17 October 1859 – 23 October 1859

A smart frost this morning. Ground stiff- ened. Hear of ice in a tub. P. M. — To Gowing’s Swamp. The water standing over the road at Moore’s Swamp, I see the sand spotted black with many thousands of little snails with a shell, and two feelers out, slowly dragging themselves over the bottom. ‘They reminded me by their color, number, and form of the young tad- poles. I look for Vaccinium Oxycoccus in the swamp. The uneven surface of the sphagnum in which the slender vine grows comes up to my idea of a mountainous coun- try better than many actual mountains that I have seen. Labrador mountains these are at least. The higher patches of sphagnum are changed to a dark purple, which shows a crude green where you crack it by your weight. ‘The lower parts are yet yellowish-green merely. These interesting little cranberries are quite scarce, the vine bearing (this year, at least) only amid the higher f and drier sphagnous mountains amid the lowest bushes about the edge of the open swamp. There the dark-red berries (quite ripe) now rest, on the shelves and in the recesses of the red sphagnum. There is only enough of these berries for sauce to a botanist’s Thanksgiving dinner. What I put into my pocket, whether berry or apple, generally has to keep company with an arrowhead or two. I hear the latter chinking against a key as I walk. These are the perennial crop of Concord fields. If they were sure it would pay, we should see farmers raking the fields for them. The rain drives me from my berrying and we take shelter under a tree. It is worth the while to sit under the lee of an apple tree trunk in the rain, if only to study the bark and its inhabitants. I do not disturb the father- long-legs which to avoid the storm has merely got round to the lee side, or under the shelter of an excrescence. Thus easily insects find their roof ready for them. Man’s very size compels him to build a house. Caves and recesses big enough are too rare. Why should we not stay at home? This is the land and we are the inhabitants so many travellers come to see. Why should we suffer ourselves to drift outside and lose all our advantages? They were bold naviga- tors once who merely sighted these shores. We were born and bred further in the land than Captain John Smith got. I hear that ten geese went over New Bedford some days ago. When La Mountain and Haddock dropped down in the Canada wilderness the other day, they came near starving, or dying of cold and wet and fatigue, not know- ing where to look for food nor how to shelter them- selves. Thus far we have wandered from a simple and independent life. I think that a wise and independent, self-reliant man will have a complete list of the edibles to be found in a primitive country or wilderness, a bill of fare, in his waistcoat pocket at least, to say nothing of matches and warm clothing, so that he can commence a systematic search for them without loss of time. They might have had several frogs apiece if they had known how to find them. Talk about tariffs and protection of home industry, so as to be prepared for wars and hard times! ! Here we are, deriving our breadstuffs from the West, our butter stuffs from Vermont, and our tea and coffee and sugar stuffs, and much more with which we stuff ourselves, from the other side of the globe. Why, a truly prudent man will carry such a list.as the above, in his mind at least, even though he walk through Broad- way or Quincy Market. He will know what are the per- manent resources of the land and be prepared for the hardest of times. He will go behind cities and their police; he will see through them. Is not the wilderness of mould and dry-rot forever invading and threatening them? They are but a camp abundantly supplied to- day, but gnawing their old shoes to-morrow.’ I see all the farmers’ old coats spread over the few squashes and pumpkins still left out in a pile. The arbor-vitee sheds seeds; how long?

