others.

McClellan's speciality is engineering. It is a speciality which does not form captains and generals for the field,— at least such instances are very rare. Of all Napoleon's marshals and eminent commanders, Berthier alone was educated as engineer, and his speciality and high capacity was that of a chief of the staff. Marescott or Todleben would never claim to be captains. The intellectual powers of an engineer are modeled, drilled, turned towards the defensive,—the engineer's brains concentrate upon selecting defensive positions, and combine how to strengthen them by art. So an engineer is rather disabled from embracing a whole battle-field, with its endless casualties and space. Engineers are the incarnation of a defensive warfare; all others, as artillerists, infantry, and cavalry, are for dashing into the unknown—into the space; and thus these specialities virtually represent the offensive warfare.

When will they begin to see through McClellan, and find out that he is not the man? Perhaps too late, and then the nation will sorely feel it.

Mr. Seward almost idolizes McClellan. Poor homage that; but it does mischief by reason of its influence on the public opinion.

SOURCE: Adam Gurowski, Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862, pp. 115-28

Diary of George Templeton Strong, May 11, 1860

. . . Stopped at Law School on my way down, with Mr. Ruggles, and conferred a little with the graduating class. The young men have expressed the wish to have a sermon preached to them before their Commencement (the 23d instant) on the duties of their profession; very becoming and graceful, especially as it is quite spontaneous. Hawks was applied to, but after nibbling a little at the invitation, declined it. He is lazy, and it may be, too, that he himself was aware that the subject demanded heavier metal than his smooth, wordy rhetoric. So the class instructed us to apply to Vinton, and we called at Trinity Church after service. Vinton sees plainly enough that it is an opening not to be despised, and accepts readily. . . . Afterwards with Lewis Rutherfurd and William Betts, about degrees to be conferred at this Law Commencement. We propose to LL.D. Judges Ingraham, Woodruff, and Daly, who have consented to act as a committee to examine the essays and examination papers and award the prizes. Vivat the Law School! I hope to make a great deal out of it.

The Baltimore Convention of conservative fogies and fossils nominates Bell for President and Edward Everett for Vice-President. Not of much practical importance probably, but I for one am tired of talk about niggers and feel much inclined to vote for anybody who promises to ignore that subject.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 25-6

Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Thursday, May 24, 1860

St. Louis     Reached St Louis at 6 A. M. went to Planters House and had short interview with Gov Morgan of New York. Also met Judge Bates & Mr Gibson there, and made an appointment with the Judge to meet him at his office at 11 O'clock. I then had a long talk with Gibson in the parlor of the Planters House, and at 11 he and I met at Judge Bates' office. The Judge had just recvd and read my letter of Tuesday—I exhibited to him the letter I had received from Springfield, and made an urgent appeal to him to come into Illinois, and make a few speeches. Whilst I was engaged in urging such considerations as I thought would be most effectual in prevailing with him, Mr Goodrich,¹ one of the Massachusetts delegates to the Chicago Convention, came in and united with me in the appeal I was making. But our efforts were unavailing. Judge Bates very emphatically declined to take the stump, saying that such a thing as one who had been before the convention as a candidate for nomination for the presidency taking the stump was unprecedented that he thought it would be in very bad taste, and incompatible with the dignity of his character & position, and that he must respectfully decline to do so that his situation was peculiar that he had been thought of as a candidate for the Presidency not because he was a member of the Republican party, but because he was a man outside of the Republican party harmonizing with it in political sentiments, and because it was supposed, therefore, that he could bring outside strength to the support of the party—that the platform, in the main expressed his sentiments, but there were some things in it unnecessary and untrue, which did not meet his approval, and mentioned particularly the clauses relating to the power of Congress over slavery in the territories, and the naturalization laws—that he felt no emotion of chagrin, or regret at not getting the nomination—that he entertained the highest regard for Mr Lincoln, appreciated and admired his character, and should rejoice at his success over any democrat who could be nominated, but that he must take a little time to deliberate as to the course proper to be when pursued by him, and that when he had reflected and matured his opinions he would write me fully upon the subject. I met Sam Glover and had a short conversation with him.² He thought Judge Bates ought to write me a letter for publication endorsing Lincoln's nomination, but he would not advise him, as he was a man of great intellect who thought, and acted for himself, and he had never known him make a mistake especially in a matter of taste and propriety

At 11 A. M. called on Mrs Bennett She was not in. At 2 P. M. called and spent an hour with Mrs Greenleaf. At 3 came on board Die Vernon on my way home Very hot day.

_______________

¹ Probably John Z. Goodrich, born 1801. Elector on Harrison ticket, 1840; representative in 32d and 33d congresses; collector of customs at Boston, 1861-1865.

² Among the Browning letters in the Illinois Historical Library at Springfield is one from Sam T. Glover to Browning, dated St. Louis, June 13, 1860. This letter deals with the attitude of Mr. Bates. After stating that he (Mr. Glover) had recently identified himself with the Republican party, and felt considerable concern as to Bates's course, he writes of a call which he made upon Mr. Bates in order to elicit some statement as to his position. The letter continues:

"He then took out of his desk and read to me a most happy well considered eloquent letter . . . defining his own position as not a republican but as a whig & one who is from principle obliged to vote with that party as the conservative party of the country. He shows up the negro democracy in their native colors— He turns the other end of the Telescope on Bell & Everet and shows how small they really are He does justice to Lincoln & Hamlin & spurns the idea that any little feeling of personal pique can influence his conduct.

 

"The letter is truly a great one. It is as solid as iron and brilliant as jaspar. I urged him to publish it immediately     He did not give me a satisfactory answer . . .

