Chapter VIII

A special session at the Boston Court-house, where the Supreme Court is sitting under the protection of the militia. Free men are judging a man-tool, the property of another man. Perhaps, under his black skin and his woolly hair, the tool has a kind of soul--you never can tell: but since he has run away, the tribunal ordains, in its sovereign independence, that he shall be returned to the hands of his master. If, weary of digging up your ground, a hoe for which you have paid with your good money should take it into its head one fine evening to scamper off, what would you say? The article that has vanished should be restored to its rightful owner. The law is sacred and the judges are there to apply it without flinching. There is no joking with these respectable judges of the Boston Court-house. They have very grave faces with white skins and not the least suggestion of wool on their skulls. They represent His Majesty the Right and His Holiness the Moral.

Are you surprised? Then where do you come from? Don’t you know how little it matters before the law whether you are innocent or guilty? The important thing is not you but respect for the law. The judge is there to grind out his judgments, the notes are printed in the record, and at the end of the month the fees fall with all the precision of music. And you fail to take this way of administering justice seriously? You feel no respect for this machine?

Henry’s chief feeling was one of humiliation. He had never cherished any great illusions about judges and justice, and in a similar case three years before he had received a painful shock. But this judgment was beyond anything. _Walden_ was appearing at this moment, and the book was utterly forgotten in the thought of this negro whom they were cold-bloodedly sending back to his master, like a package. The solemnity of the judgment added to this redelivery of the stolen article a sort of diabolical pomp. In any case, another theft had been committed, for Henry perceived that they had taken from him an essential part of himself. In vain had he tried to find among the friendly fields forgetfulness of these unclean human beings; they had lost their charm for him, for the baseness of men had blighted them. The “enemy of the human race” came back from his walks utterly unable to regain his serenity. He was haunted by the thought of those men who were in prison for having tried to mob the court and snatch the “package” out of its hands. He almost envied those fellows. An honest man belonged in prison in these times of ignominy: at large, he felt almost an accomplice in the legal crime. As he thought of it, Henry’s hand went through the motions of touching off a bomb that would send the machine and the machinists to the devil.

You strange fellow, what concern is it of yours--one negro more or less from the plantations of the South? Are you mad? He is just as much merchandise as a barrel of molasses; he can be sold and used up, but he has got to stay in the shop of the man who has paid his good money for him. Besides, all this business is going on a long way from your village: leave Boston and that good Virginia to their own affairs. Can’t you see that, after a passing flutter, the people around you go on with their own little concerns? There is nothing so momentous in this affair to interfere with the thoughts of a solitary walker.

To write a few pages in his Journal, in the privacy of his own soul, is no relief. Faces, not white pages, are what he needs to have before him in order to express his emotion. On the Fourth of July Henry goes to Framingham, where the friends of the cause are holding a meeting, and delivers there the most vigorous speech he has ever written (he never speaks _ex tempore_), the richest in blood and fire. The Chief Justice and the Governor of the State take part in the ceremony: the orator has not failed to bring these puppets along in his bag to produce them in his Punch and Judy show. The honourable Governor is playing dummy. Bang! A good rousing whack on his ear. That will teach him what it means to let the August Work of Justice follow its course. The honourable Governor refuses to hand in his resignation. A good smack in the face will root him out of his chair. The puppet catches it for being Governor; there is very little of him left. He gets all the raps on the nose that are intended for the slave-masters whose interests His Nothingness serves. And to crown the festival, they publicly burn the Constitution of the United States. The organizer of the meeting is William Lloyd Garrison, the veteran abolitionist, whom once the mob dragged through the streets of Boston at the end of a rope. This brave man, who is ready for anything, asks Henry for the text of the famous discourse so that he can publish it in his magazine, the _Liberator_.

Always that fierceness in resistance. Friends who entirely approve of Henry’s purposes regard this violence, this extremism, as very unfortunate. Destroy, if you think it good to do so, but don’t bring into it that savage conviction, as if you wanted to uproot the old tree of the earth. Keep at least a touch of scepticism. You make no effort to settle things by arrangement. Always this unsmiling gracelessness. See what an accommodating smile your old friend Waldo keeps.... It’s just like the time when you refused to pay your poll-tax and let them put you in jail, and your friends said it was “mean and in bad taste.” Is not tolerance the proper thing in a philosopher? He should accept frauds, great and small, magnanimously, as one tolerates the faults of old friends. One shouldn’t be so anti-Philistine as to scout all the respectabilities. One shouldn’t declare, in this virulent way, one’s utter contempt for the Church and the State. One shouldn’t go about insisting that the State is the enemy of free, proud men and the natural protector of the basest elements of a people: officials, capitalists, flunkies, policemen, speculators, shopkeepers, moneymakers, gospel-mongers. There are charming people in all these groups who are offended by this wholesale censure. And suppose you do consider this court-room--judges, lawyers, public, jury and all--just as criminal as the accused, is that any reason for calling down thunder on its head?

Do you never read the presidential messages in the newspapers? Perhaps you despise the newspapers too? Of course those who produce them are more interested in cultivating their subscribers than the truth, but is that any reason to lump them all together, the liberal ones included, as the “filthy press?” From your point of view, those sensational events which our friend the saloon-keeper confounds under the one name of “politics” are simply ridiculous beside a sunset watched from Fairhaven Cliffs where you go to get your evening paper and the latest news.

Just look at this pitiful specimen of a citizen who has nothing but a ridiculous “no” for his country in time of war! A war that brings the conqueror all sorts of booty is, he tells you bluntly, nothing but an expedition of brigands, sufficiently well armed to impose their will. A poor, silly isolated thief steals something and is put under lock and key, but if he swells to the proportions of an army he comes back, with flags flying and a band at the head of the procession, bombarded with flowers and hurrahs by respectable men and women. An evil deed, you see, becomes a great deed if it is conceived on a large enough scale: the enthusiasm excited by a war is the rapture of a childish people before this stupendous metamorphosis.

