Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
days of his captivity, to make political capital or newspaper copy out
of him, the Virginians tried him fairly, as those unfair things called
trials go, and they remained with a sort of respect for him which
probably puzzled them. Long after, twenty-five years after, when I was
in an ancient Virginia capital it was my privilege to meet some of
Governor Wise's family; and I noted in them this sort of retrospective
respect for Brown; they were now of Republican politics, and I found
that I was not nearly Black Republican enough for them. But in the
closing months of the year 1859 there was no man so abhorred and
execrated by the so-called Black Republicans as Governor Wise.
Without going to the files of our own newspaper I cannot now say just
how we treated the Harper's Ferry incident from first to last, but I am
safe in saying that it was according to the temperament of each writer.
Our chief, who wrote very well when he could detach his interest from
the practical politics so absorbing in the capital of a state like Ohio,
may have struck the key-note of our opinion in an able leader, and then
left each of us to follow with such music as responded in us. My vague
remembrance of the result is the daily succession of most penetrating,
most amusing comments from my senior. The event offered him the
opportunity of his life for that cold irony he excelled in and which he
knew how to use so effectively in behalf of a good cause; I do not
believe it was ever employed in a bad one. The main contribution to the
literature of the event from his junior that I can distinctly recall was
that ode or that hymn to John Brown, for which I cannot yet be ashamed
or sorry, however I must rue the facts that have forever spoilt my
rapture in it. I have the sense of a pretty constant passing from the
room where I was studying the exchanges for material, and trying to get
my senior's laugh for something I had written, or staying for him to
read me the article he had just begun or finished. It was a great time,
though it was a dreadful time, so thick with forecast, if we had only
known it, of the dreadfuler time to follow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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