GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

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FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, and from a long line of violinists, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six.” He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with that family, tutoring the son. After the raid, with the heat on while Jefferson Davis was conducting a congressional investigation, he fled overseas as did Frederick Douglass, and for the duration chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley before settling for health reasons in Switzerland. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The maternal grandfather of Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley, Virginia, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. Jeremiah had gone to school at Galesburg, Illinois and Kossuth, Iowa and had worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” during August 1857. He had twice been arrested by proslavery activists, and had been held for 10 weeks at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the 1st US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder, of a Mr. Denton, on his own doorstep by border ruffians. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. He was “J. Anderson” among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. On July 5, 1859 he had written of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was thrust through with a bayonet by one of the Marines, and pinned against the wall “vomiting gore.” A white man, he was tortured because he was perceived by the attackers as a light mulatto: “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.” A local commented “Well, it takes you a hell of a long time to die.” When opportunistic medical students would go to transport the remains to their college in Winchester, Virginia for dissection, their treatment of this corpse was so casual as to be recorded by a bystander: “In order to take him away handily they procured a barrel and tried to pack him into it. Head foremost, they rammed him in, but they could not bend his legs so as to get them into the barrel with the rest of the body. In their endeavor to accomplish this feat, they strained so hard that the man’s bones or sinews fairly cracked.” His remains were taken to the college along with the remains of Watson Brown (a corpse found on the banks of the Shenandoah River was more likely that of a local slave).

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He was a member of Congress of John Brown’s Provisional Government in Chatham, Ontario in May 1858 and was “Osborn Anderson” on the list of signatories of the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States”; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a recruiter and/or noncommissioned officer for a unit as yet undetermined, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war (he would be identified by his father Vincent Anderson in 1872 as having been a recruiter for the “western regiments”). He was a member of the Equal Rights League in 1865, and represented Michigan at the National Convention of Colored Men in 1869. He died a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Charles Blair No No No Armament white

Charles Blair supplied the pikes.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas.”

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas,” and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, had been born in Franklin, Ohio on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad, considered by his mother Mary Ann Day Brown to be the most promising. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855 with his father and returned to North Elba during October 1856, where he got married with Martha E. Brewster in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry. “I think there is no good reason why any of us should be discouraged,” he had written his family, “for if we have done but one good act, life is not a failure.... Keep a stiff lip, a sound pluck, and believe that all will come out right in the end.” He had reached the age of 20 when he was shot while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge. His body was dumped into a shallow hole on the bank of the Shenandoah River, with the bodies of other fighters.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824 at Hudson, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with young Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. “Dear Belle,” he had written to his child-wife, “I would gladly come home and stay with you always but for the cause which brought me here — a desire to do something for others, and not live wholly for my own happiness.... I sometimes feel as if I could not make this sacrifice, but what would I not want others to do were I in their place?” Their son would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive his father, because he was sent out with a white flag by his father John Brown to parley and was gut-shot by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and live on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a longish period. When one of his captors asked “What brought you here?” he responded “Duty, sir.” The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. Recovering the skeleton from this college during the Civil War, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks, before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. The name “John E. Cook” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was an Oberlin, Ohio carpenter and freeborn black American who was the son of a slave. He was active in the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society. It was rumored that he escorted John Price to Canada after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Copeland later participated in the raid on the Harpers Ferry armory with John Brown. He got trapped in “Hall’s Rifle Works” along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi. When the 3 made a run for the Shenandoah River they got caught in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker would assert in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” On the day that he died Copeland declared, “If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause — I had rather die than be a slave!” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was “Anthony” rather than “Anderson.”)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem, Ohio on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale, Iowa. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.” THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16th, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color

Dr. Martin Robison Delany, Pennsylvania, 1843; attended the Colored National Convention of 1848; attended the Emigration Convention of 1854; a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party in 1858; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, “M.R. Delany,” the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. That document would be discovered on Brown’s person when he was taken into custody. He would be a Major in the 104th Colored Infantry, and Sub-Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, in 1865. He was a Freemason.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