 

"Can you come here     If not can you not write to Mr B a strong letter urging him not to postpone longer his promise to send the letter"

The letter referred to was addressed to Browning and was published in the St. Louis Democrat of June 19, 1860, and widely copied. See entry for June 19, 1860, post, 416-417 n. 3.

SOURCE: The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. 1, pp. 410-2

Daniel Webster to Edward Everett, Monday, May 6, 1851

Washington, May 6, 1851.

MY DEAR SIR,—I think of dedicating each volume to some friend. Would that look like affectation? Public men and scholars will be remembered by their works. Private friendships are forgotten. It has occurred to me, that I would dedicate the second volume to Isaac P. Davis, as a memorial of an uninterrupted friendship of forty years. What should you think of it? I have mentioned it to no one.

D. W.

SOURCE: Fletcher Webster, Editor, The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Vol. 2, p. 442

Diary of Major Joseph Stockton, April 24, 1863

Detailed as provost guard at Richmond. This is one of the prettiest places I have yet seen. We are encamped on the property of a Mr. Anderson, a cousin of the General Anderson of Fort Sumter fame. Mr. Anderson voted against secession and for Bell and Everett, but is now a secessionist and says there is no such thing as a unionist in the South. Headquarters tent is pitched in his garden and surrounded by flowers which are in full bloom. It is so different from what it is at home. The air is so soft and balmy that I feel like resting all the time.

SOURCE: Joseph Stockton, War Diary (1862-5) of Brevet Brigadier General Joseph Stockton, p. 13

Edward Everett to John J. Crittenden, February 26, 1853

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, February 26, 1853

MY DEAR COLLEAGUE, I informed General Pierce that you propose to tender your resignation on the 4th of March, but that if he desires it, you are willing to continue to act till your successor is appointed. He stated in reply that he would be gratified to have you pursue this course.

Having been requested to prepare a form of resignation to be used by all the members of President Fillmore's cabinet, I transmit you the inclosed. If it meets your approbation, please sign and return it to me. I will see that it is placed in General Pierce's hands at the proper time.

I remain with much regard, sincerely yours,

EDWARD EVERETT.

Hon. J. J. CRITTENDEN.

SOURCE: Ann Mary Butler Crittenden Coleman, Editor, The Life of John J. Crittenden: With Selections from His Correspondence and Speeches, Vol. 2, p. 58

Daniel Webster to Edward Everett, March 21, 1851

Washington, March 21, 1851.

MY DEAR SIR,—Mr. Abbot is right. I did repeat the words. I did say, "Let it rise, let it rise, till it meet, &c."

I have no objection to have the second Bunker Hill oration immediately follow the first, and this again to be followed by whatever part you think it worth while to publish of my article in the North American Review.

I presume you would hardly think of publishing it all. I looked over a few of the first pages the other day, and thought they read well.

I suppose you will prepare a note, more or less extended, from Mr. Frothingham's book.

DAN'L WEBSTER.

SOURCE: Fletcher Webster, Editor, The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Vol. 2, p. 425-6

Lecture of Wendell Phillips: “The Lesson of the Hour,” Delivered at Brooklyn, New York, Tuesday Evening, November 1, 1859

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Of course I do not expect—speaking from this platform, and to you— to say any thing on the vital question of the hour, which you have not already heard. But, when a great question divides the community, all men are called upon to vote, and I feel to-night that I am simply giving my vote. I am only saying "ditto" to what you hear from this platform day after day. And I would willingly have avoided, ladies and gentlemen, even at this last moment, borrowing this hour from you. I tried to do better by you. Like the Irishman in the story, I offered to hold the hat of Hon. Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, (enthusiastic applause,) if he would only make a speech, and, I am sorry to say, he declines, most unaccountably, this generous offer. (Laughter.) So I must fulfil my appointment, and deliver my lecture myself.

"The Lesson of the Hour?" I think the lesson of the hour is insurrection. (Sensation.) Insurrection of thought always precedes the insurrection of arms. The last twenty years have been an insurrection of thought. We seem to be entering on a new phase of this great American struggle. It seems to me that we have never accepted, as Americans, we have never accepted our own civilization. We have held back from the inference which we ought to have drawn from the admitted principles which underlie our life. We have all the timidity of the old world, when we think of the people; we shrink back, trying to save ourselves from the inevitable might of the thoughts of the millions. The idea on the other side of the water seems to be, that man is created to be taken care of by somebody else. God did not leave him fit to go alone; he is in everlasting pupilage to the wealthy and the educated. The religious or the comfortable classes are an ever-present probate court to take care of him. The Old World, therefore, has always distrusted the average conscience—the common sense of the millions.

It seems to me the idea of our civilization, underlying all American life, is, that men do not need any guardian. We need no safeguard. Not only the inevitable, but the best, power this side of the ocean, is the unfettered average common sense of the masses. Institutions, as we are accustomed to call them, are but pasteboard, and intended to be against the thought of the street. Statutes are mere milestones, telling how far yesterday's thought had travelled; and the talk of the sidewalk to-day is the law of the land. You may regret this; but the fact stands; and if our fathers foresaw the full effect of their principles, they must have planned and expected it. With us, Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion. Let that die or grow indifferent, and statutes are waste paper—lack all executive force. You may frame them strong as language can make, but once change public feeling, and through them or over them rides the real wish of the people. The good sense and conscience of the masses are our only title-deeds and police force. The Temperance cause, the Anti-Slavery movement, and your Barnburner party prove this. You may sigh for a strong government, anchored in the convictions of past centuries, and able to protect the minority against the majority; able to defy the ignorance, the mistake, or the passion, as well as the high purpose, of the present hour. You may prefer the unchanging terra firma of despotism; but still the fact remains, that we are launched on the ocean of an unchained democracy, with no safety but in those laws of gravity that bind the ocean in its bed—the instinctive love of right in the popular heart—the divine sheet-anchor, that the race gravitates towards right, and that the right is always safe and best.

