ON THE DEATH OF JOHN BROWN[1]
(1859)
Born in 1805, died in 1879; began to publish The Liberator in 1831; founded an Abolition Society in Boston in 1832; President of the American Antislavery Society in 1843-65.
GOD forbid that we should any longer continue the accomplices of thieves and robbers, of men-stealers and women-whippers! We must join in the name of freedom. As for the Union—where is it and what is it? In one-half of it no man can exercise freedom of speech or the Press—no man can utter the words of Washington, of Jefferson, of Patrick Henry—except at the peril of his life; and Northern men are everywhere hunted and driven from the South, if they are supposed to cherish the sentiment of freedom in their bosoms. We are living under an awful despotism—that of a brutal slave oligarchy. And they threaten to leave us, if we do not continue to do their work, as if we have hitherto done it, and go down in the dust before them! Would to heaven they would go! It would only be the paupers clearing out from the town, would it not? But no, they do not
- ↑ Delivered in Boston a few weeks after John Brown was hanged at Charlestown, West Virginia.
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