John Buchanan Floyd No No No Supporter white

Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd was one of those who had been warned, months in advance, that Captain John Brown was planning to attack a federal arsenal to seize weapons with which to arm black slaves, in the creation of a servile insurrection (he didn’t know precisely when, and didn’t know it would be at Harpers Ferry, Virginia). Such a prospect did not alarm him in the slightest. The official story, if the official story is what you want to believe, is that our Secretary of War would pass this warning along to no-one. I myself find it difficult to regard this as anything more than a cover. I think the truth was that these folks were aware that such a servile insurrection could lead to nothing but a race genocide, with white Americans exterminating the black ones, and what I fear is that such a race genocide would have been considered to be just fine, an improvement in our national condition. Let’s not have ourselves a civil war of brother against brother, that would be so nasty — let’s prevent that by having ourselves a nice little race war!

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another nation. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits (Forbes was a veteran of the Grenadier Guards, and had fought along with Garibaldi in defense of the Roman Republic of 1849), and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery (another of the unresolved issues is what happened to Forbes once his extortion had failed — he simply disappeared from the pages of history).

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black con artist named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of servile insurrection plots who were being discovered and offed. According to this “mumper” Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the vicinity of the arsenal did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free black Americans (Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859; census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry, a period during which the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%).

The Rev. and Mrs. Gloucester No Financial support of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester and Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester of Brooklyn, New York were wealthy financial supporters of the servile-insurrection plot of Captain John Brown, or “Shubel Morgan,” or “Isaac Smith” (depending on what alias he was using at the time), and had put him up for a week at their home while he was enroute to Harpers Ferry. According to a report in a local newspaper: Brown said, “Goodbye, Sister Gloucester. I’ve only sixteen men, but I’m to conquer.” Mrs. Gloucester said to him, “Perhaps you will lose your life.” “Well, my life,” he replied, “is not worth much. I’m an old man. In Kansas, the balls flew around my head as thick as hail. I’ll never be killed by a ball. If I fall, I’ll open a ball in this country that will never stop until every slave is free.”

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James Henry Harris HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

No one associated with Captain John Brown, and no one associated with politics in North Carolina, has ever been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “J.H. Harris” signed, as a member of a Vigilance Committee, on May 8th, 1858, the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, a document which would be found on the person of John Brown when he was captured at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. Although another person of this name, James Henry Harris, had been born a slave in Granville County, North Carolina and had gained his freedom at the age of 18 in about 1848, he was not this “J.H. Harris.” Educated at Oberlin College, he would hold a teaching certificate from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society. He was of Cleveland in 1859, and a member of the 102d US Colored Infantry formed in Michigan by George DeBaptiste that included so many men from Chatham. He would attend the 1st Freedmen’s Convention in the South, held in what would become the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on Edenton Street in Raleigh during September 1865 as a representative of Wake County. He would become the 1st black alderman from Raleigh, and a delegate from Raleigh to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868; he got married with Bettie Miller, a daughter of Addison J. Smith and Mary Anderson, a cousin of Osborn Perry Anderson; he died in 1891 in Washington DC and the remains are at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh. There is yet a 3d James H. Harris, who was not this “J.H. Harris” signatory, who was belatedly awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and is interred in the remote section of Arlington National Cemetery that was reserved for colored soldiers, and for contrabands.

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860. George B. Gill said that “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving “Bleeding Kansas.” To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15th, 1860, the eve of his execution, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

Reverend T. W. Higginson No White

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six” believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3 of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) [Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991].

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear and would be imprisoned for a period —but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No No No Support of color

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of mixed race, an upscale tailor (John Brown visited his home). He and his wife Mary Jane Richardson Jones were active abolitionists whose home was a station on the Underground Railroad while they agitated for repeal of “Black Laws” (not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free to enter the state of Illinois but, once there, these laws barred them from visiting the homes of whites, owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contract).

