Part 11

John Brown, when he was twelve years old, from seeing a negro slave of his own age cruelly beaten, began to hate slavery and love the slaves so intensely as "sometimes to raise the question, Is God their Father?" At forty, "he conceived the idea of becoming a liberator of the Southern slaves;" at the same time "determined to let them know that they had friends, and prepared himself to lead them to liberty. From the moment that he formed this resolution, he engaged in no business which he could not, without loss to his friends and family, wind up in fourteen days." His favorite texts of Scripture were, "Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them;" "Whoso stoppeth his ear at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard;" "Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker, and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished;" "Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it." His favorite hymns were, "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" and "Why should we start and fear to die?" "I asked him," said a child, "how he felt when he left the eleven slaves, taken from Missouri, safe in Canada? His answer was, 'Lord, permit now thy servant to die in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. I could not brook the idea that any ill should befall them, or they be taken back to slavery. The arm of Jehovah protected us.'" "Upon one occasion, when one of the ex-governors of Kansas said to him that he was a marked man, and that the Missourians were determined, sooner or later, to take his scalp, the old man straightened himself up, with a glance of enthusiasm and defiance in his gray eye. 'Sir,' said he, 'the angel of the Lord will camp round about me.'" On leaving his family the first time he went to Kansas, he said, "If it is so painful for us to part, with the hope of meeting again, how dreadful must be the separation for life of hundreds of poor slaves." "He deliberately determined, twenty years before his attack upon Harper's Ferry," says Higginson, "that at some future period he would organize an armed party, go into a slave State, and liberate a large number of slaves. Soon after, surveying professionally in the mountains of Virginia, he chose the very ground for the purpose. He said 'God had established the Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves. Visiting Europe afterward, he studied military strategy for this purpose, even making designs for a new style of forest fortifications, simple and ingenious, to be used by parties of fugitive slaves when brought to bay. He knew the ground, he knew his plans, he knew himself; but where should he find his men? Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore; he reared them in his sons. Mrs. Brown had been always the sharer of his plans. 'Her husband always believed,' she said, 'that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and she believed it too.' 'This plan had occupied his thoughts and prayers for twenty years.' 'Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.'" "He believed in human brotherhood, and in the God of Battles; he admired Nat Turner, the negro patriot, equally with George Washington, the white American deliverer." "He secretly despised even the ablest antislavery orators. He could see 'no use in this talking,' he said. 'Talk is a national institution; but it does no manner of good to the slave.'" The year before his attack, he uttered these sentences in conversation: "Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks. The same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State." "Give a slave a pike, and you make him a man. Deprive him of the means of resistance, and you keep him down." "The land belongs to the bondsman. He has enriched it, and been robbed of its fruits." "Any resistance, however bloody, is better than the system which makes every seventh woman a concubine." "A few men in the right, and knowing they are, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "When the bondsmen stand like men, the nation will respect them. It is necessary to teach them this." About the same time he said, in another conversation, "that it was nothing to die in a good cause, but an eternal disgrace to sit still in the presence of the barbarities of American slavery." "Providence," said he, "has made me an actor, and slavery an outlaw." "Duty is the voice of God, and a man is neither worthy of a good home here, or a heaven, that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause." He scouted the idea of rest while he held "a commission direct from God Almighty to act against slavery." After his capture, and while he lay in blood upon the floor of the guard-house, he was asked by a bystander upon what principle he justified his acts? "Upon the Golden Rule," he answered. "I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them. That is why I am here; it is not to gratify any personal animosity, or feeling of 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, gentlemen, that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress--the greatly oppressed--as we would be done by. The cry of distress, of the oppressed, is my reason, and the only thing that prompted me to come here. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people of the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled--this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet." In his "last speech," before sentence was passed upon him, he said, "This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me that all things 'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further, to 'remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I submit: so let it be done." In a postscript to a letter to a half-brother, written in prison, he said, "Say to my poor boys never to grieve for one moment on my account; and should any of you live to see the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown, it will not be more strange than many things that have happened." In a letter to his old school-master, he said, "I have enjoyed much of life, as I was enabled to discover the secret of this somewhat early. It has been in making the prosperity and happiness of others my own; so that really I have had a great deal of prosperity." To another he wrote, "I commend my poor family to the kind remembrance of all friends, but I well understand that they are not the only poor in our world. I ought to begin to leave off saying our world." In his last letter to his family, he said, "I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind and cheerfulness, feeling the strong assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advantage to the cause of God and of humanity, and that nothing that I or all my family have sacrificed or suffered will be lost. Do not feel ashamed on my account, nor for one moment despair of the cause, or grow weary of well-doing. I bless God I never felt stronger confidence in the certain and near approach of a bright morning and glorious day than I have felt, and do now feel, since my confinement here." In a previous letter to his family, he said, "Never forget the poor, nor think anything you bestow on them to be lost to you, even though they may be as black as Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian eunuch, who cared for Jeremiah in the pit of the dungeon, or as black as the one to whom Philip preached Christ. 'Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.'" As he stepped out of the jail-door, on his way to the gallows, "a black woman, with a little child in her arms, stood near his way. The twain were of the despised race for whose emancipation and elevation to the dignity of the children of God he was about to lay down his life. His thoughts at that moment none can know except as his acts interpret them. He stopped for a moment in his course, stooped over, and with the tenderness of one whose love is as broad as the brotherhood of man, kissed it affectionately. As he came upon an eminence near the gallows, he cast his eye over the beautiful landscape, and followed the windings of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. He looked up earnestly at the sun, and sky, and all about, and then remarked, 'This is a beautiful country. I have not cast my eyes over it before.'" "You are more cheerful than I am, Captain Brown," said the undertaker, who sat with him in the wagon. "Yes," answered the old man, "I ought to be." "'Gentlemen, good-by,' he said to two acquaintances, as he passed from the wagon to the scaffold, which he was first to mount. As he quietly awaited the necessary arrangements, he surveyed the scenery unmoved, looking principally in the direction of the people, in the far distance. 'There is no faltering in his step, wrote one who saw him, 'but firmly and erect he stands amid the almost breathless lines of soldiery that surround him. With a graceful motion of his pinioned right arm he takes the slouched hat from his head and carelessly casts it upon the platform by his side. His elbows and ankles are pinioned, the white cap is drawn over his eyes, the hangman's rope is adjusted around his neck.' 'Captain Brown,' said the sheriff, 'you are not standing on the drop. Will you come forward?' 'I can't see you, gentlemen,' was the old man's answer, unfalteringly spoken; 'you must lead me.' The sheriff led his prisoner forward to the centre of the drop. 'Shall I give you a handkerchief,' he then asked, 'and let you drop it as a signal?' 'No; I am ready at any time; but do not keep me needlessly waiting.'"

