151 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF Captain John Brown, WHO WAS EXECUTED AT CHARLESTOWN, VIRGINIA, DEC. 2, 1859, for an aRMED WITH NOTICES OF SOME OF HIS CONFEDERATES. EDITED BY RICHARD D WEBB. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. 65, CORNHILL. MDCCÇLXI. A 379 720 "I have no regret for the transaction for which I am condemned. I went against the laws of men, it is true; but whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye.' Christ told me to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them, to do towards them as I would wish them to do towards me in similiar circumstances. My conscience bade me do that. I tried to do it, but failed. Therefore I have no regret on that score."-Brown's letter from prison to a clergyman in Ohio. "You would not call John Brown's movement treason, you would. not call it murder, you would not call it a wicked act, if white persons, your own relations, had been chained and claimed as property, tortured, and condemned as a race of chattels; you would call it justice heroism, piety."-Cheever. PRINTED BY ALFRED WEBB, GREAT BRUNSWICK-STREET, DUBLIN. PREFACE. THE following pages are an attempt to give a faithful portraiture of the life and character of Captain John Brown, whose name has attained celebrity in connexion with the seizure of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, on the night of the 16th October, 1859. The interest excited by this event was widely felt on this side of the Atlantic, but still more intensely in the American Union. In the Slave States, fear and danger produced their natural results in numberless deeds of cruelty and outrage against Northern citizens; in the Free States, the heroism, self-devotion, and firmness of Brown and his handful of young and devoted confederates, called forth admiration and respect, and awakened a fuller recognition of the enormity of slavery, and its gross inconsistency with the national boast of freedom. Thus the inherent difference between North and South was widened; and it is not too much to say that but for Brown's enterprise the B North would not have been prepared so soon to defy the slaveholders by electing a republican President. The election of Lincoln was the pretence, if not the motive, for Southern secession; and the war which has followed secession-however much to be deprecated in itself-will, we trust, at no distant day work the overthrow of chattel slavery, which just before Brown's enterprise seemed as firmly established as the everlasting hills. Thus the object which he failed to accomplish the commencement of the subversion of slavery -will probably through his means, as an instrument in the hands of Providence, be accelerated much more effectually than it could have been by his temporary success. But John Brown's indirect agency in promoting this great political and moral revolution would not of itself entitle him to an elaborate biography. The interest excited by the affair at Harper's Ferry was intensified by the subsequent development of the remarkable character of the principal actor in that singular drama. It soon became clear that the attempt was not the deed of a capricious fanatic, but of a sagacious and practical man, who had given long years of deliberation to the project. Brown's whole demeanour while in prison and on his trial, and the calm dignity with which he faced an ignominious death, made a profound impression on the American people; forbidding the imputation of insane excitement or of a thirst for notoriety, and showing forth his modesty, piety, and magnanimity, his unhesitating devotion to the convictions of duty, and his willingness to sacrifice life and all that was near and dear, for the attainment of a beneficent object. The life and character of such a man are a subject of abiding interest, and worthy of a permanent record. This biography has little pretension to the dignity of authorship. It is simply an attempt to present from all accessible sources such a memoir of Captain Brown as will place him fairly before the British public. The principal of these sources, of course, is Mr. James Redpath's "Public Life of Captain John Brown," which was published in America about a month after his death, and had a vast circulation in the Northern States. That work contains a large amount of interesting matter, which was compiled and prepared for the press with extraordinary industry and promptitude; but it is overladen with comments and epithets, inappropriate scripture texts, and minute particulars of events in Kansas. The arrangement is unsatisfactory, and the nomenclature of the books and chapters is more |