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Although John Henry Kagi, alias Maurice Maitland, alias John Henrie, was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. “In a very few days we shall commence,” he wrote on the eve of the raid, “things could not be more cheerful and more certain of success than they are. We have worked hard and suffered much, but the hardest is down now, and a glorious success is in sight.... Be cheerful. Don’t imagine dangers. All will be well.” At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got caught in crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, shot in the head, his body being left to float in the river.

Amos Lawrence No White

Amos Lawrence and his son Amos Adams Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio, a saddler and harness maker whose father had been a freeborn black harness maker as well. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. “Tell no man where I have gone,” he commented, “you’ll see me again, but I’ll be marching at the top of the drum.... Men must suffer for a good cause.” He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips. The corpse was dumped into the common pit beside the Shenandoah River, not to be exhumed until 1899. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was of a wild disposition. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell, Maine, by the age of 14 he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” with the 2d batch of recruits from Massachusetts, and on September 9, 1856 became a member of Captain John Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars.” He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years of age. At Springdale, Iowa, Owen Brown found him full of swagger and bluster and difficult to control George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” He signed “W.H. Leeman” to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when the raiders were subdued at Harpers Ferry. By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20, the youngest of the raiders. He wrote his mother, “I shall be in danger, but it is natural to me. I shall not get killed. I am in a good cause, and I am not afraid.” He made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to attempt to escape by swimming down the Potomac River, where two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet. For hours his corpse would be used for target practice by drunken citizens, until their hail of bullets pushed the riddled remains into a current that drew it along until only his black hair could be glimpsed in the ripples on the surface. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles W. Moffett Yes white

We believe that the name of Charles W. Moffett of Iowa was among the signatories to Chatham, Ontario’s “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” as “C.W. Moffit,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. Perhaps this “W” stood for “Wesley,” if we can rely upon a tombstone in the Maple Hill cemetery in Montour, Iowa (“Charles Wesley Moffett / Jun. 20, 1827-Aug. 19, 1904”). We wonder if perhaps he did not attend the raid on the federal arsenal because he got cold feet, or perhaps because he was one of a number of people suspected by the others of having written to alert Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd to the plan for a raid on a federal arsenal (the Cabinet member received these warnings while at Red Sweet Springs in Virginia and neglected to alert anyone to be on the lookout for such an attack — he would remind people later that as War Secretary he had been getting a whole lot of spurious warnings).

Edwin Morton No White

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six.” He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with that family. After the raid, with the heat on while Jefferson Davis was conducting a congressional investigation, he fled overseas as did Frederick Douglass, and for the duration chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, son of a Scotsman, very tall and with a splendid physique, was written by his wife begged him to obtain funds to purchase her and their baby who that had just “commenced to crawl ... as soon as possible, for if you do not get me somebody else will.” She pleaded “Oh Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money I want to see you so much; that is the one bright hope I have before me.” He was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town, Virginia, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it. His corpse was dumped into the shallow group pit beside the Shenandoah River, to be exhumed in 1899.

Reverend Theodore Parker No White

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

Luke F. Parsons White

Luke F. Parsons, 22-year-old white man, already a mercenary fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas,” a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse. His name “L.F. Parsons” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859.

Friend John Hunt Painter White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Hunt Painter, a birthright Quaker who owned a farm near Springdale, Iowa, a farm that was used as a waystation on the Underground Railroad, forwarded stored firearms to Captain John Brown at his hideout near Harpers Ferry. After disownment by the Religious Society of Friends he would relocate his farm family to downtown Pasadena, California to there construct and be the proprietor of the toney La Pintoresca hotel.

Richard Realf White

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a blacksmith who had become a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by “instincts” which he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” He had been introduced by John Edwin Cook, whom he had met in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette, to John Brown in Mount Tabor, Iowa at the end of November or beginning of December 1857. He traveled through Chicago and Detroit to Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, and his name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He returned to England to lecture, and visited France, before traveling from Havre on March 2, 1859 to New Orleans, arriving April 17, 1959 with the objective of becoming a Jesuit priest. He would testify before the US Senate Committee.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

George J. Reynolds of color

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. He had attended the Convention of Colored Men in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859, as “J.G. Reynolds” (3 weeks after this convention, he would disclose some of John Brown’s agenda to a black secret paramilitary group in Sandusky, Ohio).

