and way. We may well exclaim with Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." You, my dear sir, may be called to die in the cause of liberty, as your beloved sons have been caused to give up their lives; but, if so, I believe your and their blood will "cry unto the Lord from the ground." If you are really a child of God, you will soon be where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest; where all things work together for good. Christ is saying to you, "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." I fully believe what the kind Quaker woman * wrote you, " Thousands pray for thee every day. Posterity will do thee justice." Should they put you to death, they will not only have to wade through the blood of those who have been cruelly murdered in the same cause, but also through the prayers of God's people, which will not be unheeded or disregarded by the hearer of prayer. I am exceeding thankful that the jailer is so kind to you, and that you are permitted to occupy yourself in writing and reading. I doubt not but you now value the Bible far above all other reading. May it do you good! It will be exceedingly gratifying to me to receive a letter from you before your exit, ... I shall continue to pray for you so long as you may be a subject of prayer, that the Lord may comfort and support you and your remaining mourning and afflicted family. May we all be permitted to meet in heaven, with all the blood-bought throng, and with them unite in praise to the Redeemer forever and ever. May that peace which passeth all understanding be yours in the trying hour. Farewell! Farewell! L. H. La Crosse, Wisconsin, Nov. 20. Dear Cousin: Little did I think when I parted with you and other friends in Hudson twenty years ago that I should ever address you a prisoner under sentence of death. But such are the mysterious ways of that inscrutable Providence that directs our steps, however we may devise our ways. I have for years watched your strange, eventful history. I have wept for your griefs, and my soul has burned within me when I have read the tale of wrongs endured by your family in Kansas. And when I now read, in a venial partisan press those heartless slanders, many of which, extending back to former years, I know to be as base as can be invented by the Father of Lies, and see you held up before the world in a character not only impossible to you, but to any one brought up and educated by the sainted Oliver Brown, my indignation can scarcely be repressed. It is for this I feel * The letter referred to I do not republish in this volume, as it has already appeared in "The Public Life." that, ere you must undergo the sentence meted out to you by a false and wicked System, I must write a word, simply to express to you my confidence in your sincerity, and my belief that you have acted according to your convictions of duty. Looking at the matter from my own stand-point, I should not conceive it my duty to have done as you did. Place me in your circumstances, and I am wholly unable to say what I should have done. I have but one son! Were I called to see him wantonly sacrificed to the extension of a System, founded, nurtured, and perpetuated only in wrong, I know not what it would make me. In a conversation with you at your father's house, twenty-two years since, when some of our friends imbibed the strange notion that they had become perfectly holy, you remarked: "We never know ourselves till thoroughly tried. As heating of old smooth coin will make the effaced stamp visible again, so the fire of temptation reveals what is latent even to ourselves." I will not at this distance, and under your circumstances, even venture an opinion as to the right or wrong of your act. If your sentence is executed, you are too near the bar of that God who will judge righteous judgment, who, as you have said, "is no respecter of persons," for me to pretend to sit in judgment. Rather would I commend you to that mercy that "will not break a bruised reed." But this I will say, that I would sooner take the place you must take before Him than that of the noblest in the world's esteem, who has robbed the least of God's poor of his right. I shall cherish your memory while God spares you here, as one I formerly esteemed very highly, and whom I never can believe would have done a known wrong, even to save your life. I know it will take another and a better generation to do justice to your memory. Yet I feel an earnest desire to do what I can to set you before the world in the true light. I shall endeavor to open correspondence with your family, and gather all the facts, both for my own satisfaction and that of other friends. If this shall reach you in time, may I beg of you a word, though it be but a word, that I may know that it was received, I shall observe the day that man has fixed to terminate your earthly career as a day of fasting and prayer, in which I shall endeavor in my imperfect way to remember not only you and your deeply-afflicted family, but also bear upon my heart before a compassionate Saviour, the oppressed and downtrodden, "remembering them that are in bonds as bound with them." And now, cousin John, farewell, till we meet in eternity. And may we then be permitted, with those venerable fathers who taught us in youth to love and serve a God of truth and righteousness, to join in the new song to Him that loved us and bought us with his own precious blood. Your affectionate cousin, EDWARD BROWN, "We are educating our children for the same fate that has overtaken John Brown. Our code of morals must be changed. We must forego our religious teachings—the golden rule must be unlearned, and the dogmas of our Revolutionary Fathers concerning human rights forgotten. We have no Literature, no Philosophy, no Morality, no Religion, which this inexorable despotism has not proscribed in this Republican land. This Moloch of Slavery demands, yearly, fresh victims for its bloody altar, and it selects them from that portion of our people most distinguished for a conscientious regard for morality and religion. ... At a late Agricultural Fair in South Carolina a reward was offered to him who should produce two slaves freshly imported from Africa. The Slaves were produced, and South Carolina presented a silver pitcher as a reward to the pirate, while at the same time she was spinning the rope to hang John Brown, for heeding the Sermon on the Mount." Demi Rile |