A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.Thoreau, Henry David
History
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.
Thoreau, Henry David
Brown, John, 1800-1859; Québec (Province) -- Description and travel; Slavery -- United States
It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his more
truthful, but frightened jailers and hangmen. Governor Wise speaks far
more justly and appreciatingly of him than any Northern editor, or
politician, or public personage, that I chance to have heard from. I
know that you can afford to hear him again on this subject. He says:
“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,” (I leave that part to Mr. Wise,) “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, Stephens, and
Coppic, it was hard to say which was most firm.”
Almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to
respect!
The testimony of Mr. Vallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same
purport, that “it is vain to underrate either the man or his
conspiracy..... He is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary
ruffian, fanatic, or madman.”
“All is quiet at Harper’s Ferry,” say the journals. What is the
character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder
prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with
glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be
thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see
itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of
injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the
slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal
force. It is the head of the Plug-Uglies. It is more manifest than ever
that tyranny rules. I see this government to be effectually allied with
France and Austria in oppressing mankind. There sits a tyrant holding
fettered four millions of slaves; here comes their heroic liberator.
This most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat
on the gasping four millions, and inquires with an assumption of
innocence: “What do you assault me for? Am I not an honest man? Cease
agitation on this subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or else
hang you.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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