Vine Street, Saturday evening, December 3,1859.
Dear William, —
. . . Well, poor old Brown’s gone. What a death for such a man. It makes
me mad to hear the way some of our Northern conservatives talk about him. I
believe Governor Wise himself does him more justice than they do.
As to his being crazy, of course excessive lack of prudence,
judgment, and foresight, which every one admits that he showed, is craziness in
its very definition, and so every rash man is crazy; but his heroic devotion to
what he thought was right is surely not to be confounded with the craziness
that he showed in judging whether it was really right and best. What do people
say about it all in Boston?
SOURCE: Alexander Viets Griswold Allen, Life and Letters of
Phillips Brooks, Volume 1, p. 337