Rains till 3 Pp. M., but is warmer. P. M. — To Assabet, front of Tarbell’s. Going by Dennis Swamp on railroad, the sour scent of decaying ferns is now very strong there. Rhus vene- nata is bare, and maples and some other shrubs, and more are very thin-leaved, as alder and birches, so that the swamp, with so many fallen leaves and migrating sparrows, etc., flitting through it, has a very late look. For falling, put the canoe birch with the small white. The beach plum is almost quite bare. The leaves of a chinquapin oak have not fallen. The long, curved, yel- lowish buds of the Salix discolor begin to show, the leaves falling; even the down has peeped out from under some. In the ditch along the west side of Dennis Swamp I see half a dozen yellow-spot turtles moving about. Prob- ably they are preparing to go into winter quarters. I see one of the smaller thrushes to-day. Saw a tree-toad on the ground in a sandy wood-path. It did not offer to hop away, may have been chilled by the rain (?). Itis marked on the back with black, some- what in the form of the hylodes. Why can we not oftener refresh one another with ori- ginal thoughts? If the fragrance of the dicksonia fern is so grateful and suggestive to us, how much more refreshing and encouraging — re-creating — would be fresh and fragrant thoughts communicated to us fresh from a man’s experience and life! I want none of his pity, nor sympathy, in the common sense, but that he should emit and communicate to me his essential fra- grance, that he should not be forever repenting and going to church (when not otherwise sinning), but, as it were, going a-huckleberrying in the fields of thought, and enrich all the world with his visions and his joys. Why do you flee so soon, sir, to the theatres, lecture- rooms, and museums of the city? If you will stay here awhile I will promise you strange sights. You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway. You shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals, in which you slump or over which you glide, and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor.

P. M. — To Ripple Lake. Dug some artichokes behind Alcott’s, the largest about one inch in diameter. Now apparently is the time to begin to dig them, the plant being considerably frost-bitten. ‘Tried two or three roots. The main root ran down straight about six inches s:+—— and then terminated abruptly, thus: Aw They have quite a nutty taste eaten ¢ ¥ raw. What is that flat, spreading festuca-like grass, just killed, behind A.’s house? As I go to Clintonia Swamp along the old cross-road, I see a large and very straggling flock of crows fly[ing] southwest from over the hill behind Bull’s and contend- ing with the strong and cold northwest wind. ‘This is the annual phenomenon. They are on their migrations. The beach plum is nearly bare, and so is the wood- bine on the brick house. The wild red cherry by A. Brooks’s Hollow is completely fallen; how long? The sand cherry in my field path is almost entirely bare. Some chinquapin is half fallen. Scare up a yellow-legs, apparently the larger, on the shore of Walden. It goes off with a sharp phe phe, phe phe. This is the coldest day as yet; wind from the north- west. It is finger-cold as I come home, and my hands find their way to my pocket. I learn the next day that snow fell to-day in northern New York and New Hamp- shire, and that accounts for it. We feel the cold of it here as soon as the telegraph can inform us. La Moun- tain’s adventure has taught us how swiftly the wind may travel to us from that quarter.

P. M. — To Mason’s pasture. The brook between John Flint’s house and the river is half frozen over. The clump of mountain laurel in Mason’s pasture is of a triangular form, about six rods long by a base of two and a third rods, — or seven or eight square rods, — beside some separate clumps. It is very cold and blustering to-day. It is the breath of winter, which is encamped not far off to the north. A great many shrub oak acorns hold on, and are a darker brown than ever. Insane! A father and seven sons, and several more men besides, — as many, at least, as twelve disciples, — all struck with insanity at once; while the sane tyrant holds with a firmer gripe than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abetiors, are saving their country and their bacon! Just as insane as were their efforts in Kansas. Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane. If some Captain Ingraham threatens to fire into an Austrian vessel, we clap our hands all along the wcotlal It won’t hit us; it won’t disturb our tyranny. But let a far braver than he attack the Austria within us, we turn, we actually fire those same guns upon him, and cry, “* Insane.” The government, its salary being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the Constitution with it, as farmers in the winter contrive to turn a penny by following the coopering business. When the reporter to the Herald (!) reports the conversation “verbatim,” he does not know of what undying words he is made the vehicle. Read his admirable answers to Mason and others. How they are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast! On the one side half-brutish, half-timid questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. They are made to stand with Pilate, and Gessler, and the Inquisition. How ineffectual their speech and action! and what a void their silence! I speak to the stupid and timid chattels of the north, pretending to read history and their Bibles, desecrating every house and every day they breathe in! True, like the clods of the valley, they are incapable of per- ceiving the light, but I would fain arouse them by any stimulus to an intelligent life. Throughout the land they, not of equal magnanimity, talk of vengeance and insanity. Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward and invent a new style of outhouses. Invent a salt that will save you and defend our nostrils. The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying hundreds; a small crew of slaveholders is smothering four millions under the hatches; and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by “the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity,” without any “outbreak’’! And in the same breath they tell us that all is quiet now at Harper’s Ferry. What is that that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead, who have found deliverance. That is the way we are diffusing humanity, and all its senti- ments with it. Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted “on the principle of revenge.” They do not know the man. They must enlarge themselves to conceive of him. I have no doubt that, if that is of any importance, the time will come when they will begin to see him as he was. They have got to conceive of a man of ideas and of principle, hard as it may be for them, and not a politician or an Indian; of a man who did not wait till he was personally interfered with or thwarted in some harm- less business before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed. I know that there have been a few heroes in the land, but no man has ever stood up in America for the dig- nity of human nature so devotedly, persistently, and so effectively as this man. Ye need not trouble your- selves, Republican or any other party, to wash your skirts of him. No intelligent person will ever be con- vinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he informs us, “under the auspices of John Brown, and nobody else.” Ethan Allen and Stark, though worthy soldiers in their day, were rangers in a far lower field and in a less important cause. Insane! Do the thousands who knew him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas and have afforded him material aid, think him insane? It costs us nothing to be just. It enriches us infinitely to recognize greater qualities than we possess in another. We can at least express our sympathy with, and admira- tion for, John Brown and his companions, and this is what I now propose to do. What has Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane senators to Congress for of late years ? — to declare with effect what kind of sentiments? All their speeches put together and boiled down —and probably they themselves will allow it — do not match for simple and manly directness, force, and effectiveness the few cas- ual remarks of ansane John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house. To be sure, he was not our representative. He is too fair a specimen of a man to represent the like of us. In his case there is no idle eloquence, no made speech. Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness his critic and polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,—a Sharp’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range. “But he won’t gain anything.” Well, no! I don’t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round. But then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul, — and such a soul! — when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. So ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he, wounded, responds from the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine- house: “ No man sent me here; it was my own prompt- ing and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form.” And in what a sweet, kindly strain he proceeds, addressing those who held him prisoner: “I think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage.” And, referring to his movement: “ It is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to God!”’ “I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify any per- sonal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of God.” “I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful.” Thus the insane man preaches, while the representa - tives of so-called Christians (I refer to the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions), who pretend to be interested in the heathen, dare not so much as protest against the foreign slave-trade! “TI wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settle- ment of that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. ‘The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily. Tam nearly disposed of now; but this question 1s still to be settled, — this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.”’ You will perceive that not a single forcible or notice- able word is uttered by his questioners; they stand there the helpless tools in this great work. It was no human power that gathered them about this preacher. What should we think of the Oriental Cadi behind whom worked in secret a Vigilance Committee? What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? Do not we Protestants know the likeness of Luther, Fox, Bunyan, when we see it? Shall we still be put to bed with our story-books, not knowing day from night ? We talk about a representative government, but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind and the whole heart are not repre- sented. A semihuman tiger or ox stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. In California and Oregon, if not nearer home, it is common to treat men exactly like deer which are hunted, and I read from time to time in Christian newspapers how many “bucks,” that is, Indian men, their sports- men have killed. Who is here so base, that would be a bondman? Who is here so vile, that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended. I pause for a reply. We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or in space; but let some significant event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this dis- tance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands. Our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the eye, — a city of magnificent distances. We discover why it was that we never got beyond compliments and sur- faces with them before; we become aware of as many - versts between us and them as there are between a wan- dering Tartar or Pawnee and a Chinese or American town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the market-place. Impassable seas suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. I do not complain of any tactics that are effective of good, whether one wields the quill or the sword, but I shall not think him mistaken who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I will judge of the tactics by the fruits. It is the difference of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that makes the true and impassable boundaries between individuals and states. None but the like-minded can come plenipo- tentiary to our court. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

