1859: "A Plea for Captain John
Brown" - insurrection defended.
Thoreau parted company even with the mass of abolitionists
in 1859 by defending, in the face of widespread hostility, the
actions of John Brown, who had been captured and condemned
for leading the deadly abolitionist raid of October 16, 1859,
on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West
Viriginia), as part of his mission to liberate the slave population.
Note 18.
In impassioned speeches that surprised audiences and for a
time reversed his reputation for nonviolence and disdain of organized
action, Thoreau declared he could approve of violence in the
name of abolishing slavery.
Thoreau delivered "A Plea for Captain John Brown"
in the Concord Town Hall "as if it burned him."
"Many of those who came to scoff remained to pray,"
a visitor remarked.
Then Thoreau was asked to give the same lecture in one of
Boston's largest auditoriums - filling in for the scheduled speaker,
Frederick Douglass, who needed to put himself out of the authorities'
reach at the last minute.
Attracted more by Brown's ideals and courage than by his actions,
Thoreau pleaded, not to spare Brown's life, but to uphold the
principled character he saw in him.
Reported in many papers, Thoreau's speech was "full of
…strong expressions, hitting the politicians in the hardest
manner… The church also, as a body, came in for a share
of whipping, and it was laid on right earnestly… The lecture
was full of noble, manly ideas, though perhaps a little extravagant
in its eulogy of Capt. Brown."
A full house listened as Thoreau declared a willingness to
support violence as a last resort to end a social wrong: "I do not wish to kill or be killed, but
I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would
be by me unavoidable. …It was [Brown's] peculiar doctrine
that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the
slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him."
Note 19.
Applause greeted many of Thoreau's statements. But antislavery
editors he had criticized, including Garrison,
slapped back, rightly reminding people that only their media's
patient efforts to win the public had made that applause possible
for someone like the solitary Thoreau--
"Editors like those of The [N.Y.] Tribune and
The Liberator, …while the lecturer [Thoreau] was
cultivating beans and killing woodchucks on the margin of Walden
Pond, made a public opinion strong enough on Anti-Slavery grounds
to tolerate a speech from him in defense of insurrection."
Note 20.
In the spring of 1862 death took Henry David Thoreau at age
44, just as the enormity of America's Civil War approached its
second year. That autumn, Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation
of slaves in the free states.
"We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the
sky... we were watching by the dim light of the stars for the
dawn of a new day," declared Frederick Douglass. "We
were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries."
In 1865 the defeat of the slave-owning Confederacy ended the
war and led to the ratification of the Constitution's Thirteenth
Amendment. The Liberator ceased publication, its aim having
been achieved.
Yet as the world knows, black Americans' struggle for truly
equal rights had just begun.
Read Martin Luther King Jr.'s own words about
Thoreau.