Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/25

14 says Channing, "under the shape of that homely son of justice; his pulses thrilled and his hands involuntarily clenched together at the mention of Captain Brown."

Two years and a half later, Brown was again in Concord, and started from that place on his final expedition to Harper's Ferry, where, after seizing the arsenal, he was overpowered and captured, on Oct. 18th, 1859, in an attempt to organize an insurrection among the Virginian slaves. From the first there was little doubt that his life would be the price exacted for this culminating act of boldness, which was virulently denounced by the almost unanimous voice of the American press, and was deprecated even by abolitionists as ill-considered and unseasonable. It was at this juncture that Thoreau came forward publicly with his "Plea for Captain John Brown," which was read in the Concord Town Hall on Oct. 30th, and again at Boston on Nov. 1st, and on each occasion was received with deep attention and respect by a crowded audience. It is an emphatic endorsement of Brown's action as entirely humane, rational, and right-principled—justified by the monstrous wickedness of the slave-holding system with which he was at war. "I shall not be forward," said Thoreau, "to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds in liberating the slave. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable." The first public word spoken in defence of the hero-martyr of abolition, this essay is a worthy monument of the genius of both its subject and its author, men so unlike in many points of character and education, yet animated by the same intense hatred of cruelty and injustice.