P.M. — To Cliffs and Fair Haven. I am surprised to find in the field behind the top of the Cliffs a little vetch still perfectly fresh and blooming, where Wheeler had grain a year or two since, with nu- merous little plump pods four or five eighths of an inch long and commonly four roundish seeds to each. It must be, I think, Gray’s Vera tetrasperma, though he makes that have white flowers (apparently same as Bigelow’s V. pusilla, also made to have white flowers, but Dewey calls them “bluish white’’), while these are purple. Otherwise it corresponds. A marsh hawk sails over Fair Haven Hill. In the wood-path below the Cliffs I see perfectly fresh and fair Viola pedata flowers, as in the spring, though but few together. No flower by its second blooming more per- fectly brings back the spring to us. In my blustering walk over the Mason and Hunt pas- tures yesterday, I saw much of the withered indigo-weed which was broken off and blowing about, and the seeds in its numerous black pods rattling like the rattlepod though not nearly so loud. The very surface of the earth itself has been rapidly imbrowned of late, like the acorns in their cups, in conse- quence of cold and frost; and the evergreens and few deciduous plants which are slow to wither, like Jersey tea, are more and more distinct. F. hyemalis quite common for a week past. One would say that the modern Christian was a man who had consented to say all the prayers in their liturgy, provided you would let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. All his prayers begin with “Now I lay me down to sleep.”” He has consented to perform certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does n’t wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he does n’t want to have any codicils added to the contract, to fit it to the present time, — unexpected demands made on him, after he has said his prayers. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath and the blacks all the rest of the week. It was evidently far from being a wild and desperate and insane attempt. It was a well-matured plan. The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, and they are few. When it was observed that if he had had a chaplain his would have been a perfect Cromwellian company, he said that he would have had a chaplain if he could [have] found one who could perform that service suitably. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was thus a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; a man of principle, of rare courage, and of devoted humanity; ready to lay down their lives any moment for the weak and enslaved. It may be doubted if there were any more their equals in all the land, for their leader scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone stood forward, prepared to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the greatest com- pliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for the gallows. I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out with glaring distinctness the character of this gov- ernment. A man of Spartan habits, who at sixty has scruples about his diet at your table, must eat sparingly and fare hard, as becomes a soldier, he says, and one who is ever fitting himself for difficult enterprises. A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a Transcendentalist above all, a man of ideals and principles, —that was what distin- guished him. Of unwavering purposes, not to be dis- suaded but by an experience and wisdom greater than his own. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. He did not go to the college called Harvard; he was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, “I know no more of grammar than one of your calves.”” But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and, having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the practice of Humanity, as you all know. I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. If any leniency were shown him, any compromise made with him, any treating with him at all, by the government, he might be suspected. We needed to be thus assisted to see our govern- ment by the light of history. It needed to see itself. Compare the platform of any or all of the political parties, which deem themselves sane, with the platform on which he lay and uttered these things! ! I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, the poet will sing it, the historian record it, and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when the present form of slavery shall be no more. We shall then be at liberty to weep for John Brown. Then and not till then we will take our revenge. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I was his con- temporary. When I consider the spectacle of himself, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, enlisted for this fight, pro- ceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side, I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle. For months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without ex- pecting any reward but a good conscience and the gratitude of those made free. a If he had had any journal advocating “his cause,” it would have been fatal to his efficiency, — any “organ,” as the phrase is, monotonously and weari- somely playing that same old tune, and then passing round the hat. If he had acted in any way so as to gain the respect or toleration of the government, he might have been suspected. It was the fact that the tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all other reformers that I know. For once the Sharp’s rifle and the revolver were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them. I know that the mass of my neighbors think that the only righteous use that can be made of them is to fight duels with them when we are insulted by other nations, or hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them. Talk of political parties and their platforms! he could not have any platform but that of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house. I am aware that I anticipate a little, — that he was still, at the last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes; but that being the case, I find myself most naturally thinking and speaking of him as physically dead. The same indignation that cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has appeared in America as yet who loved his fellow- man so well and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him; he took up his life and he laid it down for him. Though you may not approve of his methods or his principles, cease to call names, to cry mad dog. The method is nothing; the spirit is all in all. It is the deed, the devotion, the soul of the man. For you this is at present a question of magnanimity. If the schoolboy, forgetting himself, rushed to the rescue of his drowning playmate, what though he knock down somebody on his way, what though he does not go to the same church with you, or his father belong to the same political party! Would you not like to claim kindred with him in this, though in no other thing he is like, or likely, to you ? Heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but I never heard of any good done by a government that had no heart, or at least had not brains of a high order. This is not the time to hear what Tom, Dick, or Harry is doing, or in such a case would have done. We shall have time enough to find that out in, if we do not know it already. We ask you to the extent of your ability to appreciate this man and: his deed, in spite of the difference between you and him. Who cares whether he belonged to your clique, or party, or sect, or not? A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declaring: “I didn’t do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. It can’t fairly be inferred from my past career.”’ Now, I am not interested to hear you define your position. I don’t know that I ever was, or ever shall be. I am not now, at any rate. I think [it] is mere egotism, and impertinent. On the whole my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper-writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual pluck, —as the Governor of Virginia says, using the language of the cockpit, “the gamest man he ever saw,” — had been caught and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the Governor thought he looked so brave. Think of him, — of his rare qualities! — such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, not the representative of any party. A man such as the sun may never rise upon again in this benighted land, to whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant, the purest gold; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; — and the only use to which you can put him, after mature deliberation, is to hang him at the end of a rope. I need not describe him. He has stood where I now stand; you have all seen him. You who pretend to care for Christ cruci- fied, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four millions of men! I wish to correct the tone and some of the statements of the newspapers respecting the life and character and last action of John Brown. The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps they are really ignorant of, the fact that there are at least as many as one or two individuals to a town throughout the North who think much as I do about him and his enterprise. I do not hesitate to as- sert that they are an important and growing party. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of John Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. Talk of failure and throwing his life away! he is not dead yet in any sense, and if he were dead he would still live. Were the battles of Black Jack and Ossa- watomie and many encounters of less note useless anda failure? I think that it was he more than any other who made Kansas as free as she is, who taught the slaveholder that it was not safe for him to carry his slaves thither. None of the political parties have ever accomplished anything of the sort. It was he who taught Missouri that it was not profitable to hold slaves in that neighborhood. Was it a failure to deliver from bondage thirteen human beings and walk off with them by broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through one State after another, for half the length of the North, conspicuous to all parties, with a price set upon his head, going into a court-room on his way and telling what he had done? To face singly in his work of righteousness the whole power of this unrighteous government, and success- fully too! Who has gained the most ground within five years, — Brown or the Slave Power? And this, not because the government was lenient, but because none of its menials dared to touch him. They counted the cost and concluded that a thousand dollars was not enough. There are a few — there are more than you suppose — who cannot help thinking of that man now in the clutches of the enraged slaveholder. He is one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all, — the Puritans. It is in vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers’ day and eat parched corn in remembrance of their ancestors. They were neither Democrats nor Repub- licans. They were men of simple habits, straight- forward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear God, not making many compromises, or seeking after available candidates. He is of the same age with the century. He is what is called a thin and wiry-looking man, being composed of nerves instead of flesh, some five feet nine or ten inches