Somewhat briefly stated, such is the idea of American civilization; uncompromising faith—in the average selfishness, if you choose—of all classes, neutralizing each other, and tending towards that fair play that Saxons love. But it seems to me that, on all questions, we dread thought; we shrink behind something; we acknowledge ourselves unequal to the sublime faith of our fathers; and the exhibition of the last twenty years and of the present state of public affairs is, that Americans dread to look their real position in the face.

They say in Ireland that every Irishman thinks that he was born sixty days too late, (laughter,) and the world owes him sixty days. The consequence is, when a trader says such a thing is so much for cash, the Irishman thinks cash means to him a bill of sixty days. (Laughter.) So it is with Americans. They have no idea of absolute right. They were born since 1787, and absolute right means the truth diluted by a strong decoction of the Constitution of '89. They breathe that atmosphere; they do not want to sail outside of it; they do not attempt to reason outside of it. Poisoned with printer's ink, or choked with cotton dust, they stare at absolute right, as the dream of madmen. For the last twenty years, there has been going on, more or less heeded and understood in various States, an insurrection of ideas against the limited, cribbed, cabined, isolated American civilization, interfering to restore absolute right. If you said to an American, for instance, any thing in regard to temperance, slavery, or any thing else, in the course of the last twenty years—any thing about a principle, he ran back instantly to the safety of such a principle, to the possibility of its existing with a particular sect, with a church, with a party, with a constitution, with a law. He had not yet raised himself to the level of daring to trust justice, which is the preliminary consideration to trusting the people; for whether native depravity be true or not, it is a truth, attested by all history, that the race gravitates towards justice, and that making fair allowance for differences of opinion, there is an inherent, essential tendency to the great English principle of fair play at the bottom of our natures. (Loud applause.) The Emperor Nicholas, it is said, ordered his engineers to lay down for him a railway from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and presently the engineers brought him a large piece of card-paper, on which was laid down, like a snake, the designed path for the iron locomotive between the two capitals. "What's that?" said Nicholas. "That's the best road," was the reply. "What do you make it crooked for?" Why, we turn this way to touch this great city, and to the left to reach that immense mass of people, and to the right again to suit the business of that district." "Yes." The emperor turned the card over, made a new dot for Moscow, and another for St. Petersburg, took a ruler, made a straight line, and said, "Build me that road." (Laughter.)

"But what will become of this depot of trade?—of that town?" "I don't know; they must look out for themselves." (Cheers.) And omnipotent democracy says of Slavery, or of a church, "This is justice, and that is iniquity; the track of God's thunderbolt is a straight line from one to the other, and the Church or State that cannot stand it must get out of the way. (Cheers.) Now our object for twenty years has been to educate the mass of the American people up to that level of moral life, which shall recognize that free speech carried to this extent is God's normal school, educating the American mind, throwing upon it the grave responsibility of deciding a great question, and by means of that responsibility, lifting it to a higher level of intellectual and moral life. Responsibility educates, and politics is but another name for God's way of teaching the masses ethics, under the responsibility of great present interest. To educate man is God's ultimate end and purpose in all creation. Trust the people with the gravest questions, and in the long run you educate the race; while, in the process, you secure not perfect, but the best possible, institutions. Now scholarship stands on one side, and, like your Brooklyn Eagle, says, "This is madness!" Well, poor man, he thinks so! (Laughter.) The very difficulty of the whole matter is, that he does think so, and this normal school that we open is for him. His seat is on the lowest end of the lowest bench. (Laughter and applause.) But he only represents that very chronic distrust which pervades all that class, specially the timid, educated mind of these Northern States. Anacharsis went into the forum at Athens, and heard a case argued by the great minds of the day, and saw the vote. He walked out into the streets, and somebody said to him, "What think you of Athenian liberty?" "I think," said he, "wise men argue causes, and fools decide them." Just what the timid scholar two thousand years ago said in the streets of Athens, that which calls itself the scholarship of the United States, says to-day of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions, and fools decide them. But that unruly Athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of polity, and right, and wrong, where it was not safe to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the prejudices of the mob to-morrow; that very Athens probably secured the greatest human happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy; God lent to it the noblest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain peaks of the old world; while Egypt, the hunker conservative of antiquity, where nobody dared to differ from the priest, or to be wiser than his grandfather; where men pretended to be alive, though swaddled in the grave clothes of creed and custom as close as their mummies in linen, is hid in the tomb it inhabited; and the intellect which Athens has created for us digs to-day those ashes to find out what hunkerism knew and did. (Cheers.) Now my idea of American civilization is, that it is a second part, a repetition of that same sublime confidence in the public conscience and the public thought that made the groundwork of Grecian Democracy.

We have been carrying on this insurrection of thought for thirty years. There have been various evidences of growth in education; I will tell you of one. The first evidence that a sinner, convicted of sin, and too blind or too lazy to reform, the first evidence he gives that his nature has been touched, is, that he becomes a hypocrite; he has the grace to pretend to be something. Now, the first evidence that the American people gave of that commencing grace of hypocrisy was this: in 1831, when we commenced the Anti-Slavery agitation, the papers talked about Slavery, Bondage, American Slavery, boldly, frankly, and bluntly. In a few years it sounded hard; it had a grating effect; the toughest throat of the hardest Democrat felt it as it came out. So they spoke of the "patriarchal institution," (laughter,) then of the "domestic institution," (continued laughter,) and then of the "peculiar institution," (laughter,) and in a year or two it got beyond that. Mississippi published a report from her Senate, in which she went a stride further, and described it as "economic subordination." (Renewed laughter.) A Southern Methodist bishop was taken to task for holding slaves in reality, but his Methodist brethren were not courageous enough to say "slaves" right out in meeting, and so they advised the bishop to get rid of his "impediment," (loud laughter;) and the late Mr. Rufus Choate, in the last Democratic Canvass in my own State, undertaking and obliged to refer to the institutions of the South, and unwilling that his old New England lips, that had spoken so many glorious free truths, should foul their last days with the hated word, phrased it "a different type of industry." Now, hypocrisy—why, "it is the homage that vice renders to Virtue." When men begin to weary of capital punishment, they banish the gallows inside the jail-yard, and let nobody see it without a special card of invitation from the sheriff. And so they have banished Slavery into pet phrases and fancy flash-words. If, one hundred years hence, you should dig our Egyptian Hunkerism up from the grave into which it is rapidly sinking, we should need a commentator of the true German blood to find out what all these queer, odd, peculiar, imaginative paraphrases mean in this middle of the Nineteenth Century. This is one evidence of progress.