As for soldiers, Henry has no flowers for an idiot who, whether he is victor or vanquished, has allowed himself to be seduced by fine feathers and high pay. He has nothing but a glance to give him, enough to divine, under the automaton who fires to the right or left at command and would shoot his brother just as readily, a vestige of a man who is rather ashamed of the work he is made to do and would be only too happy to desert if he dared. The instruction which they give a soldier should logically lead him to distinguish his natural enemy, the instructor. But this professional brave man is a coward. For the sake of dressing up in a fine uniform, he has allowed himself to be stripped of his dignity as a man, just as some young fellows throw their pride to the winds for a foolish girl. Weak souls, unhappy souls. But in spite of all this there is less contempt than pity in the look he gives these fools, yes, even this masquerade of the militia with their puppets’ gestures. Little as one may sympathise with their stupidity, everything that debases man is a menace that touches you in your own person.

You see how far a village good-for-nothing can carry his sarcasm--a lover of wild flowers and beautiful trees and the unknown things that might be equally beautiful. He is not responsible for his country, this “land of liberty” which is subject to the omnipotences of money and morality; he despises the majority and the ballot. He is no pistareen-patriot. He ought to take a lesson from his friend Walt Whitman, whom he has seen in Brooklyn and admires--Walt who stands whole-heartedly for the flag and for war to a finish, brigand war or holy war.... Henry has not read his articles in that wretched Brooklyn sheet, for he never reads the papers at all. It’s a great pity. Walt is not the man to belittle the National Honour and cynically ask to see this interesting creature of which they are talking in the newspapers.

Henry had never met this famous bird on his walks, or that other chanticleer, National Sentiment. Among his own people, among those whom he would like to regard as his compatriots, even among those who are nearest to him, he often feels as lost as among strangers. The prejudices of colour and the flag do not correspond with anything in his geography. Whether you are an American or a South Sea Islander, whether you wear a cap or a turban, whether your hair is in a queue or parted on the side is all one to him. All he asks is, Are you a man, and what can you do? Play me a little of your music, and I shall know. A man, you understand; that comes first, first. You can tell me later what kind of dessert you like or what your nationality is, if you have a moment to spare: those things are very interesting, of course, but begin with essentials. Talk music.

You see?... How can anybody hit it off with a fellow who defends his ideas in this revolutionary way? Henry has only one excuse. If there is in his sarcasms something more than the pride of a solitary man and the revolt of the individual, it is because he feels and speaks as a man whose hands know certain things that philosophers do not know. He has not allowed himself to be caught up in the machinery of the workaday world, but he has had to drudge just the same. He knows better than by hearsay what it means to be exploited. Of all those lies that other people complacently accept, sweetening them with the honey of a lofty philosophy, he has felt the effects in his own person ever since he left college. A man who works with his hands for wages has definite and personal reasons for criticising these lies a little more sharply than a humanist in his study or a journalist at his editorial desk. The elements and materials he has touched have given him a sensibility of a subtler kind. “_The callous palms of the labourer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness._” This quality, whether he wills it or not, gives him the more fraternal accent of the comrade of the poor. Is it a mere philosopher who, as he follows the railroad that skirts Walden, can ask, as he places his foot on a sleeper, if it is not going to rise up, if every sleeper is not going to take the form of one of those hard-working Irishmen who have placed it there and over whom the train passes at fixed hours, filled with people who roll comfortably along while the others are rolled over?

The older he grows the more sensitive Henry becomes to the injuries which, with the precision of a rite, the armed man inflicts upon the unarmed. The experience of life avails nothing; instead of blunting, it sharpens his susceptibility. That nameless one whom the Supreme Court in Boston has just sent off like a package is an intolerable humiliation--it is enough to blot out the five continents. It is the State burying its fangs in the flesh of a fugitive. The victim may not be a great philosopher, but he has nerves--like the distinguished Governor himself. His thick lips cannot afford to keep smiling.

In an age swollen with the sense of its own importance, this negro slavery was the most brutal form of the exploitation of man by man. Since Uncle Tom had brought all the lovers of sentimental scenes and tears-in-the-eyes flocking about his Cabin, the abolitionist propaganda had made headway. Henry had joined in it from afar, in his own way. To further the desertion of the blacks, it had developed a whole secret organization, the Underground Railroad, with its system, its branches, switches, waiting-rooms, regulating station. Henry had his share in the administration. He was station-master at one of those little halting-places in the country where only a few trains stop from time to time but that are all the safer in the transit of smuggled goods. Concord was only a middling-sized village, but it was one that counted in no small way in the scheme of anti-slavery sympathies. At the very dawn of the movement, when Henry was just preparing to enter college, a society of women had been founded there for the abolition of slavery, and several particular friends of the family were members of it. Ten years later, Wendell Phillips came there, three winters in succession, and aroused the most violent excitement in the village frog-pond by denouncing a Constitution that openly supported the ignominy. If the old people were outraged and scandalised by this audacity, the young were enraptured by it; Henry, at that time secretary of the Lyceum, sent the _Liberator_ a paper on the first lecture. On August 1st, 1844, an abolitionist meeting was held in the Court-house at which Waldo had spoken. William Lloyd Garrison was there, and Henry rang the bell to fling to the winds the good news and the challenge.