high, with a sharp eye, and the last time he was hereabouts wore a long white beard; with a very soldier- like bearing. I understand his grandfather was an officer in the Revolution; that he himself was born in Connecticut, but early went to Ohio with his father. His father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there in the last war, and young Brown, accompanying his father to the camp and assisting him in his employment, saw considerable of military life, — more perhaps than he would if he had been a soldier, for he was some- times present at the councils of the officers. He saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with war and excite in him a great abhorrence of it; so much so that, though he was offered some petty office in the army, he not only refused it, but also refused to train when he was warned, and was fined for it. He was then about eigh- teen. He said that few persons had any conception of - the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war. Above all, he learned by experience how armies were collected, supplied, and maintained in the field for a length of time, — a work which required at Jeast as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. And he then resolved that he would never have anything to do with war, unless it were a war for liberty. I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery he saw to be wholly opposed to all of these, and he was its determined foe. When the troubles first broke out in Kansas, he sent several of his sons thither to strengthen the party of the Free State men, fitting them out with such weapons as he had, telling them if the troubles should increase, and there should be need of him, he should follow, to assist them with his hand and counsel. It was not long before he felt it to be his duty to give the Free State men of Kansas, who had no leader of experience, the benefit of what experience he had had. At a time when scarcely a man from the Free States was able to reach Kansas by any direct route, at least without having his arms taken from him, he, carrying what imperfect firelocks and other weapons he could collect, openly drove an ox-cart through Missouri, with his surveyor’s compass exposed in it, and, passing for a simple surveyor, who by his very profession must be neutral, he met with no resistance and in the course of his leisurely journey became thoroughly acquainted with the plans of the Border Ruffians. For some time after his arrival he pursued, before he was known, similar tactics. When, for instance, he saw a knot of the Ruffians on the prairie, discussing, of course, the single topic that then occupied their minds, he would take his compass and one of his sons, and perhaps pro- ceed to run an imaginary line which passed through the very spot on which that conclave had assembled, and then of course he would have some talk with them, learn their news and their plans, and when he had heard all they had to impart, he would resume his surveying, and run on his line till he was out of sight. This is enough to show that his plans were not crazily laid. For a good part of his life he was a surveyor, part of the time, I think, in Illinois. At one time he was en- gaged in wool-growing, and went to Europe once as the agent of some wool-growers; and there too he carried his common sense with him. I have been told, for in- stance, that he made such a remark as this, — that he saw why the soil of England was so rich and that of Germany (or a part of it at least) so exhausted, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. It was because in England the peasantry lived on the soil which they cultivated, while in Germany they were © gathered into villages at night. It would be worth the while to have collected all the remarks of such a trav- eller. Of course, he is not so foolish as to ask or expect any favors from the government, nor probably will his. friends for him. No wonder it struck the politicians and preachers generally very forcibly that either he was insane or they, and they, being the painters, or judges, this time, de- cided, naturally enough, that it must be he. Such, however, as far as I learn, has not been nor is likely to be the decision of those who have recently stood face to face to him and who are now about to hang him. They have not condescended to such insult. The slaveholders and the slaves who have really dealt with him are not likely sincerely to question his sanity, but rather political or religious parties, who stand further off from a living man. I almost fear to hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death. No doubt many of you have seen the little manuscript book which he carried about him, during the Kansas troubles, — his “ orderly book,” as I think he called it, — containing the names of his small company, a score at most, and half of them his own family, and the rules which bound them together, — a contract which many of them have sealed with their blood. There was one rule, as I remember, which prohibited prophane swear- ing in his camp. I believe that he never was able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would accept, and only ten or a dozen in whom he had perfect faith. Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in this enterprise, but the anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? Do they not realize why they are so anxious? It is because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least five millions of the inhabitants of the United States who were not pining to attempt, would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics. He said that if any man offered himself to be a soldier under him who was forward to tell what he could or would do if he could only get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him. One writer says, I know not with what motive, that it is a fact “illustrative of Brown’s insanity, that he has charts of nearly all the great battle-fields of Europe.” I fear that his collection is not to be compared for com- pleteness with that which this government possesses, however his sanity may be compared with its, though it did not make them itself, but there are two or three fields in Kansas of which he did not need to make any chart. At any rate, I do not think it is sane to spend one’s whole life talking or writing about this matter, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. The murderer always knows that he is justly pun- ished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step toward its own dissolu- tion. Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made, and declared by any number of men to be good, when they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to per- form a deed of which he disapproves? Is it the inten- tion of lawmakers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hung? Is it indispensable to any Northern man? If you do not wish it, say so distinctly. What right have you to enter into a compact with your- self (even) that you will do thus or so, against your better nature? Is it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which even pass your understanding ? Any man knows when he is justified, and not all the wits in the world can enlighten him on that point. I do not believe in lawyers, — in that mode of defend- ing or attacking a man,— because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the high- est importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide triv- ial cases. If they were interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. Just as we are doing away with duelling or fighting one another with pistols, I think that we may in course of time do away with fighting one another with lawyers. Such improvements are not altogether unheard of. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for freemen can you expect from that? Substantial justice!! There ’s nothing substantial about it, but the Judge’s salary and the lawyer’s fee. The thought of that man’s position and probable fate is spoiling many a man’s day here at the North for other thinking. We do not think of buying any crape this time. It seems that one of his abettors had lived there for years, and Brown took all his measures deliberately. The country was mountainous, and it was given out that they were concerned in mining operations, and to play this part required very little invention on his part, such had been his previous pursuits and habits. Having been a surveyor, he would not make a strange figure in the fields and woods; this, too, would account [for] quantities of spades and pickaxes, and strangers from time to time visiting and conferring with him in a some- what mysterious manner. I have no respect for the judgment of any man who can read the report of that conversation and still call the principal insane. It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordi- nary organization, secures. Take any sentence of it, — “Any questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise. So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir.” He never overstated anything, but spoke within bounds. I remember particularly how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, never giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. Also, referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier keeping a reserve of force and meaning, “'They had a perfect right to be hung.” I would fain do my best to correct, etc., little as I know of him. / But I believe, without having any outward evidence, that many have already silently retracted their words. They (Allen and Stark) may have possessed some of his love of liberty, indignation, and courage to face their country’s foes, but they had not the rare qualities — the peculiar courage and self-reliance — which could enable them to face their country itself, and all man- kind, in behalf of the oppressed. He could give you information on various subjects, for he had travelled widely and observed closely. He said that the Indians with whom he dealt in Kansas were perhaps the richest people in a pecuniary sense on the earth. The money that this government annually paid them gave so much to each member of the com- munity. They were, moreover, more intelligent than the mass of the Border Ruffians, or that class of the inhabitants of Missouri. Much of the time of late years he has had to skulk in the swamps of Kansas with a price set upon his head, suffermg from sickness and poverty and exposure, befriended only by Indians and [a] few white men. When surprise was expressed that he was not taken, he accounted for it by saying that it was perfectly well understood that he would not be taken alive. He would even show himself openly in towns which were half composed of Border Ruffians, and transact some busi- ness, without delaying long, and yet nobody attempted to arrest [him], because, as he said, a small party did not like to undertake it, and a large one could not be got together in season. I thought the same of his speech which I heard some years ago, — that he was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to Buncombe or his constituents any- where, who had no need to invent anything, but to tell the simple truth and communicate his resolution. Therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and elo- quence in Congress or elsewhere was at a discount. It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king. They have tried a long time; they have hung a good many, but never found the right one before. Dispersing the sentiments of humanity! As if they were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds! as if you could disperse them as easily as water with a watering- pot and they were good only to lay the dust with! A few ministers are doing their duty in New York. This use of the word “insane” has got to be a mere trope. Newspaper-editors talk as if it were impossible that a man could be “divinely appointed”’ in these days to do any work whatever, as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any man’s daily work, and as if a man’s death were a failure and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success. They