"The Last Days of John Brown" is a written speech delivered at an anti-slavery meeting at North Elba, Brown's home and burial-place, in July, 1860. It was not read by Thoreau himself, but by the secretary of the meeting, who informed the audience that he had lately received the manuscript from the hand of its author as he was passing through Concord on his way to North Elba. This essay, which was written after Brown's execution on Dec. 2nd, 1859 (on which day a memorial service was held in the Concord Town Hall by Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Thoreau, and other abolitionists[1]), is supplementary to the "Plea," and is of especial interest to students of Thoreau's character as clearly demonstrating the fallacy of regarding him as one whose affections were wholly devoted to nature to the exclusion of man. "For my part," he says, in reference to Brown's death, "I commonly attend more to nature than to man; but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent." Here, at any rate, the charge of "stoico-epicurean adiaphorism" must be applied elsewhere than to Thoreau.
Thoreau's prophecy as to the momentous consequences of John Brown's martyrdom did not prove to be mistaken. "If this man's acts and words," he said, "do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do;" and within eighteen months from when these words were spoken, the civil
- ↑ Referred to on p. 83.