The friends of the cause did not forget Concord in their rounds. One of them, whom a friend introduced to him in March, 1857, made a profound impression on Henry. A big fellow in his fifties, round-shouldered, grizzled, rough-hewn, with the rugosity that went with the frontier type; he came from Kansas, in fact, where with his sons he led, in those hazardous regions, the far from rose-coloured existence of a defender of the cause. And what a face he had.... That mouth like a sabre-cut, the metal of those eyes, that stiff, projecting hair planted thick on the low, determined brow, those perpendicular wrinkles between the eyebrows, how much they told.... You could imagine unforgettable figures like this in old times on a rowers’ bench, chained by the feet.... That astonishing face, hard as steel, stood out so magnificently from the crowd of weak masks--the face of a pirate, a condottiere or a martyr. Another one who did not smile.

Henry felt at once that he was in the presence of a member of his own family. They talked. But he did not need to be convinced by the arguments or the stories of what was going on out there on the frontier. This presence was enough for him: it carried conviction with it. What did it matter if the man talked like an illiterate, narrow-minded, old sanctimonious Puritan pietist? Henry looked at that face, that naked grandeur, that pure force of heroism and self-sacrifice. He drank in the wind that had swept that brow from its childhood, saw all that the horizon of the prairie had left in that glance. It was arranged that the man should come back to Concord and give a lecture. His name was John Brown--in other words, he was as good as nameless. You felt like saying simply the man, for short.

The little station-master acquitted himself of his duties with the decision and the punctuality which, as a ne’er-do-well, he always put into his work. They signalled to you that someone was on the way; you had to be there to receive the “package,” before dawn or at nightfall, put him up if necessary, and in great mystery (the whole family was in the conspiracy and protected the fugitive, but evil tongues and spies were not lacking at Concord any more than elsewhere), then quietly ship him off again, to a safe place over the Canadian border. Pass the ball. One more Southern planter would have to make the best of his loss. Henry, a veteran with a sure eye, had the qualities of a smuggler. You had charge of a man with the police on his tracks, stimulated by a “good reward,” and while you were on the way to get a ticket for him at the station you would notice a man with a gallows-face roaming about, looking very much like a sleuth from Boston; so you would decide to wait for the next train. The runaway could stay a little longer at the house, where he was in good hands. While he was living at Walden, Henry had put one of them up in his cabin. There were certainly risks in this smuggling business. But when did risks ever weaken the resolution of an honest man? They strengthen it.

For the rest, Henry was an abolitionist of an altogether special kind, very far from orthodox. If the exploitation of the negroes was the most patent form of slavery, how many other slaves there were beyond the horizon of the cotton-fields, everywhere, to infinity, whom he would have liked to free.... The views of the Boston friends were limited by the famous Cabin. They didn’t see them increasing among the people of the North, those white-skinned, thin-lipped, fair or chestnut-haired slaves with heads anything but woolly! Henry saw them all around him, innumerable and more brutalized than he would have been able to say. He reckoned fully a million of them in Massachusetts, without the least suspicion of their state, poor souls--which was the saddest part of the whole business.

When are you going to start a campaign to enable all these white negroes to escape, these slaves who are so busy under the eye of their overseers growing the evil cotton from which the web of our days is woven? To make them want to bid farewell for good and all to their servile habits and gestures? If people would listen to you, Henry, Canada would be so full that there would be no place to house them.

* * * * *

One morning such a big piece of news spread abroad that a man who never read the newspapers could not help glancing at it. It was the paper for October 18th, 1859. Henry read it. A handful of men, almost unarmed, had seized the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia during the night and intrenched themselves there, after making a prisoner of a colonel, the great-grand-nephew of George Washington; they had held it for twenty-four hours. A regular siege had been necessary to get the better of the rebels, or rather the survivors, for more than half of them had been killed. It was his friend John Brown’s work.... That morning and for days to come, Henry could devour more newspapers than his good father had nibbled in a whole lifetime.

But if John Brown had struck, it was not solely to enable his friend Thoreau to give at last the full measure of his egoism. Old Brown had more substantial reasons than that.

Henry saw again the face of the old peasant or galley-slave, the expression of the bluish eyes that brightened up when the man spoke of the cause. It was not six months since he had seen him the last time, and his image was as fresh as yesterday. Old Brown was wearing now a long white beard that gave him a patriarchal look. They had dined together at Henry’s. Waldo had come over and the three had found themselves there together. In the evening Old Brown had spoken at the Town Hall; and as he told them how his son had been made prisoner by the Border Ruffians, he had even shown them the chain which the latter had made him wear. The effect was a little crude, but this man so excluded the idea of anything theatrical that you couldn’t look at this gesture ironically. As for his plans, Henry had no anxiety at the time; you could have entire faith in such a figure as that.

Old Brown’s plans.... That was what had been suddenly revealed by the incident of the Arsenal, the long, long story of which that low brow and those inexorable eyes had spoken. Born in Connecticut, of good English and Dutch stock, he had found himself, a boy of five, cast in the middle of Ohio, whither his father, a penniless tanner, had come from New England to seek his fortune. A boy who grew up in buckskin trousers, among the animals and the friendly Indians; a sensitive boy who remained inconsolable after losing the only marble he had ever possessed; a boy who, at twelve, was already conducting cattle long distances and had learned just enough to read and reckon a little.