Richard Richardson No of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him. He was a member of the African Mysteries, a secret defense group in Michigan in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859, but evidently did not get from Ontario to Virginia due to lack of travel money. He became a private in Company E of the 113th US Colored Infantry that was formed from the 13th US Colored Infantry that was recruited in and spent its entire service in Arkansas.

Judge Thomas Russell No White

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

Gerrit Smith No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos in May 1855, he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake” of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great- grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.”

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white

Stewart Taylor was born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with Captain Brown through George B. Gill. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. A spiritualist, he confidently predicted his own death. He signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario, Canada West per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington, Illinois, and thence to Harper’s [sic] Ferry.” While out of touch with the John Brown movement, he had feared being left behind: “I felt as though I was deprived of my chief object in life.... I believe that fate has decreed me for this undertaking.... It is my chief desire to add fuel to the fire.” When mortally wounded in the engine house, begging to be put out of his misery, Brown told him to “die like a man.” What remained of his corpse would be recovered in 1899 from a soggy group pit near the Shenandoah River above Harpers Ferry.

Eli Thayer No HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes,” a “pippin-cheeked country boy.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson got married with Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson got married with Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. “I suppose the folk think we are a set of fools,” he wrote from someplace he described as “Parts Unknown,” “but they will find out we know what we are about.” The two brothers died at Harpers Ferry, Dauphin cowering beneath a fire engine until skewered by a Marine bayonet. Their bodies were placed in the common pit beside the Shenandoah River above town, and exhumed in 1899.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. During Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He “would have made a successful comic actor ... he was very lively and full of funny stories and jokes.” He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body onto the rocks of the Potomac River. The corpse “could be seen lying at the bottom of the river, with his ghastly face still showing what a fearful death agony he had experienced.” One of his captors commented that for such “villainous Abolitionists,” he “felt justified in shooting any that I could find. I felt it my duty, and I have no regrets.” The corpse was dumped into a common pit on the bank of the Shenandoah River above town, and buried about a foot deep.

Henry David Thoreau No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo, Maine in 1834 and had emigrated to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Mount Tabor, Iowa in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857/1858 encampment of the Brown forces in Springdale, Iowa, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He signed, as “Charles P. Tidd,” the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Henry Watson No of color

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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EDWIN MORTON

EDWIN MORTON

1613

Nathaniel Morton was born in England, the eldest son of George Morton. He would come across to the New World with his father and mother as members of the Scrooby Congregation during 1623, and during 1635 would become a freeman and get married with Lydia Cooper, who would bear Remember Morton during 1637; Mercy Morton; Lydia Morton; Elizabeth Morton born on May 3, 1652; Joanna Morton born on November 9, 1654; and Hannah Morton; besides Eliezer Morton and Nathaniel Morton who would die in early youth so that descent in the male line would fail. He would have the benefit of all the MSS of Governor William Bradford, his uncle, and would compile the well known “New-Englands Memoriall,” of which the 5th edition would be HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

illustrated by Judge Davis. He would be secretary of Plymouth Colony from 1645 until his death.

Edwin Morton of Plymouth would be one of his violinist descendants. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1623

July: Hobomok witnessed Plymouth’s prayers for rain, prayers which apparently brought to an end a six-week drought, and became intrigued by the powers of this Christian religion.

Per John Camden Hotten’s EMIGRANT ANCESTORS (1874), after the vessels Anne and Little James had parted company at sea the Anne had arrived at Boston harbor during the latter part of June, with the Little James arriving some week or ten days later. At this point the Anne and the Little James came to anchor at the Plymouth beachhead, bringing new settlers along with many of the wives and children that had been left behind in Leyden when the Mayflower had departed in 1620.

