John Brown: An Address at the 14th Anniversary of Storer CollegeDouglass, Frederick
History
John Brown: An Address at the 14th Anniversary of Storer College
Douglass, Frederick
Brown, John, 1800-1859
truth of history, John Brown survived the saber gashes, bayonet wounds
and bullet holes, and was able, though covered with blood, to tell his
own story and make his own defense. Had he with all his men, as might
have been the case, gone down in the shock of battle, the world would
have had no true basis for its judgment, and one of the most heroic
efforts ever witnessed in behalf of liberty would have been confounded
with base and selfish purposes. When, like savages, the Wises, the
Vallandinghams, the Washingtons, the Stuarts and others stood around
the fallen and bleeding hero, and sought by torturing questions to
wring from his supposed dying lips some word by which to soil the
sublime undertaking, by implicating Gerrit Smith, Joshua R. Giddings,
Dr. S. G. Howe, G. L. Stearns, Edwin Morton, Frank Sanborn, and other
prominent Anti-slavery men, the brave old man, not only avowed his
object to be the emancipation of the slaves, but serenely and proudly
announced himself as solely responsible for all that had happened.
Though some thought of his own life might at such a moment have seemed
natural and excusable, he showed none, and scornfully rejected the
idea that he acted as the agent or instrument of any man or set of
men. He admitted that he had friends and sympathizers, but to his own
head he invited all the bolts of slave-holding wrath and fury, and
welcomed them to do their worst. His manly courage and self-forgetful
nobleness were not lost upon the crowd about him, nor upon the
country. They drew applause from his bitterest enemies. Said Henry A.
Wise, "He is the gamest man I ever met." "He was kind and humane to
his prisoners," said Col. Lewis Washington.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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