John Brown: An Address at the 14th Anniversary of Storer CollegeDouglass, Frederick
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John Brown: An Address at the 14th Anniversary of Storer College
Douglass, Frederick
Brown, John, 1800-1859
mountains, and send the weak and timid ones to the North by the
underground Rail-road; his operations would be enlarged with
increasing numbers and would not be confined to one locality.
Slave-holders should in some cases be approached at midnight and told
to give up their slaves and to let them have their best horses to ride
away upon. Slavery was a state of war, he said, to which the slaves
were unwilling parties and consequently they had a right to anything
necessary to their peace and freedom. He would shed no blood and would
avoid a fight except in self-defense, when he would of course do his
best. He believed this movement would weaken slavery in two
ways--first by making slave property insecure, it would become
undesirable; and secondly it would keep the anti-slavery agitation
alive and public attention fixed upon it, and thus lead to the
adoption of measures to abolish the evil altogether. He held that
there was need of something startling to prevent the agitation of the
question from dying out; that slavery had come near being abolished in
Virginia by the Nat. Turner insurrection, and he thought his method
would speedily put an end to it, both in Maryland and Virginia. The
trouble was to get the right men to start with and money enough to
equip them. He had adopted the simple and economical mode of living to
which I have referred with a view to save money for this purpose. This
was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already
too long and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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