A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

When the troubles in Kansas began, he sent several of his sons
thither to strengthen the party of the Free State men, fitting them
out with such weapons as he had; telling them that if the troubles
should increase, and there should be need of him, he would follow,
to assist them with his hand and counsel. This, as you all know, he
soon after did; and it was through his agency, far more than any
other's, that Kansas was made free.

For a part of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he was
engaged in wool-growing, and he went to Europe as an agent about
that business. There, as everywhere, he had his eyes about him, and
made many original observations. He said, for instance, that he saw
why the soil of England was so rich, and that of Germany (I think it
was) so poor, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads
about it. It was because in England the peasantry live on the soil
which they cultivate, but in Germany they are gathered into villages
at night. It is a pity that he did not make a book of his
observations.

I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the
Constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery
he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined
foe.

He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great
common sense, deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold
more so. He was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge
once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer
and higher-principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as
there. It was no abolition lecturer that converted him. Ethan Allen
and Stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were rangers
in a lower and less important field. They could bravely face their
country's foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself
when she was in the wrong. A Western writer says, to account for his
escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a "rural
exterior"; as if, in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights,
wear a citizen's dress only.