"Give the corpse a good dose of arsenic, and make sure work of it!" exclaimed a captain of Virginia militia.

"The saint, whose martyrdom will make the gallows glorious like the cross!" exclaimed the Massachusetts sage and seer.

Froude's reflections upon the death of John Davis, the navigator, one of England's Forgotten Worthies, may well be applied to John Brown: "A melancholy end for such a man--the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in a poor brawl or ambuscade. Life with him was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what his Master sent was welcome." It was "hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same: the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink."

"Whether on the scaffold high, Or in the battle's van, The fittest place where man can die Is where he dies for man."

V.

REWARDS.

The Bishop of Llandaff was standing in the House of Lords, in company with Lords Thurlow and Loughborough, when Lord Southampton accosted him: "I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make him get forward in the world?" "I know of but one way," replied the bishop; "give him parts and poverty." Poussin, being shown a picture by a person of rank, remarked, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to make you a good painter."

"The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir." Yet, says Froude, "The man who with no labor of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor, who has soiled his fingers by labor, is no better than a parvenu."

Labor, curse though we call it, as things are, seems to be life's greatest blessing. "There is more fatigue," says Tom Brown, "and trouble in a lady than in the most laborious life; who would not rather drive a wheelbarrow with nuts about the streets, or cry brooms, than be Arsennus?" (a fine gentleman). When Sir Horace Vere died, it was asked what had occasioned his death; to which some one replied, "By doing nothing." "Too much idleness," said Burke, "fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master than any sort of employment whatsoever." What to do? how to do? become distressing questions to him, and he finds himself in as great extremity as the man in the story of the Persian poet: "I saw," says Saadi, "an Arab sitting in a circle of jewelers of Basrah, and relating as follows: 'Once on a time having missed my way in the desert, and having no provisions left, I gave myself up for lost; when I happened to find a bag full of pearls. I shall never forget the relish and delight that I felt on supposing it to be fried wheat; nor the bitterness and despair which I suffered on discovering that the bag contained pearls.'"