I believe in moral suasion. The age of bullets is over. The age of ideas is come. I think that is the rule of our age. The old Hindoo dreamed, you know, that he saw the human race led out to its varied fortune. First, he saw men bitted and curbed, and the reins went back to an iron hand. But his dream changed on and on, until at last he saw men led by reins that came from the brain, and went back into an unseen hand. It was the type of governments; the first despotism, palpable, iron; and the last our government, a government of brains, a government of ideas. I believe in it—in public opinion.

Yet, let me say, in passing, I think you can make a better use of iron than forging it into chains. If you must have the metal, put it into Sharpe's rifles. It is a great deal better used that way than in fetters; types are better than bullets, but bullets a thousand times rather than a clumsy statue of a mock great man, for hypocrites to kneel down and worship in a state-house yard. (Loud and renewed cheers, and great hissing.) I am so unused to hisses lately, that I have forgotten what I had to say. (Laughter and hisses.) I only know I meant what I did say.

My idea is, public opinion, literature, education, as governing elements.

But some men seem to think that our institutions are necessarily safe, because we have free schools and cheap books, and a public opinion that controls. But that is no evidence of safety. India and China had schools for fifteen hundred years. And books, it is said, were once as cheap in Central and Northern Asia, as they are in New York. But they have not secured liberty, nor a controlling public opinion to either nation. Spain for three centuries had municipalities and town governments, as independent and self-supporting, and as representative of thought, as New England or New York has. But that did not save Spain. De Tocqueville says that fifty years before the great revolution, public opinion was as omnipotent in France as it is to-day, but it did not make France free. You cannot save men by machinery. What India, and France, and Spain wanted, was live men, and that is what we want to-day; men who are willing to look their own destiny, and their own responsibilities, in the face. "Grant me to see, and Ajax asks no more," was the prayer the great poet put into the lips of his hero in the darkness that overspread the Grecian camp. All we want of American citizens is the opening of their own eyes, and seeing things as they are. The intelligent, thoughtful, and determined gaze of twenty millions of Christian people, there is nothing—no institution wicked and powerful enough to be capable of standing against it. In Keats's beautiful poem of "Lamia," a young man had been led captive by a phantom girl, and was the slave of her beauty, until the old teacher came in and fixed his thoughtful eye upon the figure, and it vanished.

You see the great commonwealth of Virginia fitly represented by a pyramid standing upon its apex. A Connecticut born man entered at one corner of her dominions, and fixed his cold gray eye upon the government of Virginia, and it almost vanished in his very gaze. For it seems that Virginia, for a week, asked leave "to be" of John Brown at Harper's Ferry. (Cheers and applause.) Connecticut has sent out many a schoolmaster to the other thirty States; but never before so grand a teacher as that Litchfield born schoolmaster at Harper's Ferry, writing as it were upon the Natural Bridge in the face of nations his simple copy: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." (Loud cheers.)

I said that the lesson of the hour was insurrection. I ought not to apply that word to John Brown of Osawatomie, for there was no insurrection in his case. It is a great mistake to call him an insurgent. This principle that I have endeavored so briefly to open to you, of absolute right and wrong, states what? Just this: "Commonwealth of Virginia!" There is no such thing. Lawless, brutal force is no basis of a government, in the true sense of that word. Quæ est enim civitas? asks Cicero. Omnis ne conventus ettam ferorum el immanium? Omnis ne etiam fugitivorum ac latronum congregata unum in locum multitudo? Certe negabis. No civil society, no government, can exist except on the basis of the willing submission of all its citizens, and by the performance of the duty of rendering equal justice between man and man.