Among that boatload of people was Robert Bartlett, who would get married in 1628 with Mary Warren, daughter of Richard Warren. They would produce Benjamin Bartlett, and then in 1638 would produce Joseph Bartlett, and in addition there would be six daughters: Rebecca Bartlett who would get married n December 20, 1649 with William Harlow; Mary Bartlett who would get married on September 19, 1651 with Richard Foster, and then on July 8, 1659 would remarry with Jonathan Morey; Sarah Bartlett who would get married on December 23, 1656 with Samuel Rider of Yarmouth MA; Elizabeth Bartlett who would get married on December 20, 1661 with Anthony Sprague of Hingham MA; Lydia Bartlett who would be born on June 8, 1647 and get married with James Barnaby and then get married with John Nelson of Middleborough; and Mercy Bartlett who would be born on March 10, 1651 and get married on December 25, 1668 with John Ivey of Boston. This passenger Robert Bartlett was of the first purchase of Dartmouth, and would die in 1676 at the age of 73. His widow Mary Warren Bartlett would remarry on October 24 either in the year 1692 or in the year 1699 with Thomas Delano.

The George Morton who was arriving was not the son of the infamous Thomas Morton of Merry Mount yet, no doubt, he was a relative of that numerous family and perhaps a brother of the 2nd Thomas Morton. He had been born at Austerfield in Yorkshire and had been baptized on February 12, 1599.

He arrived at Boston and then Plymouth in the Ann with a wife Juliana Carpenter Morton whom he had married at Leyden on July 23, 1612, a daughter of Alexander Carpenter, and four or five children counted with Experience Mitchell for 8 in the 1624 division of lands, including his eldest son Nathaniel Morton, son John Morton, son Ephraim Morton, daughter Patience Morton, daughter Sarah Morton, and Thomas Morton, Jr., the son of Thomas Morton of the Fortune. Edwin Morton of Plymouth would be one of his violinist descendants.

The ship’s list of passengers was: Annable, Anthony (settled in Scituate) Jane (Momford) Annable, wife Sarah Annable, daughter Hannah Annable, daughter Bangs, Edward (settled in Eastham) Bartlett, Robert Buckett, Mary Brewster, Patience (a daughter of Elder Brewster) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Brewster, Fear (a daughter of Elder Brewster) Clarke, Thomas (his gravestone is the oldest on Plymouth Burial Hill) Conant, Christopher Cooke, Mrs. Hester (Mahieu) Jane Cooke, daughter Jacob Cooke, son Hester Cooke, daughter Dix, Anthony Faunce, John Flavel, Goodwife (probably Mrs. Elizabeth Flavel, wife of Thomas Flavell of the Fortune) Flood, Edmond Fuller, Mrs. Bridget (Lee) (apparently the wife of Dr. Samuel Fuller) Godbertson, Godbert or Cuthbertson, Cuthbert (a Hollander rather than a Pilgrim) Sarah (Allerton) (Vincent) (Priest) Godbertson, wife Samuel Godbertson, son Sarah Priest, step-daughter Mary Priest, step-daughter Hatherly, Timothy Heard, William Hicks, Mrs. Margaret (with her children below; family of Robert Hickes of the Fortune) Samuel Hicks, son Lydia Hicks, daughter Hilton, Mrs. William (with her children below; William Hilton had sent for them before his death) William Hilton, son Mary Hilton, daughter Holman, Edward Jenny, John (Why wasn’t he on the list, was he a man of color? He had “liberty, in 1636, to erect a mill for grinding and beating of corn upon the brook of Plymouth”) Kempton, Manasseh Long, Robert Mitchell, Experience (would marry Jane Cooke, daughter of Francis Cooke of the Mayflower) Morton, George (paterfamilias; family below) Juliana Morton, wife Nathanial Morton, son (afterwards the 1st Secretary of Plymouth) John Morton, son Ephraim Morton, son HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Patience Morton, daughter Sarah Morton, daughter Morton, Thomas Jr. (son of Thomas Morton of the Fortune) Newton, Ellen Oldham, John Mrs. Oldham, wife Lucretia Oldham, sister Palmer, Mrs. Frances (wife of William Palmer of the Fortune) Penn, Christian Pierce, Abraham Pratt, Joshua Rand, James Rattliff, Robert Mrs. Rattliff, wife Snow, Nicholas (settled in Eastham) Southworth, Alice (widow, formerly named Carpenter, would remarry as the 2nd wife of Governor William Bradford) Sprague, Francis (settled in Duxbury) Anna Sprague, wife Mercy Sprague, daughter Standish, Mrs. Barbara (would become the 2d wife of Captain Miles Standish) Tilden, Thomas (Ann?) Tilden, wife child Tilden Tracy, Stephen Wallen, Ralph Joyce Wallen, wife Warren, Mrs. Elizabeth Mary Warren, daughter Elizabeth Warren, daughter Ann Warren, daughter Sarah Warren, daughter Abigail Warren, daughter Mr. Perce’s two servants HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1624