As a big lad of twenty, strong and serious, working in a tannery with his father, he appeared very shy and rather haughty. The Bible and the Church absorbed him, together with an anxious fear for the salvation of his soul, even suggesting to him for a while the idea of becoming a preacher. He married, moved his tannery to Pennsylvania, where he had no very brilliant success, ran into debt, remarried, returned to Ohio and set up in business with a partner. Another failure. He threw himself into land-speculation, went into bankruptcy, then, a poor, uncertain soul, tried any and every means of conjuring away his ill fortune. Long journeys took him across country, buying and selling cattle and sheep. In spite of everything, divine Providence did not assist John the Shepherd and his thirteen children--whom, as a brutally fierce believer, he ruled with a rod of iron: little matter whether they had any education or not as long as they feared the Lord and his representative, their father. The wholesale sheep-trade which he followed for ten years with a partner still failed to bring him prosperity, and at the end of their enterprise left him the same poor John as before. In incessant litigation with his creditors, always clumsy in business, he found himself lost in a maze of speculations, plans, combines, and was not entirely free from those barely honest little trickeries to which the perfect devotee does not refuse to stoop in order to save his worldly goods along with his soul.

It was in the midst of these vicissitudes, as he was approaching his fortieth year, that an idea took possession of him, an idea that he revealed to his family, one evening, in the kitchen of the old farm in Ohio--to “break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of his teeth.” What he meant in his pietistic jargon was to free the blacks from slavery, and to free them by violence. From that moment John the Shepherd underwent a gradual transformation into Old Brown, Partisan and Freebooter. In Springfield, Massachusetts, he rented a little wooden house where he stored his wool; his principal object in coming there was to place himself in touch with the militants of Boston, whose debating societies and philosophic views, for the rest, interested him very little. Words, nothing but words. The sheep-raiser explained his programme to them. Brother Brown was going to strike with a vengeance, rise openly against the authorities and crush those who resisted. The direct route this time, no more Underground Railroads. It was in the South, on its own ground, that the slave-power must be attacked. Towards the time of his first visit to Concord, Old Brown, without taking anybody into his confidence, was already thinking, among the important points he had in view, of that Arsenal which was so well situated at the intersection of the three States of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. After this, he pondered his plan, perfected it, minutely prepared to carry it out. But in the meantime, as he had to live, and the market-price of wool had fallen because of the war, he embarked for Europe, where he hoped to make an advantageous sale. London--Paris--Brussels--Hamburg: it was a very fine journey for a Westerner, but the traveller had carried his old bad luck along with him in his bag; he was obliged to sell his bales of wool at ridiculous prices. From Europe he returned with a loss of $40,000 for his partner and himself and the still more firmly fixed reputation of a man who had no understanding of business.

Then, one fine day, he bade farewell to trade and went off and established his family in the midst of the solitude of the Adirondacks, at North Elba. He would go and see them up there when he had the time, for he was almost always in Kansas, where three of his older sons were settled and his mission claimed him. The Border was his sphere; he was at the front there, in contact with the enemy--the slaver. Business, litigation, cattle, the price of wool, all these things counted for nothing now in Old Brown’s mind: it was as if the victim of eternal combines, the old veteran upon whom earthly fortune had been unwilling to smile, was meditating a last stroke of business, a supreme speculation, in which he would risk everything, even his skin, without regret, for the triumph of a great cause--would sacrifice as a visionary the rest of his mortal life, the rest of this rough, storm-tossed, agitated life, for a beautiful share of eternity....

Thanks to all this travelling about, managing men and animals and hides and wool and pushing his famous plan, he was clothed with a kind of authority that impressed people. He was going to find this useful enough in holding his own with the Border Ruffians who roamed about the country, well-armed, in their red or blue flannel shirts, with a dagger boldly thrust through their leather belts, with an unspeakably villainous air--cut-throats in the pay of the planters, who were determined to remain the masters in their own house and protect the free disposal of their black work-hands. To earn his living, he did surveying, a trade that permitted him to study the ground in more ways than one. Between whiles, there were surprises--hangings, lynchings, tar-and-featherings, raids, cold-blooded butcheries with the sabre--all work for a soldier.

Old Brown was appropriately free from sentimentality. For instance, to avenge the abominable sacking of Lawrence, when the partisans of a Free Kansas had allowed themselves to be trampled upon like cowards by their enemies, he arranged a little party of his own. With a sort of company of which he was captain and cook, he intended to show these swine that they were not always going to triumph with impunity and spread among the band a wholesome terror. In the old man’s camp, they sharpened the cutlasses on the grindstone and got ready for business. A list had been drawn up of the condemned persons who were to pay for all the rabble. While he was getting ready, one of his companions who was a little anxious came and recommended caution to the chief. The latter replied: “Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.” The chief was greatly excited and ready for anything. Forward, men; let the cowards stay behind.

They were soon there; the little troop collected for a moment not far from Pottawatomie, where the birds they were going to catch had their nest. There were three brothers here, Germans by birth, known for their pro-slavery sympathies--big brutes with whom he had already had a bone to pick as a neighbour, together with a family of poor devils from Tennessee, a father and his two grown sons, who had followed the lead of the Germans. There was also a member of that pseudo-Legislative Assembly which claimed to rule the State in the name of the slave-holders. At ten o’clock in the evening the little troop got under way, taking all precautions. They knocked at the door of the Tennesseeans, made the father and his two sons come out, conducted them two hundred yards from the house and cold-bloodedly put them to the sword. A bullet in the father to finish the business and make it surer. One of the two brothers who had offered resistance had his arms cut off, his body mangled, his skull torn open, a hole in the jaw. All this made less noise than a musket volley; it was a thorough job, swift and stimulating. A little further away, at midnight, at the “Representative’s” house, a similar scene. The wife was ill with measles; the condemned man asked to be allowed to stay with her till they found someone to look after her. “It matters not,” said Old Brown; “you have neighbours.” And he did not even allow the man to pull on his boots. Off with him. Shortly afterwards the “Representative” lay in a thicket, with his head and side run through; they had sent him to represent his friends the slave-holders in the Legislative Assembly on high. There remained the three Germans, one of whom turned out to be spending the night with neighbours. The same ceremonial. The next day he was found in the ravine, with his skull split in two places and half emptied, a hole in his chest, his right hand cut off, hanging to the wrist by a rag of skin. The work finished, they went off and washed their sabres in the river and the butchers started for home, rather disgusted. They needed some good hot coffee to settle their nerves. But it was all in the day’s work and Old Brown regretted nothing.

