Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/24

Rh watched the singularly lowly and tender devotion of the scholar to the slave. He must be fed, his swollen feet bathed, and he must think of nothing but rest. Again and again this coolest and calmest of men drew near to the trembling negro, and bade him feel at home. He could not walk this day, but must mount guard over the fugitive, for slave-hunters were not extinct in those days."

The most brilliant of Thoreau's "Anti-Slavery Papers," and, indeed, the most impassioned of all his writings, is the "Plea for Captain John Brown." John Brown was first introduced to Thoreau by F. B. Sanborn, in the spring of 1857, when he visited Concord, and addressed a meeting of citizens in the Town Hall. "On the day appointed," says Mr. Sanborn, "Brown went up from Boston at noon, and dined with Mr. Thoreau, then a member of his father's family, and residing not far from the railroad station. The two idealists, both of them in revolt against the civil government because of its base subservience to slavery, found themselves friends from the beginning of their acquaintance. They sat after dinner discussing the events of the border warfare in Kansas, and Brown's share in them, when, as it often happened, Mr. Emerson called at Mr. Thoreau's door on some errand to his friend. Thus the three men met under the same roof, and found that they held the same opinion of what was then uppermost in the mind of Brown." Thoreau's admiration of the massive strength and earnestness of Brown's character was instant and unalterable. "He worshipped a hero in mortal disguise,"