[151] _Page 269, note 1._ “This court acknowledges, I suppose, the validity of the Law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me that all things ‘whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.’ It teaches me further to ‘remember them which are in bonds as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted that I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments—I submit: so let it be done.” From the Speech of John Brown to the Court. [152] _Page 270, note 1._ Among the sheets of the lecture “Courage” is one which seems to have been used at that time:— “Governor Wise and Mr. Mason no doubt have some right to their places. It is some superiority of working brain that put them there, and the aristocrats in every society. But when they come to deal with Brown, they find that he speaks their own speech,—has whatever courage and directness they have, and a great deal more of the same; so that they feel themselves timorous little fellows in his hand; he outsees, outthinks, outacts them, and they are forced to shuffle and stammer in their turn. “They painfully feel this, that he is their governor and superior, and the only alternative is to kneel to him if they are truly noble, or else (if they wish to keep their places), to put this fact which they know, out of sight of other people, as fast as they can. Quick, drums and trumpets strike up! Quick, judges and juries, silence him, by sentence and execution of sentence, and hide in the ground this alarming fact. For, if everything comes to its right place, he goes up, and we down.” [153] _Page 271, note 1._ Commodore Hiram Paulding, in 1857, had broken up Walker’s filibustering expedition at Nicaragua. The arrest of Walker on foreign soil the government did not think it wise wholly to approve. [154] _Page 272, note 1._ The allusion is to the trials of the fugitives Shadrach, Sims and Burns in Boston. The story of these humiliations is told in full and in a most interesting manner in the diary of Richard H. Dana,[H] whose zeal in the cause of these poor men did him great honor. During the trial of Sims, a chain was put up, as a barrier against the crowd, around the United States Court-House, and the stooping of the judges to creep under this chain in order to enter the court-house was considered symbolic of their abject attitude towards the aggressive slave power. JOHN BROWN: SPEECH AT SALEM