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