Whatever calls itself a government, and refuses that duty, or has not that assent, is no government. It is only a pirate ship. Virginia, the commonwealth of Virginia! She is only a chronic insurrection. I mean exactly what I say. I am weighing my words now. She is a pirate ship, and John Brown sails the sea a Lord High Admiral of the Almighty, with his commission to sink every pirate he meets on God's ocean of the nineteenth century. (Cheers and applause.) I mean literally and exactly what I say. In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority. You have often heard here, doubtless, and I need not tell you the ground of morals. The rights of that one man are as sacred as those of the miscalled commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia is only another Algiers. The barbarous horde who gag each other, imprison women for teaching children to read, prohibit the Bible, sell men on the auction-blocks, abolish marriage, condemn half their women to prostitution, and devote themselves to the breeding of human beings for sale, is only a larger and blacker Algiers. The only prayer of a true man for such is, "Gracious Heaven! unless they repent, send soon their Exmouth and Decatur." John Brown has twice as much right to hang Gov. Wise, as Gov. Wise has to hang him. (Cheers and hisses.) You see I am talking of that absolute essence of things that lives in the sight of the Eternal and the Infinite; not as men judge it in the rotten morals of the nineteenth century, among a herd of States that calls itself an empire, because it raises cotton and sells slaves. What I say is this: Harper's Ferry was the only government in that vicinity. Look at the trial. Virginia, true to herself, has shown exactly the same haste that the pirate does when he tries a man on deck, and runs him up to the yard-arm. Unconsciously she is consistent. Now, you do not think this to-day, some of you, perhaps. But I tell you what absolute History shall judge of these forms and phantoms of ours. John Brown began his life, his public life, in Kansas. The South planted that seed; it reaps the first fruit now. Twelve years ago the great men in Washington, the Websters and the Clays, planted the Mexican war; and they reaped their appropriate fruit in Gen. Taylor and Gen. Pierce pushing them from their statesmen's stools. The South planted the seeds of violence in Kansas, and taught peaceful Northern men familiarity with the bowie-knife and revolver. They planted nine hundred and ninety-nine seeds, and this is the first one that has flowered; this is the first drop of the coming shower. People do me the honor to say, in some of the western papers, that this is traceable to some teachings of mine. It is too much honor to such as me. Gladly, if it were not fulsome vanity, would I clutch this laurel of having any share in the great resolute daring of that man who flung himself against an empire in behalf of justice and liberty. They were not the bravest men who fought at Saratoga and Yorktown, in the war of 1776. O, no! it was rather those who flung themselves, at Lexington, few and feeble, against the embattled ranks of an empire, till then thought irresistible. Elderly men, in powdered wigs and red velvet, smoothed their ruffles, and cried, "Madmen!" Full-fed custom-house clerks said, "A pistol shot against Gibraltar!" But Captain Ingraham, under the stars and stripes, dictating terms to the fleet of the Cæsars, was only the echo of that Lexington gun. Harper's Ferry is the Lexington of to-day. Up to this moment, Brown's life has been one unmixed success. Prudence, skill, courage, thrift, knowledge of his time, knowledge of his opponents, undaunted daring he had all these. He was the man who could leave Kansas, and go into Missouri, and take eleven men and give them to liberty, and bring them off on the horses which he carried with him, and two which he took as tribute from their masters in order to facilitate escape. Then, when he had passed his human proteges from the vulture of the United States to the safe shelter of the English lion, this is the brave, frank, and sublime truster in God's right and absolute justice, that entered his name in the city of Cleveland, "John Brown, of Kansas," advertised there two horses for sale, and stood in front of the auctioneer's stand, notifying all bidders of — what some would think — the defect in the title. (Laughter.) But he added, with nonchalance, when he told the story, "They brought a very excellent price." (Laughter.) This is the man who, in the face of the nation, avowing his right, and laboring with what strength he had in behalf of the wronged, goes down to Harper's Ferry to follow up his work. Well, men say he failed. Every man has his Moscow. Suppose he did fail, every man meets his Waterloo at last. There are two kinds of defeat. Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but Liberty dates from it, though Warren lay dead on the field. Men say the attempt did not succeed. No man can command success. Whether it was well planned, and deserved to succeed, we shall be able to decide when Brown is free to tell us all he knows. Suppose he did fail, in one sense, he has done a great deal still. Why, this is a decent country to live in now. (Laughter and cheers.) Actually, in this Sodom of ours, twenty-two men have been found ready to die for an idea. God be thanked for John Brown, that he has discovered or created them. (Cheers.) I should feel some pride, if I was in Europe now, in confessing that I was an American. (Applause.) We have redeemed the long infamy of sixty years of subservience. But look back a bit. Is there any thing new about this? Nothing at all. It is the natural result of Anti-slavery teaching. For one, I accept it; I expected it. I cannot say that I prayed for it; I cannot say that I hoped for it. But at the same time, no sane man has looked upon this matter for twenty years, and supposed that we could go through this great moral convulsion, the great classes of society crashing and jostling against each other like frigates in a storm, and that there would not come such scenes as these.

In 1835 it was the other way. Then it was my bull that gored your ox. Then ideas came in conflict, and men of violence, men who trusted in their own right hands, men who believed in bowie-knives—such sacked the city of Philadelphia; such made New York to be governed by a mob; Boston saw its mayor suppliant and kneeling to the chief of a broadcloth mob in broad daylight. It was all on that side. The natural result, the first result of this starting of ideas, is like people who get half awaked, and use the first weapons that lie at hand. The first show and unfolding of national life, were the mobs of 1835. People said it served us right; we had no right to the luxury of speaking our own minds; it was too expensive; these lavish, prodigal, luxurious persons walking about here, and actually saying what they think. Why, it was like speaking loud in the midst of the avalanches. To say "Liberty" in a loud tone, the Constitution of 1789 might come down—it would not do. But now things have changed. We have been talking thirty years. Twenty years we have talked every where, under all circumstances; we have been mobbed out of great cities, and pelted out of little ones; we have been abused by great men and by little papers. (Laughter and applause.) What is the result? The tables have been turned; it is your bull that has gored my ox now. And men that still believe in violence, the five points of whose faith are the fist, the bowie-knife, fire, poison, and the pistol, are ranged on the side of Liberty, and, unwilling to wait for the slow but sure steps of thought, lay on God's altar the best they have. You cannot expect to put a real Puritan Presbyterian, as John Brown is—a regular Cromwellian dug up from two centuries—in the midst of our New England civilization, that dare not say its soul is its own, nor proclaim that it is wrong to sell a man at auction, and not have him show himself as he is. Put a hound in the presence of a deer, and he springs at his throat if he is a true bloodhound. Put a Christian in the presence of a sin, and he will spring at its throat if he is a true Christian. Into an acid we may throw white matter, but unless it is chalk, it will not produce agitation. So, if in a world of sinners you were to put American Christianity, it would be calm as oil. But put one Christian, like John Brown of Osawatomie, and he makes the whole crystallize into right and wrong, and marshal themselves on one side or the other. God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to the American people that, whether that old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were a mob of murderers that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. The banks of the Potomac, doubly dear now to History and to Man! The dust of Washington rests there; and History will see forever on that river-side the brave old man on his pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the Father of his country would be proud to make room for beside his own. But if Virginia tyrants dare hang him, after this mockery of a trial, it will take two more Washingtons at least to make the name of the State any thing but abominable in time to come. (Applause and hisses.) Well, I say what I really think, (cheers, and cries of "good, good.") George Washington was a great man. Yet I say what I really think. And I know, ladies and gentlemen, that, educated as you have been by the experience of the last ten years here, you would have thought me the silliest as well as the most cowardly man in the world, if I should have come, with my twenty years behind me, and talked about any thing else to-night except that great example which one man has set us on the banks of the Potomac. You expected, of course, that I should tell you my real opinion of it.

