The Life of Henry David Thoreau by Henry Stephens Salt

The Life of Henry David Thoreau by Henry Stephens Salt

Author:Henry Stephens Salt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: R. Bentley
Published: 1890-10-14T16:00:00+00:00


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their national liberties with an indifference to abolition ; and on one of the occasions when a runaway slave was surrendered to his owners by the Massachusetts Government, he is said to have proposed to his townsmen at Concord that the monument which commemorated American independence should be coated with black paint.

When he was introduced to John Brown in 1857 he doubtless recognised in him the " one righteous man" whose advent he had heralded in the essay on Slavery in Massachusetts, which he had written and published several years before, and it is not difficult to imagine the intensity of admiration with which he must have followed the phases of the great emancipator's career. Himself an individualist, and, as regards politics, less a man cf .....^on than a man of thought, he reverenced in Brown the very qualities in which he was himself deficient. " His was a more sour and saturnine hatred of injustice," says Changing; " his life was more passive, and he lost the glory of action which fell to the lot of Brown. Thoreau worshipped a hero in a mortal disguise, under the shape of that homely son of justice; his pulses thrilled and his hands Involuntarily clenched together at the mention of Captain Brown." The final effort of Brown's heroism was now at hand, and the events that followed proved to be in some respects the crowning point of Thoreau's life also.

In October 1859 John Brown, who was just entering on his' sixtieth year, was again in Concord,

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and it was from Mr. Sanborn's house that he started on his last and fateful expedition against the Vii^n-ian slaveholders. The very evening before his departure he addressed another meeting in the Concord Town Hall, where Thoreau and Sanborn (their friendship being now the closer for their devotion to the same cause) were among his most earnest listeners. On i6th October Brown was arrested at Harper's Ferry, and then ensued those seven weeks of suspense and anxiety and vituperation which ended in his trial and death. To Thoreau—the shy solitary idealist—belongs the lasting honour of having spoken the first public utterance on behalf of John Brown, at a time when a torrent of ridicule and abuse was being poured by the American press on the so-called crazy enthusiast whose life was to pay forfeit for his boldness. Notice was given by Thoreau that he would speak in the Town Hall on Sunday evening, 30th October, on the subject of John Brown's condition and character; and when this course was deprecated by certain Republicans and Abolitionists as hasty and ill-advised, they received the emphatic assurance that he had not sent to them for advice, but to announce his intention of speaking. A large and attentive audience, composed of men of all pjirties, assembled to hear Thoreau's address,—the " Plea for Captain John Brown," which is in every respect one of the very finest of his writings. In the plainest and most unequivocal terms, and with all his accustomed

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incisiveness



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