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166 the possible benefits of education for freed negroes.

Thoreau, as remonstrant in potent, dramatic form, was destined to stand with many of his friends, rather than alone, as the years passed with their messages of hazard and state-corruption. The Fugitive Slave Law and the Anthony Burns affair of 1854 kindled Thoreau's wrath to strong words. Alcott said that, after the return of Simms, Thoreau, in defiant satire, urged his townsmen to paint their Revolutionary monument black, "as a symbol of the dreadful treason." John Brown came to Concord to visit Mr. Sanborn in 1857 and then Thoreau met the man whose character he had long admired. There seemed an immediate affinity between the two men, both keen lovers of nature and legend, both inflexible in moral fibre, both somewhat fanatical in ideas of government, both glad to risk life for principle. Mr. Burroughs has called Thoreau the spiritual brother of Brown,—"the last and final flowering of the same plant,—the seed flowering; he was just as much of a zealot, was just as gritty and unflinching in his way." John Brown's character and career moved Thoreau at two points,—as reformer and as poet. He admired the life-risking defiance to an unjust, slave-permitting government, but he also appreciated the dramatic and