I value this element that Brown has introduced into American politics. The South is a great power—no cowards in Virginia. (Laughter.) It was not cowardice. (Laughter.) Now, I try to speak very plain, but you will misunderstand me. There is no cowardice in Virginia. The South are not cowards. The lunatics in the Gospel were not cowards when they said, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" (Laughter.) They were brave enough, but they saw afar off. They saw the tremendous power that was entering into that charmed circle; they knew its inevitable victory. Virginia did not tremble at an old gray-headed man at Harper's Ferry; they trembled at a John Brown in every man's own conscience. He had been there many years, and, like that terrific scene which Beckford has drawn for us in his Hall of Eblis, where the crowd runs around, each man with an incurable wound in his bosom, and agrees not to speak of it; so the South has been running up and down its political and social life, and every man keeps his right hand pressed on the secret and incurable sore, with an understood agreement, in Church and State, that it never shall be mentioned, for fear the great ghastly fabric shall come to pieces at the talismanic word. Brown uttered it; cried, "Slavery is sin! come, all true men, help pull it down," and the whole machinery trembled to its very base.

I value this movement for another reason. Did you ever see a blacksmith shoe a restless horse? If you have, you have seen him take a small cord and tie the upper lip. Ask him what he does it for, he will tell you to give the beast something to think of. (Laughter.) Now, the South has extensive schemes. She grasps with one hand a Mexico, and with the other she dictates terms to the Church, she imposes conditions on the State, she buys up Webster with a little or a promise, and Everett with nothing. (Great laughter and applause.) John Brown has given her something else to think of. He has turned her attention inwardly. He has taught her that there has been created a new element in this Northern mind; that it is not merely the thinker, that it is not merely the editor, that it is not merely the moral reformer, but the idea has pervaded all classes of society. Call them madmen if you will. Hard to tell who's mad. The world says one man is mad. John Brown said the same of the Governor. You remember the madman in Edinburgh. A friend asked him what he was there for. "Well," cried he, "they said at home that I was mad; and I said I was not; but they had the majority." (Laughter.) Just so it is in regard to John Brown. The nation says he is mad. I appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober; I appeal from the American people, drunk with cotton, and the New York Observer, (loud and long laughter,) to the American people fifty  years hence, when the light of civilization has had more time to penetrate, when self-interest has been rebuked by the world rising and giving its verdict on these great questions, when it is not a small band of Abolitionists, but the civilization of the nineteenth century, in all its varied forms, interests, and elements, that undertakes to enter the arena, and discuss this last great reform. When that day comes, what will be thought of these first martyrs, who teach us how to live and how to die?

Has the slave a right to resist his master? I will not argue that question to a people hoarse with shouting ever since July 4, 1776, that all men are created equal, that the right to liberty is inalienable, and that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." But may he resist to blood— with rifles? What need of proving that to a people who load down Bunker Hill with granite, and crowd their public squares with images of Washington; ay, worship the sword go blindly that, leaving their oldest statesmen idle, they go down to the bloodiest battle field in Mexico to drag out a President? But may one help the slave resist, as Brown did? Ask Byron on his death-bed in the marshes of Missolonghi. Ask the Hudson as its waters kiss your shore, what answer they bring from the grave of Kosciusko. I hide the Connecticut Puritan behind Lafayette, bleeding at Brandywine, in behalf of a nation his rightful king forbade him to visit.

But John Brown violated the law. Yes. On yonder desk lie the inspired words of men who died violent deaths for breaking the laws of Rome. Why do you listen to them so reverently? Huss and Wickliffe violated laws, why honor them? George Washington, had he been caught before 1783, would have died on the gibbet, for breaking the laws of his sovereign. Yet I have heard that man praised within six months. Yes, you say, but these men broke bad laws. Just so. It is honorable, then, to break bad laws, and such law breaking History loves and God blesses! Who says, then, that slave laws are not ten thousand times worse than any those men resisted? Whatever argument excuses them, makes John Brown a saint.