argue that it is a proof of his insanity that he thought he was appointed to do this work which he did, — that he did not suspect himself for a moment! If they do not mean this, then they do not speak the truth and say what they mean. They are simply at their old tricks still. He said truly that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him with a handful of men only was, as some of his prisoners stated, that the former lacked a cause, — a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. He said that when the time arrived, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong. They did not like that this should be their last act in this world. As if the agent to abolish slavery could only be some- body “appointed” by the President or some political party. All this — his insanity (monomania, says one), etc. — made him to be “dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.” Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him. ‘Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man !” I have read all the newspapers I could get within a week, and I do not remember in them a single expres- sion of sympathy for these men. Most of them decided not to print the full report of Brown’s words in the armory “to the exclusion of other matter.”” Why, they have matterated, and there is no safety for them but in excluding the dead part and giving place to the living and healthy. But I object not so much to what they have not done as to what they have done. He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical as that class, and tenfold more so. He was like the best of those who stood at our bridge once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher-principled than any that I chance to have heard of as there. It was no Abolition lecturer that converted him. A Western paper says, to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a “rural exterior,” as if in that prairie land a hero should by good rights wear a citizen’s dress only. It would appear from published letters that the women of the land are where the men should be. What sort of violence is that which is encouraged not by soldiers but by citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as Quaker women? ‘The enemy may well “quake”’ at the thought of it. Is not that a righteous war where the best are thus opposed to the worst ? Governor Wise speaks far more justly and admir- ingly of him than any Northern editor that I have heard of. “They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman. . . . He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners. . . . And he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous (!!), but firm, truthful, and intelligent. His men, too, who survive, are like him. . . . Colonel Washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. Of the three white prisoners, Brown, Stevens, and Coppoc, it was hard to say which was the most firm.” There is another man with whom the South and a good part of the North heartily sympathize. His name is Walker. I subscribed a trifle when he was here three years ago, I had so much confidence in the man, — that he would do right, — but it would seem that he had not confidence enough in me, nor in anybody else that I know, to com- municate his plans to us. I do not wish to kill or to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both of these things would be by me unavoidable. In extremities I could even be killed. This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death, — the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America; for in order to die you must first have lived. I don’t believe in the hearses and palls and funerals that they have had. There was no death in the case, because there had been no life; they merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. No temple’s veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. The best of them fairly ran down like a clock. I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught I know. Nonsense! Ill defy them to do it. They have n’t got life enough in them. They ’ll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began. Memento mori! they don’t under- stand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. They ’ve under- stood it in a grovelling and snivelling sense. They ’ve wholly forgotten how to die. Be sure you die. Finish your work. “Know when to leave off. Men make a needless ado about taking lives, — capital punishment. Where is there any life to take? You don’t know what it means to let the dead bury the dead. Beauty stands veiled the while, and music is a screech- ing lie. These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man’s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest pos- sible satire on the acts and words of those who are said to have effected such things. Do you ever think you have died, or are going to die, sir? No! there is no hope of you, sir. You have n’t got your lesson yet. You ’ve got to stay after school. It is the best news that America has ever heard. Franklin, — Washington, — they were let off with- out dying; these were merely missing one day. It has already quickened the public pulse of the North; it has infused more, and more generous, blood into her veins and heart than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for! Mr. Giddings says of them that “their sad fate will occupy a brief page in the history of our nation.” Does he think that the history of the Republican Party — hitherto, for it may be re-created by his death — will be in the proportion of a sentence to that page? When I reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder. The amount of it is our “leading men” are a harmless kind of folk, and they know well enough that they were not divinely appointed, but elected by the votes of their party. The most sensible of the apparently editorial articles on this event that I have met with is in the Wheeling Intelligence. Vide Supplement to Journal, October 29th." Swamp-pink and waxwork were bare October 23d; how long?