In 1861, in Cooper Institute, New York, Mr. Phillips said: "Let public
opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those women may
go out, and, wherever they find work to do, do it without a stigma being
set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to
use the pen, to practise law, to write books, to serve in a library, to
tend in a gallery of art, to do anything that her brother can do." And
he asked for woman equal wages with man for the same work.
The anti-slavery war was still waging. The Kansas and Nebraska Act, by
which the people were left to fight out the battle of slavery or freedom
on their own soil, resulted, as might have been expected, in bloodshed.
Among those who went to Kansas, determined to help make it a free State,
was John Brown, whose pathetic life has been written recently by that
eminent anti-slavery worker and author, Frank B. Sanborn, Esq., of
Concord, Mass.
During those dreadful years of civil war in Kansas, Brown and his family
suffered all manner of hardships. Some of his sons were in prison, and
some murdered. He had always wished to free the slaves, had helped many
to escape, and in 1859 carried out a plan, long in his mind, to
establish a station in Virginia, near enough to a free State, where
fugitive slaves could defend themselves for a time, till they could be
helped into Canada.
On Sunday evening, Oct. 16, 1859, Brown, with eighteen men, arrived at
Harper's Ferry, broke down the armory-gate, and took possession of the
village, without firing a gun. The citizens soon armed, several men were
killed, and, before the next night, Brown and his company, now reduced
to six, were barricaded in the engine-house. Colonel Robert E. Lee,
afterwards the Confederate general, arrived with some United States
marines from Washington, and Brown was ordered to surrender, which he
refused to do. When he was finally captured, his two sons were dead, and
he was thought to be dying from his wounds.
He met his death bravely on the scaffold at Charlestown, Va., Dec. 2.
1859.
He wrote a friend, a short time before his death, "I think I cannot
better serve the cause I love so much than to die for it; and in my
death I may do more than in my life."
The day he died, he wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to one of
the guards, "I, John Brown, am now quite _certain_ that the crimes of
this _guilty land_ will never be purged away but with _blood_. I had, as
I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it
might be done."
As he rode on the wagon to the scaffold, at eleven o'clock, looking out
over the two thousand Virginian soldiers, the distant hills, and the
Blue Ridge Mountains, he said, "This is a beautiful country; I have not
cast my eyes over it before--that is, in this direction." He thanked his
jailer for his kindness, and said, "I am ready at any time--do not keep
me waiting;" and died without a tremor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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