Suppose John Brown had not staid at Harper's Ferry. Suppose on that momentous Monday night, when the excited imaginations of two thousand Charlestown people had enlarged him and his little band into four hundred white men and two hundred blacks, he had vanished, and when the gallant troops arrived there, two thousand strong, they had found nobody! The mountains would have been peopled with enemies; the Alleghanies would have heaved with insurrection! You never would have convinced Virginia that all Pennsylvania was not armed and on the hills. Suppose Massachusetts, free Massachusetts, had not given the world the telegraph to flash news like sunlight over half the globe. Then Tuesday would have rolled away, while slow-spreading through dazed Virginia crawled the news of this event. Meanwhile, a hundred men having rallied to Brown's side, he might have marched across the quaking State to Richmond and pardoned Governor Wise. Nat Turner's success, in 1831, shows this would have been possible. Free thought, mother of invention, not Virginia, baffled Brown. But free thought, in the long run, strangles tyrants. Virginia has not slept sound since Nat Turner led an insurrection in 1831, and she bids fair never to have a nap now. (Laughter.) For this is not an insurrection; this is the penetration of a different element. Mark you, it is not the oppressed race rising. Recollect history. There never was a race held in actual chains that vindicated its own liberty but one. There never was a serf nor a slave whose own sword cut off his own chain but one. Blue-eyed, light-haired Anglo-Saxon, it was not our race. We were serfs for three centuries, and we waited till commerce, and Christianity, and a different law, had melted our fetters. We were crowded down into a villanage which crushed out our manhood so thoroughly that we had not vigor enough left to redeem ourselves. Neither France nor Spain, neither the Northern nor the Southern races of Europe have that bright spot on their escutcheon, that they put an end to their own slavery. Blue-eyed, haughty, contemptuous Anglo-Saxons, it was the black the only race in the record of history that ever, after a century of oppression, retained the vigor to write the charter of its emancipation with its own hand in the blood of the dominant race. Despised, calumniated, slandered San Domingo is the only instance in history where a race, with indestructible love of liberty, after bearing a hundred years of oppression, rose up under their own leader, and with their own hands wrested chains from their own limbs. Wait, garrulous, ignorant, boasting Saxon, till you have done half as much, before you talk of the cowardice of the black race!

The slaves of our country have not risen, but, as in most other cases, redemption will come from the interference of a wiser, higher, more advanced civilization on its exterior. It is the almost universal record of history, and ours is a repetition of the same drama. We have awakened at last the enthusiasm of both classes—those that act from impulse, and those that act from calculation. It is a libel on the Yankee to think that it includes the whole race, when you say that if you put a dollar on the other side of hell, the Yankee will spring for it at any risk, (laughter;) for there is an element even in the Yankee blood that obeys ideas; there is an impulsive, enthusiastic aspiration, something left to us from the old Puritan stock; that which made England what she was two centuries ago; that which is fated to give the closest grapple with the Slave Power to-day. This is an invasion by outside power. Civilization in 1600 crept along our shores, now planting her foot, and then retreating; now gaining a foothold, and then receding before barbarism, till at last came Jamestown and Plymouth, and then thirty States.

Harper's Ferry is perhaps one of Raleigh's or Gosnold's colonies, vanishing and to be swept away; by and by will come the immortal one hundred, and Plymouth Rock, with "manifest destiny" written by God's hand on their banner, and the right of unlimited "ANNEXATION" granted by Heaven itself.

It is the lesson of the age. The first cropping out of it is in such a man as John Brown. Grant that he did not measure his means; that he was not thrifty as to his method; he did not calculate closely enough, and he was defeated. What is defeat? Nothing but education—nothing but the first step to something better. All that is wanted is, that our public opinion shall not creep around like a servile coward, corrupt, disordered, insane public opinion, and proclaim that Governor Wise, because he says he is a Governor, is a Governor; that Virginia is a State, because she says she is so.

Thank God, I am not a citizen. You will remember, all of you, citizens of the United States, that there was not a Virginia gun fired at John Brown. Hundreds of well-armed Maryland and Virginia troops rushed to Harper's Ferry and—went away! You shot him! Sixteen marines, to whom you pay eight dollars a month—your own representatives. When the disturbed State could not stand on her own legs for trembling, you went there and strengthened the feeble knees, and held up the palsied hand. Sixteen men, with the Vulture of the Union above them—(sensation)— your representatives! It was the covenant with death and agreement with hell, which you call the Union of thirty States, that took the old man by the throat with a pirate hand; and it will be the disgrace of our civilization if a gallows is ever erected in Virginia that bears his body. "The most resolute man I ever saw," says Governor Wise, "the most daring, the coolest. I would trust his truth about any question. The sincerest!" Sincerity, courage, resolute daring, beating in a heart that feared God, and dared all to help his brother to liberty—Virginia has nothing, nothing for those qualities but a scaffold! (Applause.) In her broad dominion she can only afford him six feet for a grave! God help the Commonwealth that bids such welcome to the noblest qualities that can grace poor human nature! Yet that is the acknowledgment of Governor Wise himself! I will not dignify such a horde with the name of a Despotism; since Despotism is sometimes magnanimous. Witness Russia, covering Schamyl with generous protection. Compare that with mad Virginia, hurrying forward this ghastly trial.