The hand of the Lord had smitten these infidels a little roughly. These were the ways of the frontier, where sober notions of good and evil were not in vogue. But one of the sons of Old Brown who took part in the expedition lacked the iron nerves of the old man, although his Christian name was John also. The night after the deed, returning half out of his wits to the house of an uncle, he cried to his brother Owen, who had joined him: “Out with you, you filthy murderer ...” and then wandered off into the brush, his poor mind gone.... With Jason, another of his brothers, the demented man was soon captured by the Ruffians, who had hurried out in search of them. Jason saw the rope that was about to encircle his neck hanging from a tree over his head. But for days and days, both of them, chained together by their ankles, their hands tied like convicts, were led about the roads, while John, who had not recovered his right mind, imagined that he was the officer in charge of the troop, shouted his commands and told his keepers how they ought to kill his brother, the stammerer. And the Ruffians of the guard bullied and tortured their prisoners with all the more zest because they thought the poor madman was pretending. During all this time they were scouring the region to dislodge Old Brown, who was actually not far away. He was roaming about in the neighbourhood, waiting for an opportunity to free his two boys. But it was impossible to lay hands on him. With four of his other sons and a few faithful followers, he had gained the brush. He had also gained the reputation of a bird whose feathers it was not good to stroke and who could not be safely approached without plenty of precautions. Be sufficiently energetic and people will respect you. When they shouted in the fields: “Look out! There’s Old Brown!” well-armed people whom you would have supposed were brave, if only because of their numbers, ran as if the devil were coming out of the bushes. Old Brown had become a bugbear. And years followed, full of guerilla warfare, raids and forays, and through them passed a man on horseback or marching along with bent shoulders beside a wagon, who was now here, now there, but never where you expected to catch him. You could burn, destroy the village where he had his headquarters, but to catch the Old Man was another pair of breeches.

A new stage in the march towards the goal which Old Brown had fixed. He published a tract in which he urged the army to disobey orders, “respectfully and amicably offered to the Officers and Soldiers of the American Army in Kansas.” He summed up his argument in these words: “It is as much the duty of the common soldier of the U. S. Army, according to his ability and opportunity, to be informed upon all subjects in any way affecting the political or general welfare of his country, and to watch with jealous vigilance the course and management of all public functionaries both civil and military; and to govern his actions as a citizen soldier accordingly: as though he were President of the United States.” This appeal, signed “A Soldier,” did not win the approval of the friends in Boston; but the Old Man could get along without their approval. The Old Man was collecting his wits for a still more serious action. He set to work, quietly, to instruct a little troop of voluntary followers. His war budget was not very heavy, and often he had not enough to eat. Then, on a brief raid in Missouri, he entered a planter’s house, revolver in hand, killed another man, freed the slaves, ransacked the dwelling, took two prisoners. All this just to keep his hand in. In mid-winter, with a single companion, the Old Man travelled more than six hundred miles escorting to Canada a wagon full of negro women and children; his fingers and his ears were frozen, but his skin was tough and he could stand it. There was a constant reward of $3000 for anyone who arrested him. It was worth the effort, but no one interfered with him, even when on one occasion Old Brown calmly entered a town, made a speech, and calmly went off again, after a glance at the handbills in big letters in which his admirers were invited to capture him. Didn’t anyone want $3000?

Much later, on the night of October 16th-17th, a wagon descended the hill which, on the Maryland side, leads to the peninsula where Harper’s Ferry rises, formed by the confluence of the two rivers. The horse stiffened its legs, for the wagon was full of pikes and ammunition. A round-shouldered old man with a white beard and eighteen other men accompanied the convoy. The plan, matured through long years, was being executed. It had definitely ceased to be a question of Uncle Tom and his Cabin; it was a question now of bayonets and bullets. Do you understand, Boston friends?

The plan was to surprise and carry the place, cost what it might. And then, who could say?... Once masters of this important point, they could fortify themselves in the mountains, the blacks would rise, they would run from all the cotton fields; they would arm (they had pikes--a thousand of them, specially made), and there would be a general conflagration, the war carried into Africa. They would establish a provisional government, of which the constitution was already drawn up on paper and the principal parts were assigned. There was $600 in the treasury.

Meanwhile, the little troop advanced, made a prisoner of the watchman on the bridge, who thought it was a joke, a few passers-by, and then the janitor of the armory, which they entered with the game all in their own hands. John Brown’s company were masters of the Arsenal, in the dead of night. The hardest part was over; from this point they could strike out. Five miles off, on the heights of Bolivar, there lived a landed proprietor, a slave-holder who was no other than Colonel Lewis Washington, a descendant of the great man. He had in his possession the pistol given by Lafayette and the sword presented by Frederick the Great to the Liberator. At midnight, by the flickering light of a torch, the colonel saw, outlined against the door of his bedroom, four armed men who informed him that he was their prisoner and ordered him to hand to one of them--a black--the sword of the Great Frederick. Then they courteously conducted the colonel away in his own carriage, made the slaves climb into a big wagon, and the procession turned towards the Arsenal. They stopped on the way at a neighbour’s, where the scene was repeated. The latter was also treated to a ride, with his six blacks. At the Arsenal Old Brown distributed the pikes to the negroes, placed them in charge of their former masters and thus addressed the colonel: “I shall be very attentive to you, sir, for I may get the worst of it in my first encounter, and if so, your life is worth as much as mine.” Then the Old Man calmly girded himself with the sword of Frederick the Great. The trains were stopped on the bridge where he had placed a guard. The alarm was given. The fire-bell rang. The good citizens of the little town took down their shot-guns, since the more formidable weapons were in the hands of the rebels. The Old Man, very much master of himself, ordered breakfast for forty-five persons at the hotel nearby. And the day rose on this astonishing victory, as clean as the Liberator’s sword.

