refer without manifesting sadness. He had selected a suitable place for
planting appleseeds on a small prairie, and in order to prepare the
ground, he was mowing the long grass, when he was bitten by a
rattlesnake. In describing the event he sighed heavily, and said, 'Poor
fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my ungodly
passion, put the heel of my scythe in him, and went away. Some time
afterward I went back, and there lay the poor fellow, dead!'" "He was a
man, after all,"--Hawthorne might have exclaimed of him, too,--"his
Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!--not that steel engine of
the devil's contrivance--a philanthropist!"
John Brown, when he was twelve years old, from seeing a negro slave of
his own age cruelly beaten, began to hate slavery and love the slaves so
intensely as "sometimes to raise the question, Is God their Father?" At
forty, "he conceived the idea of becoming a liberator of the Southern
slaves;" at the same time "determined to let them know that they had
friends, and prepared himself to lead them to liberty. From the moment
that he formed this resolution, he engaged in no business which he
could not, without loss to his friends and family, wind up in fourteen
days." His favorite texts of Scripture were, "Remember them that are in
bonds as bound with them;" "Whoso stoppeth his ear at the cry of the
poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard;" "Whoso mocketh
the poor reproacheth his Maker, and he that is glad at calamities shall
not be unpunished;" "Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when
it is in the power of thine hand to do it." His favorite hymns were,
"Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" and "Why should we start and fear to die?"
"I asked him," said a child, "how he felt when he left the eleven
slaves, taken from Missouri, safe in Canada? His answer was, 'Lord,
permit now thy servant to die in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy
salvation. I could not brook the idea that any ill should befall them,
or they be taken back to slavery. The arm of Jehovah protected us.'"
"Upon one occasion, when one of the ex-governors of Kansas said to him
that he was a marked man, and that the Missourians were determined,
sooner or later, to take his scalp, the old man straightened himself up,
with a glance of enthusiasm and defiance in his gray eye. 'Sir,' said
he, 'the angel of the Lord will camp round about me.'" On leaving his
family the first time he went to Kansas, he said, "If it is so painful
for us to part, with the hope of meeting again, how dreadful must be the
separation for life of hundreds of poor slaves." "He deliberately
determined, twenty years before his attack upon Harper's Ferry," says
Higginson, "that at some future period he would organize an armed party,
go into a slave State, and liberate a large number of slaves. Soon
after, surveying professionally in the mountains of Virginia, he chose
the very ground for the purpose. He said 'God had established the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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