They say it cost the officers and persons in responsible positions more effort to keep hundreds of startled soldiers from shooting the five prisoners, sixteen marines had made, than it cost those marines to take the Armory itself. Soldiers and civilians both alike—only a mob fancying itself a government! And mark you, I have said they were not a government. They not only are not a government, but they have not even the remotest idea of what a government is. (Laughter.) They do not begin to have the faintest conception of what a civilized government is. Here is a man arraigned before a jury, or about to be. The State of Virginia, as she calls herself, is about to try him. The first step in that trial is a jury; the second is a judge; and at the head stands the Chief Executive of the State, who holds the power to pardon murder; and yet that very Executive, who, according to the principles of the sublimest chapter in Algernon Sydney's immortal book, is bound by the very responsibility that rests on him, to keep his mind impartial as to the guilt of any person arraigned, hastens down to Richmond, hurries to the platform, and proclaims to the assembled Commonwealth of Virginia, "The man is a murderer, and ought to be hung." Almost every lip in the State might have said it except that single lip of its Governor; and the moment he had uttered these words, in the theory of the English law, it was not possible to impannel an impartial jury in the Commonwealth of Virginia; it was not possible to get the materials and the machinery to try him according to even the ugliest pattern of English jurisprudence. And yet the Governor does not know that he has written himself down non compos, and the Commonwealth that he governs supposes itself still a Christian polity. They have not the faintest conception of what goes to make up government. The worst Jeffries that ever, in his most drunken hour, climbed up a lamp-post in the streets of London, would not have tried a man who could not stand on his feet. There is no such record in the blackest roll of tyranny. If Jeffries could speak, he would thank God that at last his name might be taken down from the gibbet of History, since the Virginia Beach has made his worst act white, set against the blackness of this modern infamy. (Applause.) And yet the New York press daily prints the accounts of the trial. Trial! In the names of Holt and Somers, of Hale and Erskine, of Parsons, Marshall, and Jay, I protest against the name. Trial for life, in Anglo-Saxon dialect, has a proud, historic meaning. It includes indictment by impartial peers; a copy of such indictment and a list of witnesses furnished the prisoner, with ample time to scrutinize both; liberty to choose, and time to get counsel; a sound body and a sound mind to arrange one's defence; I need not add, a judge and jury impartial as the lot of humanity will admit; honored bulwarks and safeguards, each one the trophy and result of a century's struggle. Wounded, fevered, lying half unconscious on his pallet, unable to stand on his feet, the trial half finished before his first request for aid had reached his friends,—no list of witnesses or knowledge of them till the crier, calling the name of some assassin of his comrades, wakes him to consciousness; the judge a tool, and the prosecutor seeking popularity by pandering to the mob; no decent form observed, and the essence of a fair trial wholly wanting, our History and Law alike protest against degrading the honored name of Jury Trial by leading it to such an outrage as this. The Inquisition used to break every other bone in a man's body, and then lay him on a pallet, giving him neither counsel nor opportunity to consult one, and wring from his tortured mouth something like a confession, and call it a trial. But it was heaven-robed innocence compared with the trial, or what the New York press call so, that has been going on in crazed and maddened Charlestown.

I wish I could say any thing worthy of the great deed which has taken place in our day—the opening of the sixth seal, the pouring out of the last vial but one on a corrupt and giant Institution. I know that many men will deem me a fanatic for uttering this whosesale vituperation, as it will be called, upon a State, and this indorsement of a madman. I can only say that I have spoken on this Anti-slavery question before the American people thirty years; that I have seen the day when this same phase of popular feeling—rifles and force—was on the other side. You remember the first time I was ever privileged to stand on this platform by the magnanimous generosity of your clergyman, when New York was about to bully and crush out the freedom of speech at the dictation of Capt. Rynders. From that day to this, the same braving of public thought has been going on from here to Kansas, until it bloomed in the events of the last three years. It has changed the whole face of the sentiment in these Northern States. You meet with the evidence of it every where. When the first news from Harper's Ferry came to Massachusetts, if you were riding in the cars, if you were walking in the streets, if you met a Democrat, or a Whig, or a Republican, no matter what his politics, it was a singular circumstance that he did not speak of the guilt of Brown, of the atrocity of the deed, as you might have expected. The first impulsive expression, the first outbreak of every man's words was, "What a pity he did not succeed! (Laughter.) What a fool he was for not going off Monday, when he had all he wanted! How strange that he did not take his victory, and march away with it!" It indicated the unconscious leavening of a sympathy with the attempt. Days followed on; they commenced what they called their trial; you met the same classes again; no man said he ought to be hung; no man said he was guilty; no man predicated any thing of his moral position; every man voluntarily and inevitably seemed to give vent to his indignation at the farce of a trial, indicative again of that unheeded, potent, unconscious, but widespread sympathy on the side of Brown.

Do you suppose that these things mean nothing? What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, as Emerson says, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the charter of nations. The American people have begun to feel. The mute eloquence of the fugitive slave has gone up and down the highways and byways of the country; it will annex itself to the great American heart of the North, even in the most fossil state of its hunkerism, as a latent sympathy with its right side. This blow, like the first gun at Lexington, "heard around the world,"—this blow at Harper's Ferry reveals men. Watch those about you, and you will see more of the temper and unconscious purpose and real moral position of men than you would imagine. This is the way nations are to be judged. Be not in a hurry; action will come soon enough from this sentiment. We stereotype feeling into intellect, and then into statutes, and finally into national character. We have now the first stage of growth. Nature's live growths crowd out and rive dead matter. Ideas strangle statutes. Pulse-beats wear down granite, whether piled in jails or Capitols. The people's hearts are the only title-deeds after all. Your Barnburners said, "Patroon titles are unrighteous." Judges replied, "Such is the law." Wealth shrieked, "Vested rights!" Parties talked of Constitutions; still, the people said, "Sin." They shot a sheriff. A parrot press cried, "Anarchy!" Lawyers growled, "Murder!"—still, nobody

was hung, if I recollect aright. To-day, the heart of the Barnburner beats in the statute-book of your State. John Brown's movement against Slavery is exactly the same. Wait a while, and you'll all agree with me. What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed to-morrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.

John Brown has stirred those omnipotent pulses—Lydia Maria Child’s is one. She says, "That dungeon is the place for me," and writes a letter in magnanimous appeal to the better nature of Gov. Wise. She says in it, "John Brown is a hero; he has done a noble deed. I think he was all right; but he is sick; he is wounded; he wants a woman's nursing. I am an Abolitionist; I have been so thirty years. I think Slavery is a sin, and John Brown a saint; but I want to come and nurse him; and I pledge my word that if you will open his prison door, I will use the privilege, under sacred honor, only to nurse him. I enclose you a message to Brown; be sure and deliver it." And the message was, "Old man, God bless you! You have struck a noble blow; you have done a mighty work; God was with you; your heart was in the right place. I send you across five hundred miles the pulse of a woman's gratitude." And Gov. Wise has opened the door, and announced to the world that she may go in. John Brown has conquered the pirate. (Applause.) Hope! there is hope every where. It is only the universal history:

“Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;

But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”

SOURCE: James Redpath, Editor, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, p. 43-66