Twenty-four hours later, in the engine-room, Old Brown, his body torn with bayonet thrusts, his head gashed, his hair matted and his face stained with blood, was stretched out with his son Oliver, who had ceased to beg them to kill him, motionless at his side, and his other son Watson dying. Of the twenty-one men involved in the raid only four remained who were alive. Seven had escaped, including those who had remained at the farm to guard the stock of arms and two of those who had occupied the Arsenal, who had succeeded in getting away during the night. And on a rock, in the middle of the Potomac, was the huddled body of the youngest of the company, a boy of eighteen who, while he was attempting to escape by swimming, had been overtaken and riddled with bullets. There his body was, perched in mid-stream, a fine target for the troops that had passed in the afternoon. It was altogether too tempting for everybody not to take a shot at it before dropping in for a drink at the hotel, which had made a lot of money to-day. In the bed of the river lay another corpse, and as it was not very deep in that spot they could see it clearly, with its face drawn in death and seeming to move with the water. Another fine target for the clever sharpshooters: this man too was one of the companions of the raid.

In the Arsenal they were waiting for the Governor of Virginia. Already officers, reporters, congressmen, curiosity-seekers were filing past the Rebel, lying there on his mattress. Old Brown did not look at all like a man who had been beaten; he spoke calmly, weighing his words, as if he were at home on his old farm. Meanwhile, the town began to be filled with shouts, brawls and a general fanfaronade in preparation for the saturnalia when the militia and the brave population would be fraternizing in an orgy of victory.

* * * * *

Henry was agitated to the depths of his soul, depths that one might have supposed were better sheltered from squalls. Agitated at the thought of the gallows-rope strangling the tough neck of his friend Old Brown. Agitated by the cowardice of the worthy disciples with all their good intentions who, since the raid, the crime against the safety of the State, had run for cover, desperately disavowing the rebel.... No, gentlemen, no, gentlemen, we hadn’t the faintest suspicion of it; you can see we are as white as snow.... It was a stampede of runaways, a chorus of denials. Even the _Liberator_ treated the raid as an act of madness. Not one of these people was capable of seeing how beautiful it was, just because it was mad--with a madness that purged the world of its reasonable reason! The Knight of the Umbrella and the Bundle had always been for madnesses like this against the niggardly prudence of the sham humanitarians. That obstinate, that furious old lunatic, with his hobby of carrying the war into Africa, had actually carried it there. That old Trojan who continued to believe, with a belief as tough as a stump, in other realities than the price of wool, who was ready to sacrifice himself for an idea.... He himself had staked his fortune on a folly. John Brown, murderer or madman, was a brother. And that brother was going to be hanged.

In Henry’s innermost sanctuary there was no security left--the gods were tottering on their socles. It was no longer possible to think of anything else, to resume the thread of one’s dear old thoughts. Nothing but a few passages from the greatest poems corresponded with the obsession of this hour and seemed to meet the circumstances. When he went out his ramble was finished before it had begun: what was waiting for him at the end of his solitary walk rose up, from the moment he set out, to demand its due. His eyes no longer saw what they had seen; when he lifted his head, he saw rising against the woods a face with a low brow and bluish grey eyes, the hard face of the old cattle-driver, the driver of a whole people towards the Promised Land, the face of the martyr, imposing silence on all nature. The sun set behind a gibbet. Wachusett, over there, was like a judge delivering a sentence. The beauty of the world could no longer vie with this beauty of the man who was dying for a mad cause.

Henry was unable to sleep. At night, he would relight his candle, seize a scrap of paper within reach of his hand and cover it with lines. No event, near or far, had ever inflamed him to this degree. He was another Henry, unknown to himself. Old Brown, what have you done to a man who had such a beautiful equanimity and such a disdain for the affairs of the world? What power is this within you that can arouse such a mad passion? You have thrown him into a pitiable state. He is much less strong than another fellow who lives in Brooklyn and whom your fate does not prevent from eating and sleeping. For this latter at least a man who is going to be hanged for his crime does not blot out the universe; luckily for him, he remains the master of his serenity. He is not like Henry, astonished at the sight of all these villagers, these good citizens who have the heart to go about their little affairs, as if nothing were burning their vitals. For him the whole life of the world seems to be in abeyance, as on the eve of a cataclysm. Will it not rise in one mass to free this upright man and avenge his defeat? The wildness in Henry’s soul is boiling up, boiling over with rebellion; it runs to Harper’s Ferry and bars the exits of the Arsenal.

He must speak, and at once, dissociate himself from these wavering souls, these cowards, utter all his admiration for the criminal, while the latter is still alive. For they have condemned him hastily, in all the heat of public indignation, as an altogether special criminal. They have actually had to carry him into court on a stretcher because of his wounds, of which those in his head have made him half deaf. And they are waiting, from one day to another, to pronounce the sentence. It is vain to tell Henry that he is mad, that he is almost alone in his opinion, for a man who, alone, rushes to the defence of a friend, marches surrounded by a whole army. To counsels of caution he replies as Old Brown replied at Pottawatomie. To hell with your caution, you skulkers.

