I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane.
It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure.Take any sentence of it,--"Any questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise.So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully.I value my word, sir."The few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism,have no test by which to detect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold.They mix their own dross with it.
It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his more truthful, but frightened jailers and hangmen.Governor Wise speaks far more justly and appreciatingly of him than any Northern editor, or politician, or public personage, that I chance to have heard from.I know that you can afford to hear him again on this subject.He says:"They are themselves mistaken who take him to be madman.He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say, that he was humane to his prisoners.
And he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth.He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous," (I leave that part to Mr. Wise,) "but firm, truthful, and intelligent.His men, too,who survive, are like him.Colonel Washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death.With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure,encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could.Of the three white prisoners, Brown, Stephens, and Coppic, it was hard to say which was most firm."
Almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect!
The testimony of Mr. Vallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same purport, that "it is vain to underrate either the man or his conspiracy.He is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman."
"All is quiet at Harper's Ferry," say the journals.What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail?I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government.
We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history.
It needed to see itself.When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force.It is the head of the Plug-Uglies.It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules.I see this government to be effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind.There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves; here comes their heroic liberator.This most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat on the gasping four millions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence:"What do you assault me for?Am I not an honest man?Cease agitation on this subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you."
We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented.A semi-human tiger or ox,stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away.Heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but I never heard of any good done by such a government as that.
The only government that I recognize,--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,--is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses?A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!
Treason!Where does such treason take its rise?I cannot help thinking of you as you deserve, ye governments.Can you dry up the fountains of thought?High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by,the power that makes and forever recreates man.When you have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountain-head.You presume to contend with a foe against whom West Point cadets and rifled cannon point not.Can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn against its maker?Is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more essential than the constitution of it and of himself?
The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves.They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.Such are not all the inhabitants of Massachusetts, but such are they who rule and are obeyed here.It was Massachusetts, as well as Virginia, that put down this insurrection at Harper's Ferry.She sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the penalty of her sin.