June: George Morton, who had come to Boston in the Ann during 1623 with his wife Julian Carpenter Morton and four or five children and had resided in the Plymouth Colony, died. His widow Julian Carpenter Morton would remarry with Manasseh Kempton, and is thought to have been a sister of Governor William Bradford. She would die at the age of 81 on February 19, 1665. The children were Nathaniel Morton; Patience Morton, who married during 1633 with a fellow-passenger John Faunce, father of the celebrated Elder Faunce; John Morton, born during 1616; Sarah Morton, born during 1618, married on December 20, 1644 with George Bonham; and Ephraim Morton. This George Morton has been presumed to have been in 1622 the editor of the tract “MOURT’S RELATION”, or A RELATION OR IOURNALL OF THE BEGINNING AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE ENGLIFH PLANTATION FETTLED AT PLIMOTH, IN NEW-ENGLAND, BY CERTAINE …, which described the initial experiences of the “Old Comers” at their Massachusetts Bay settlement of Plymouth. Edwin Morton of Plymouth would be one of his violinist descendants. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1669

Nathaniel Morton’s NEW-ENGLANDS MEMORIALL was published. Thoreau would write later that “Nathaniel Morton, in his NEW ENGLAND’S MEMORIAL, printed in 1669 — speaking of white men going to treat with Canonicus, a Narraghanset Indian, about Mr. Oldham’s death in 1636 — says ‘Boiled chestnuts is their white bread, and because they would be extraordinary in their feasting, they strove for variety after the English manner, boiling puddings made of beaten corn, putting therein great store of blackberries, somewhat like currants’ — no doubt whortleberries. This seems to imply that the Indians imitated the English — or set before their guests dishes to which they themselves were not accustomed — or which were extra-ordinary. But we have seen that these dishes were not new or unusual to them and it was the whites who imitated the Indians rather.”

“HUCKLEBERRIES”: But Nathaniel Morton, in his NEW ENGLAND’S MEMORIAL, printed in 1669 — speaking of white men going to treat with Canonicus, a Narraghanset Indian, about Mr. Oldham’s death in 1636 — says ‘Boiled chestnuts is their white bread, and because they would be extraordinary in their feasting, they strove for variety after the English manner, boiling puddings made of beaten corn, putting therein great store of blackberries, somewhat like currants’ — no doubt whortleberries. This seems to imply that the Indians imitated the English — or set before their guests dishes to which they themselves were not accustomed — or which were extra-ordinary. But we have seen that these dishes were not new or unusual to them and it was the whites who imitated the Indians rather.