Henry announced that he would speak the following Sunday, October 30th, in the vestry of the parish church. At the last moment, when some advisers still tried to stop him, he replied roughly: “I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” And he spoke. The defence had succeeded in causing a postponement of the sentence, but there was no doubt what it would be. Henry’s object, however, was not to save Old Brown’s neck; it was merely to celebrate the beauty of his character and his act. Henry Thoreau, fool of nature and the beauty in man, as Hokusai in his Japan was the fool of drawing, was ready to maintain against the whole world that John Brown, his friend, convicted of high treason, was right, and this to the very foot of the gallows if they judged him worthy of being hanged also. That is what beauty means, that is what friendship means. It does not consist in lending you half a dollar in case of need or an umbrella if it happens to rain. It consists in accepting blows of your own free will and bearing witness at any risk. In not letting go of your own kind if he has fallen into the hands of the enemy. Henry spoke. His listeners were all ears. It was no philosophical lecture this time. There may have been a few stifled growls in certain corners of the hall. But no one protested. It was as if his conviction had stirred that soft dough. When it was over, the few rabid people were no longer talking of the gallows for John Brown: they held their peace. The general impression was excellent. One good mark for Concord.

Henry was very anxious to repeat his “plea” at Worcester, where his friend Blake lived. He would have liked to repeat it without remuneration in every county in New England. Meanwhile, he spoke in Boston, two days after Concord. It was November 1st; the sentence had not yet been pronounced. Perhaps it would be to-morrow. Half an hour before the moment set for the lecture, the hall was full. For an hour and a half the people listened religiously to this fervent little man who, far from attempting to excuse the crime, celebrated it. Henry had more expression and enthusiasm than usual. He was no longer a man bored with the necessity of uttering fine-spun sarcasms and over-concise aphorisms before rows and rows of eyes that could not make him out at all: he was an embattled soul, stirred by friendship and emotion. There was electricity in the air and in the applause. Even in his casual remarks before and after the lecture it was as if he had lost all his old savage shyness and discovered how to communicate with men. Henry spoke fluently, in a tone of exaltation, thundered against the Union, the President, the State. It was as if there were no more barriers left.

As for Old Brown, in his prison at Charlestown, nothing remained for him, after the sittings of the court, but to lend himself to the little ceremony that was being arranged in his honour. He was preparing for it with no ill grace; was it not the final touch of the great plan that bore his signature? He had formally refused to countenance any attempt of his followers to enable him to escape. If they left the prison door wide open he would not go out; he had made this statement to the warden, who was a very kind man. John Brown was an obstinate old soul. Even his wife, who had come down from North Elba and was in the neighbourhood, was obliged, the first time, to go away without seeing him, broken-hearted but well aware that nothing could avail against the will of the Old Man; this will might have weakened at the farewell scene. He had only consented to see her yesterday, at the last extremity. The warden had invited them both to his own family table. When the time came to part, after these too happy moments, the Old Man would have liked to keep her longer. But they had had to bid each other good-bye, agreeing to meet again at Harper’s Ferry; she was going to wait there for his body, which was to be turned over to her. The condemned man had spent his time, since the sentence, writing letters in his peasant hand to his friends. “Yesterday Nov. 2nd I was sentenced to be hanged on Dec. 2nd next. Do not grieve on my account. I am still quite cheerful. God bless you all.” It was a whole month now since he had been condemned to death; his wounds were healed, and it would have been good not to be lying idle in prison. A true old stager is bored by this inactivity.

On December 2nd, in the morning, he left his cell, surrounded by uniforms. It was a clear dawn and mild enough for the season. As far as he could see, on all sides, there were massed troops as if for the arrival of some great personage. Old Brown was a little surprised; he had had no idea he was so important. A van was waiting for him. He was only fifty-nine years old, but as he climbed into the wagon he had the air of a very old man; his white beard, which he had clipped a little for the raid, completed his patriarchal appearance. That box there in the van was quite long enough to serve as a bench for three persons, and he sat down between his friend the warden and the sheriff on his coffin.

The man they had come for was as calm as a traveller who had come out to see the country after having kept in his room for six weeks. Perhaps he was thinking that his last great combine was not ending so badly for him, on the whole, since, at the cost of a few seconds of fluttering at the end of a rope, he could see as far as the eye could reach fields golden as glory. But nothing actually lay before him save the winter landscape of the valley. “What a beautiful country this is,” he said. “I have never been down this way before.” The journey was not long. They were there at last. Old Brown climbed down, more briskly than he had climbed up, and ascended the steps of the scaffold, from which he descried the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a spectacle to fill eyes that had taken in many horizons during their lifetime. When he became once more aware of the scaffold, he shook hands with the warden and the sheriff. Then they pulled the cap over his head, tied his arms behind his back and passed the noose around his neck, taking care not to let it catch in his beard. In his old trousers, in his old slippers, Old Brown stood upright there, as if he were in command of the three parade companies who were taking ten minutes to find their places. Perhaps he was counting these minutes, but nothing appeared from under his cap. In a natural voice, he merely said: “Be quick,” and stood there, without a tremor, awaiting his reward. A signal, the floor gaped, and at the end of the rope a great body hung, oscillated a moment and was still.

But Old Brown had come out of his prison that morning with the prospect of a much longer journey than those few hundred yards to the scaffold. His wife was waiting for him at Harper’s Ferry. Fifteen men escorted his remains, which were not unpunctual at the rendezvous. And then the pine coffin set out, accompanied by the widow and a few friends. In the towns where the train stopped, the crowds surged about the station, the bells rang, the reception committees stepped forward, a guard of honour watched the corpse all night in the court-house. The body of the condemned man seemed to be armed with an even more formidable strength than that of the Old Man when his head had had a price on it out there in Kansas. At last there remained only twenty-five miles to be covered, feet foremost, by the Old Man who had so often travelled them with his great peasant strides. And then he was at home, after his five days’ pilgrimage, at the family farm, under a great rock opposite White Face Mountain, and very calm as the hymns that he had loved, sung about the grave by the blacks of the neighbourhood, faded away in the silence of the mountains.

