A Plea for Captain John Brown

“I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in respect for the Constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this Union.”

Many of the abolitionists were concerned that Brown acted without consideration of the delicate Union. Here, Thoreau tells the audience that Brown shared in their convictions about the composition of the nation.

“Such were his humanities and not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.”

Thoreau suggests that Brown was a man of the people. He may not have had the education to know which way a Greek accent leans, but he had something far more important: the conviction to help his fellow man.

“It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king.”

Thoreau thought of Oliver Cromwell as a master of virtue who overturned the old corrupt order of things to pursue his religious conviction. Cromwell’s speeches, like Brown’s, lacked the pageantry and artifice of the old rulers, offering something radical and rational in their place.

“When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defence of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”

Thoreau frames the bravery of John Brown and his men as a natural result of their convictions. He insinuates that the border ruffians know their cause is unjust.

“They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded.”

This phrase powerfully reminds the audience that the four million enslaved people living in the US are their countrymen and that their voices are being excluded from the conversation. Brown’s aims should be extremely popular when thus contextualized.

“The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. […] He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week.”

This phrase is an attack on the Christian who professes belief but does not take action to live this belief. It suggests that modern Christians are only moral when it benefits them.

“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.”

Thoreau is critiquing the business-as-usual nature of the peace that allows slavery to remain unabated. His speech, like Brown’s action, is meant to rouse the nation from its complacency.

“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.”

The popular opinion at the time was that Brown’s lawlessness was indicative of his immorality. Thoreau argues that no government or law can cast judgment on Brown as long as slavery exists.

“I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.”

While pacifism is a noble goal, Thoreau argues that this understanding is too simplistic. He invites the audience to consider whether there is any situation in which violence is necessary.

“Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.”

This quote speaks to Thoreau’s belief in the power of the individual to enact his morality in the world. Thoreau believed that a man could conduct himself with a set of transcendent values that would shake the foundations of an unjust society.

“When I reflect to what cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, I see they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder.”

Though Brown and the abolitionists were supposedly on the same side, they argued about tactics, with Brown supporting the use of force and Northern abolitionists preferring to rely on legislative progress. Thoreau believes this discrepancy essentially makes them as far apart as “the heavens and earth”—a metaphor that locates Brown in the realm of the saved and saintly and “his judges” as still sinful mortals in the material world.

“You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four million men.”

Thoreau compares Brown to Christ, reminding the audience that Brown died to save enslaved people from violence. He insinuates that those who would see Brown hanged are as guilty as those who stood by while Jesus was crucified.

“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?”

This passage speaks to a longstanding theme in Thoreau’s work: that government must abide by the social contract it has with its people. Thoreau strongly advocates for individual morality that supersedes government authority.