NATHANIEL MORTON CANONICUS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.” — The Scarecrow, in THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (L. Frank Baum, 1904)

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

FRONTMATTER Governor Bradford Governor Winslow 1620 (Nathaniel Morton) 1621 (Nathaniel Morton) 1621 (Thomas Prince) 1622 (Nathaniel Morton) 1622 (Thomas Prince) 1623 (Nathaniel Morton) 1623 (Thomas Prince) 1624 (Nathaniel Morton) 1624 (Thomas Prince) 1625 (Nathaniel Morton) 1625 (Thomas Prince) 1626 (Nathaniel Morton) 1626 (Thomas Prince) 1627 (Nathaniel Morton) 1627 (Thomas Prince) 1628 (Nathaniel Morton) 1628 (Thomas Prince) 1629 (Nathaniel Morton) 1629 (Thomas Prince) 1630 (Nathaniel Morton) 1631 (Nathaniel Morton) 1632 (Nathaniel Morton) 1633 (Nathaniel Morton) 1634 (Nathaniel Morton) 1635 (Nathaniel Morton) 1636 (Nathaniel Morton) 1637 (Nathaniel Morton) 1638 (Nathaniel Morton) 1639 (Nathaniel Morton) 1640 (Nathaniel Morton) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1641 (Nathaniel Morton) 1642 (Nathaniel Morton) 1643 (Nathaniel Morton) 1644 (Nathaniel Morton) 1645 (Nathaniel Morton) 1646 (Nathaniel Morton) 1647 (Nathaniel Morton) 1648 (Nathaniel Morton) 1649 (Nathaniel Morton) 1650 (Nathaniel Morton) 1651 (Nathaniel Morton) 1652 (Nathaniel Morton) 1653 (Nathaniel Morton) 1654 (Nathaniel Morton) 1655 (Nathaniel Morton) 1656 (Nathaniel Morton) 1657 (Nathaniel Morton) 1658 (Nathaniel Morton) 1659 (Nathaniel Morton) 1660 (Nathaniel Morton) 1661 (Nathaniel Morton) 1662 (Nathaniel Morton) 1663 (Nathaniel Morton) 1664 (Nathaniel Morton) 1665 (Nathaniel Morton) 1666 (Nathaniel Morton) 1667 (Nathaniel Morton) 1668 (Nathaniel Morton) 1669 (by another hand) Bradford’s Dialogue Christianizing Indians Covenant of 1629 Isaac De Rasieres Leyden/Plymouth New Plymouth Visit to the Massasoit HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1685

June 29 Nathaniel Morton, the 1st secretary of the Plymouth colony, died. His first wife had died on September 23, 1673 and he had remarried on April 29, 1674 with Ann Templar, widow of Richard Templar of Charlestown MA, who survived him and would die at age 66 at Charlestown on December 26, 1690. Remember Morton had married on November 18, 1657 with Abraham Jackson, and Mercy Morton had married on that day with Joseph Dunham but had died before her father; Hannah Morton had married on November 27, 1666 with Benjamin Bosworth of Hull MA; Lydia Morton married with George Ellison; Joanna Morton had married on December 7, 1670 with Joseph Prince of Hull MA; and Elizabeth Morton had married on December 7, 1670 with Benjamin Bosworth. Edwin Morton of Plymouth, musician and poet, would be descended from a kinsman of this Nathaniel Morton, 1st secretary of the Plymouth Colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1690

During 1690-1692, Henry Kelsey would be exploring inland to the prairies, seeking trade with the Indians. CARTOGRAPHY

The island of Rodriguez –which is in the Indian Ocean not far to the east of Mauritius but is too tiny to indicate on this map showing Mauritius and Réunion– was settled temporarily by refugees of the Huguenot diaspora

under the leadership of Abraham du Quesne. This was not an atypical event. One of the reasons why the tropical island became a commonplace trope for mental refuge from political turmoil in French literature, as it did as well in English literature for Marvell, was that by this point the various islands of the Indian Ocean had begun to offer to numerous bands of French Protestant that commodity most eagerly sought by the political and religious refugee — refuge: [W]e admired the secret and extraordinary operations of Providence which after having permitted us to be ruined in our own country, and to be cruelly driven from it, had at least suffered us … this earthly paradise to which we had been conducted. — François Le Guat

By this point, there were only four settlements remaining in Maine from which at least some of the English inhabitants had not fled. In Boston, fully a quarter of the population consisted of impoverished widows and orphans who had fled from these frontier settlements.