Since December 2nd, Henry had been haunted by the feeling that his friend was the only living man in New England. The others did not need to have a rope passed round their necks in order to die; they did not exist. In a number of towns, to celebrate this living man, they fired a salute of a hundred shots at the hour when he at last received his full reward--towns where enormous crowds gathered in the church to pray in memory of him. Concord was a village, but Henry had been chosen by a few people to request the Selectmen to allow the parish bell to be rung at the hour of the execution. Did not Concord owe this attention to John Brown, who had twice been a visitor there? But the authorities refused for fear of compromising themselves; these people were among those million slaves who carried Virginia into the very heart of Massachusetts. So they met in the afternoon at the Town Hall, among themselves, Waldo, Alcott, William, Sanborn and those of the Concordians who were not dead, in solemn commemoration of the condemned man who had already judged his judges. Some words were spoken by Henry and Waldo, and they all sang a funeral hymn. After the ceremony, William and Henry vanished into the fields, their minds full of a figure that would go so well in a triptych, as Henry sometimes thought, between those of ruddy Walt in Brooklyn and Joe the Indian.

That same evening, on his return, Henry found his good friend Sanborn waiting at the house with a word for him: “To-morrow morning, Emerson’s covered wagon and mare will be hitched up at sunrise. Will you call for it, pick up a traveller at my door, take him to the station at South Acton and put him on the first train for Canada? He is a friend, but he’s a queer chap. Pay no attention to what he says to you.” Henry did not inquire further. It froze hard that night, but at the hour mentioned he was at Sanborn’s with the rig, and was soon on his way with the queer fellow, who was quite a young lad. He had put him on the back seat of the wagon as a precaution. Starting so early, the poor fellow had not had time to brush his teeth, and this made him feel ill. In short, this brother seemed to be a little cracked. He rambled on in a steady stream. He absolutely insisted that his driver was Mr. Emerson; and on the way he suddenly flung himself out of the wagon insisting that he was going back to Concord. Henry, who was bent upon carrying out his mission, was obliged to place his hand on his shoulder and force him, with the little arts one uses with a man who is not in his right mind, to get back into the wagon. Hastening the mare, they at last reached the station, which was only three or four miles away. There was scarcely anyone about, the train arrived and the traveller started off. Then Henry returned the wagon and the mare to the stable, and before going home for breakfast stopped at his friend’s house to tell him that everything had gone well. There was no need for either of them to know more. If someone asked you to do a friendly service and you were employed in the system of the Underground Railroad, what difference did it make to you to know whether you had taken to the station on a December morning someone who had escaped in a raid with a price on his head or a mere traveller who thought you were Mr. Emerson? Henry said nothing whatever at home about his early morning drive, and everything passed quietly, as it should. There would be plenty of time to tell about these things some day.

Three months later, his friend Sanborn himself was obliged to decamp to Canada. Summoned to appear before the committee of the Senate charged with investigating the great conspiracy, he had not presented himself and was threatened with arrest as a defaulting witness. As he refused to testify, there was nothing for him to do but to disappear. After a short absence he returned, and one fine day in April a police-sergeant with five men came out from Boston to arrest him at his house in Concord. The fire-alarm rang and the village was instantly up in arms; they were not going to allow Sanborn to be kidnapped. The helpless sergeant and his men were obliged to leave their prisoner in the custody of a guard of citizens. Another good mark for Concord.

The following day, he appeared before the court in Boston. The friends were there, ready for anything, to save Frank Sanborn if the case went against him. And look over there, by the door, at that big bearded fellow with a greenish coat: what a florid complexion he has, and how attentively he is following the discussion! In the name of all the gods, it’s Walt! Happening to be in Boston, to see through the press the third edition of his _Leaves_, which Thayer and Eldridge are going to bring out (these Boston guys are beginning to swallow the satyr whole), he has turned up to give his comrades a strong hand if there is any need for it. But there is no occasion to intervene, for the court declares the arrest of Sanborn illegal, and he returns home in triumph. It was through his friend Sanborn, who had once been introduced to Henry by Waldo and who kept a little school in the village, as Henry himself had done at twenty, that the latter had met Old Brown at the time of his first visit to Concord. But all the “confederates” in the plot, or those at least who were accused of having aided it, were not of the same stripe as Sanborn. Seized with panic, some of them had placed the frontier between themselves and their responsibility, real or supposed. There was even one of them, an old friend of John Brown, whose constitution had been so little able to endure the uproar of the raid and the fear of being compromised that he had had to be shut up as a lunatic.

And a year and a half after the raid--scarcely ten months after the commemoration of the Fourth of July at North Elba, before the rock under which the tough carcass of the Old Man rested in the solitude of the Adirondacks (Henry, who was invited, was unable to go, but he had sent a few pages that were read)--the same Governor of Virginia who had come to see the traitor and conspirator lying, a prisoner, on his mattress at the Arsenal seized the same Arsenal himself, and the next day, April 10th, 1861, the decree of Secession was voted. War was on. The troops of Massachusetts, defiling through the streets of Boston, sang the song of John Brown, the song of the soldiers. The dead of Antietam were strewn over the earth on the outskirts of the town which the Old Man had entered with his eighteen companions, armed with pikes.

It was war, and thousands of young fellows were going to kill one another for ... for ... for.... You, Walt, you know what it’s all about, don’t you?... And you, Henry?... Mark you, this is no war of conquest: it is civil war, holy war.