ROME, December 24, 1839.
What a stormy time
you are having in America! Your cradle was rocked in the Revolution, and now in
your old age you see the storm of another Revolution beginning: none knows when
and where it shall end. Yesterday, the telegraph brought us the expected
intelligence that the Slaveholders had hung Captain John Brown! Of course I knew
from the moment of his capture what his fate would be; the logic of Slavery is
stronger than the intellect or personal will of any man, and it bears all
Southern politicians along with it. No martyr whose tragic story is writ in the
Christian books ever bore himself more heroically than Captain Brown; for he
was not only a martyr, any bully can be that, but also a SAINT—which no bully
can ever be. None ever fell in a more righteous cause:— it has a great future,
too, which he has helped bring nearer and make more certain. I confess I am
surprised to find love for the man, admiration for his conduct, and sympathy
with his object, so wide-spread in the North, especially in New England, and
more particularly in dear, good, old Boston! Think of the Old South on the same
platform with Emerson and Phillips! Think of sermons like Wheelock's,
Newhall's, Freeman Clarke's, and Cheever's Thanksgiving sermon at New York-an
Orthodox minister of such bulk putting John Brown before Moses! The New York
Herald had an extract from ———’s sermon. It was such as none but a mean soul
could preach on such an occasion; but we must remember that it taxes a mean man
as much to be mean and little, as it does a noble one to be grand and generous.
Every minister must bear sermons after his kind; "for of a thorn men do
not gather figs, nor of a bramble-bush gather they grapes." I rather think
the Curtises did not fire a hundred cannon on Boston Common when they heard
that John Brown was hung, as they did when the Fugitive Slave Bill passed.
There has been a little change since 1850, and men not capable of repentance
are yet liable to shame and if they cannot be converted, may yet be scared.
Well, things can
never stand as they did three months ago. On the morning of the 19th of April,
1775, at day-break, Old England and New—Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies
were one nation. At sunrise, they were two. The fire of the grenadiers made
reconciliation impossible, and there must be war and separation. It is so now.
Great events tarn on small hinges, and let mankind march through. How different
things happen from what we fancy! All good institutions are founded on some
great truth of the mind or conscience; and, when such a truth is to be put over
the world's highway, we think it must be borne forward on the shoulders of some
mighty horse whom God has shod strong all round for that special purpose, and
we wonder where the creature is, and when he will be road-ready; and look after
his deep footprints, and listen for his step or his snorting. But it sometimes
happens that the Divine Providence uses quite humble cattle to bear his most
precious burdens, both fast and far. Some 3000 or 4000 years ago, a body of
fugitives — slaves — poor, leprous, ill-clad, fled out of Egypt, under the
guidance of a man who slew an Egyptian. He saw a man do a vile thing to one of
his slaves, and lynched him on the spot then ran for it.
Those fugitive
slaves had a great truth. The world, I think, had not known before "The
Oneness of God;" at least, their leader had it, and for hundreds of years
did this despised people keep the glorious treasure which Egypt did not know
which Greece and Rome never understood. Who would have thought the ark of such
salvation would have been trusted to such feeble hands!
Some 1800 or 1900
years ago, who would have looked to a Jewish carpenter of Galilee, and a Jewish
tent-maker of Tarsus in Cilicia, with few adherents fishermen—obscure people—unlearned
and ignorant men, who would have looked to such persons for a truth of religion
which should overturn all the temples of the old world, and drive the gods of
Olympus from their time-honored thrones of reverence and power? The Rome of the
Popes is, no doubt, as Polytheistic as the Rome of the Cæsars-but the old gods
are gone, and men worship the Fisherman and the Tent-maker.
It was the
Augustinian Monk who broke the Roman Hierarchy to atoms. Tough in the brains,
tough in the bones, mighty also by his love of the people and his trust in God,
he did what it seemed only the great councils of the learned could
accomplish-he routed the Popes, and wrested the German world from their rude
and bloody gripe.
At a later day, when
the new Continent which God had kept from the foundation of the world—a virgin
hid away between the Atlantic and the Pacific seas— was to be joined to
Humanity, in the hopes of founding such a Family of Men as the world had never
seen, was there any one who would have thought that the Puritan, hated in his
British home, and driven out thence with fire and sword, would be the
Representative of Humanity, and claim and win that Bride, and wed her too, with
nuptials now so auspicious? Yet so it turns out; and the greatest social and
political achievement of the human race is wrought out by that Puritan, with
his Bride— whose only dower was her broad lands. Really, it seems as if God
chose the small things to confound the great. But when we look again, and study
carefully the relation which these seemingly insignificant agents bear to the
whole force of Humanity, then it appears they were the very agents most fit for
the work they did. I think it will turn out so in the case of Captain Brown.
What the masterly eloquence of Seward could not accomplish, even by his manly
appeal to the Higher Law, nor the eloquence of Phillips and Sumner, addressed
to the conscience and common sense of the people, seems likely to be brought to
pass by John Brown—no statesman, no orator, but an upright and downright man,
who took his life in his hand, and said, "Slavery shall go down even if it
be put down with red swords!" I thanked God for John Brown years ago: he
and I are no strangers, and still more now his sainthood is crowned with
martyrdom. I am glad he came from that Mayflower company that his grandfather
was a captain in the Revolutionary war:—the true aristocratic blood of America
runs in such veins. All the grand institutions of America, which give such
original power to the people, came from that Puritan stock, who trusted in God,
and kept their powder dry—who stood up straight when they prayed, and also when
they fought. Yes, all the grand original ideas, which are now on their way to
found new institutions, and will make the future better than the past or
present they come from the same source.
Virginia may be the
mother of Presidents, (she yet keeps the ashes of two great ones, only their
ashes, not their souls,) but it is New England that is mother of great ideas.
God is their Father mother also of communities, rich with intelligence and
democratic power.
John Brown came from
a good lineage; his life proves it and his death. It is not for you or me to
select the instruments wherewith the providence of mankind has the world's work
done by human hands; it is only for us to do our little duty, and take the good
and ill which come of it.
When the monster
which hinders the progress of Humanity is to be got rid of, no matter if the
battle-axe have rust on its hilt, and spots, here and there, upon its
blade-mementoes of ancient work; if its edge have but the power to bite, the
monster shall be cloven down, and mankind walk triumphantly on, to-morrow, to
fresh work and triumphs new.
But I did not mean
to write you such a letter as this it wrote itself, and I couldn’t help it. I
cannot sleep nights, for thinking of these things. I am ashamed to be sick and
good for nothing in times like these, but can't help it, and must be judged by
what I can do, not can't and don't.
It is curious to
find the slaves volunteering to go to shoot men (in buckram) who are coming
"a thousand at a time, to rescue Captain Brown"! The African is as
much superior to the Anglo-Saxon in cunning and arts of hypocrisy — except the
ecclesiastical as he is inferior in general power of mind. Didn't a negro in Savannah
tell a Northern minister, "I no want to be free! I only 'fraid to be slave
of sin! dat's it, massa, I's fraid of de Debil, not of massa!" What a
guffaw he gave when with his countrymen alone! and how he mimicked the gestures
of the South-side, white-choked priest, who bore "his great commission in
his work"!
But I end as I began
— what a stormy time is before us! There are not many men of conscience like
John Brown, but abundance of men of wrath; and the time for them-I know not when it is.
Farewell!
Theo. Parker
SOURCE: James
Redpath, Editor, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, p. 88-92