In the executive chamber one evening, there were present a number of gentlemen, among them Mr. Seward. A point in the conversation suggesting the thought, the president said, "Seward, you never heard, did you, how I earned my first dollar?" "No," rejoined Mr. Seward. "Well," continued Lincoln, "I was about eighteen years of age; I belonged, you know, to what they call down South the 'scrubs;' people who do not own slaves are nobody there. But we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion, I got the consent of mother to go, and constructed a little flat-boat, large enough to take a barrel or two of things that we had gathered, with myself and little bundle, down to New Orleans. A steamer was coming down the river. We have, you know, no wharves on the Western streams; and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the landings, for them to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new flat-boat, wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any particular, when two men came down to the shore in carriages, with trunks, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked, 'Who owns this?' I answered, somewhat modestly, 'I do.' 'Will you,' said one of them, 'take us and our trunks out to the steamer?' 'Certainly,' said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something. I supposed that each of them would give me two or three bits. The trunks were put on my flat-boat, the passengers seated themselves on the trunks, and I sculled them out to the steamboat. They got on board, and I lifted up their heavy trunks, and put them on deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out that they had forgotten to pay me. Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar, and threw it on the floor of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day,--that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time."

Only such persons interest us, it has been said, who have stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might extricated themselves, and made man victorious. Young and old, all of us, have been intensely interested in knowing what Robinson Crusoe was to do with his few small means. Wonderful Robert Burns! "While his youthful mother was still on the straw, the miserable clay cottage fell above her and the infant bard, who both narrowly escaped, first being smothered to death, and then of being starved by cold, as they were conveyed through frost and snow by night to another dwelling." While he was yet a child, the poverty of the family increased to wretchedness. The "cattle died, or were lost by accident; the crops failed, and debts were accumulating. To these buffetings of misfortune the family could oppose only hard labor and the most rigid economy. They lived so sparingly that butcher-meat was a stranger in their dwelling for years." "The farm proved a ruinous bargain," said the poet; "and to clinch the misfortune, we fell into the hands of a factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of Twa Dogs. My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent letters, which used to set us all in tears. This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave--brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme.... My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet."

Edmund Kean's early life was very wretched. It was after his marriage that we find him "strolling in the old misery, giving an entertainment at Dumfries to pay his lodging. One six-penny auditor alone came." (Once, we are told, he absented himself from his home in Exeter for three days. To the question of where he had been, he replied, grandiloquently, "I have been doing a noble action; I have been drinking these three days with a brother actor who is leaving Exeter, to keep up his spirits.") After rehearsal, and before his appearance at Drury Lane, he exclaimed prophetically, "My God! if I succeed I shall go mad!" Drunk with delight, he rushed home, and with half-frenzied incoherency poured forth the story of his triumph. "The pit rose at me!" he cried. "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet!" "Charles," lifting the child from his bed, "shall go to Eton." Then his voice faltered, and he murmured, "If Howard (his recently deceased child) had but lived to see it!"

Among the companions of Reynolds, when he was studying his art at Rome, was a fellow-pupil of the name of Astley. They made an excursion, with some others, on a sultry day, and all except Astley took off their coats. After several taunts he was persuaded to do the same, and displayed on the back of his waistcoat a foaming waterfall. Distress had compelled him to patch his clothes with one of his own landscapes. Henderson, the actor, after a simple reading of a newspaper, repeated such an enormous portion of it as seemed utterly marvelous. "If you had been obliged, like me," he said, in reply to the surprise expressed by his auditors, "to depend during many years for your daily bread on getting words by heart, you would not be so much astonished at habit having produced the facility." Amyot was a servant at college, and studied, like Ramus, by the light of burning charcoal from want of candles; but his translations earned him a mitre as well as renown. Duchatel rose from being reader in a printing-office to be grand almoner of France; and was paid by the king to talk to him during his meals.