John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like,
flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so
miraculous in our history.
If any person, in a lecture or conversation at that time, cited any ancient
example of heroism, such as Cato or Tell or Winkelried, passing over the
recent deeds and words of Brown, it was felt by any intelligent audience of
Northern men to be tame and inexcusably far-fetched.
For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any
affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so
absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the
natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs
indifferent. It appeared strange to me that the “little dipper”
should be still diving quietly into the river, as of yore; and it suggested
that this bird might continue to dive here when Concord should be no more.
I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under sentence
of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more
wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he
contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South,
were beside themselves. Our thoughts could not revert to any greater or
wiser or better man with whom to contrast him, for he, then and there, was
above them all. The man this country was about to hang appeared the greatest
and best in it.
Years were not required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours,
produced marked changes in this case. Fifty who were ready to say, on going
into our meeting in honor of him in Concord, that he ought to be hung, would
not say it when they came out. They heard his words read; they saw the
earnest faces of the congregation; and perhaps they joined at last in singing
the hymn in his praise.
The order of instructions was reversed. I heard that one preacher, who at
first was shocked and stood aloof, felt obliged at last, after he was hung,
to make him the subject of a sermon, in which, to some extent, he eulogized
the man, but said that his act was a failure. An influential class-teacher
thought it necessary, after the services, to tell his grown-up pupils that at
first he thought as the preacher did then, but now he thought that John
Brown was right. But it was understood that his pupils were as much ahead of
the teacher as he was ahead of the priest; and I know for a certainty that
very little boys at home had already asked their parents, in a tone of
surprise, why God did not interfere to save him.