The two acres of Snake Island appeared off Winthrop on a chart of Boston Harbor with the name Bare Island. It is now just east of Logan Airport and has been renamed after its serpentine shape. It has escaped the fate of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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two other islands –Apple Island and Governors Island– the mud flats of which were incorporated into the Logan Airport runway system during the 1940s and 1950s. The island is mostly a tern nesting site.

As Henry Thoreau would record the event in his journal, the town of Plymouth decided not to keep Clark’s Island “as a sacred place” and it was purchased by Elkanah Watson, Samuel Lucas, and a George Morton who was a relative of, but not a descendant of, the George Morton who was the 1st secretary of that Colony:

Clark’s Island Sunday night [in July 1851] On Friday night Dec 8th o.s. the Pilgrims exploring in the shallop landed on Clark’s Island (so called from the Master’s mate of the May Flower) where they spent 3 nights & kept their first sabbath. On Monday or the 11th o.s. they landed on the rock. This island contains about 86 acres and was once covered with red cedars which were sold at Boston for gate posts– I saw a few left –one 2 ft in diameter at the ground –which was probably standing when the pilgrims came. Ed. Watson who could remember them nearly fifty years –had observed but little change in them. Hutchinson calls this one of the best islands in Mass. Bay. The Town kept it at first as a sacred place –but finally sold it in 1690 to Sam. Lucas, Elkanah Watson, & Geo. Morton. Saw a Stag’s horn Sumach 5 or 6 inches in diameter and 18 ft high– Here was the Marsh golden rod Solidago laevigata –not yet in blossom –a small bluish flower in the marshes which they called rosemary –a kind of Chenopodium which appeared distinct from the common –and a short oval leaved set looking plant which I suppose is Glaux Maritima sea milkwort or Saltwort. Scates-eggs called in England Scate-barrows from their form on the sand.

The old cedars were flat-topped spreading the stratum of the wind drawn out– HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1832

December 31, Monday: Edwin Morton was born a son of Edwin Morton, and descended from a Pilgrim Father, George Morton (he was about a year younger than his buddy Franklin Benjamin Sanborn).

Toward the end of the year Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied not being in good health, Karl Bodmer proceeded alone from New Harmony, Indiana.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 31 of 12 M 1832 / This is a season of the Year which never passes unnoticed & unfelt by me — That time is going rapidly is certain I can now look back & well recollect circumstances which occurd about 45 Years ago, & the time, where is it —- Well it is certainly not to be recalled & I desire to be thankful for past & present good & I apprehend there are but few who have had more to be thankful for — While my life has not been exempt from trial I certainly have cause of great thankfulness for many favours & exemptions from many of the keen & stinging afflictions which fall to the lot of many. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

While vacationing at a “tranquil retreat” near Boston called “Brook Farm” Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley and the Reverend George Ripley concluded that the place had possibilities.1

In the winter of 1840, the Reverend Ripley would purchase Brook Farm. A few months later the Articles of Association would be drawn up, the stock would have subscribers, and Institute officers would be elected.

1. The farm had 208 acres of land and was not greatly isolated as it was only three miles from the Dedham Branch Railroad. Edwin Morton of Plymouth would be able to see Brook Farm from the inside because both his father and his uncle invested in the venture (they would lose their money, as did most of the kind souls who thus contributed). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

August 5, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Benjamin Marston Watson in Plymouth, presumably from Concord, conveying a sample of a pale-fruited form (leucocarpa) of Black Huckleberry Gaylussacia baccata, a sample of Sand Cherry Prunus susquehanae, a sample of what we now identify as American Hornbeam (or Ironwood) Carpinus caroliniana, the fruit of which looks somewhat like hops, and a sample of American Hackberry (or False Elm) Celtis occidentalis (this was the period in which, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Watson was initiating his “Old Colony Nurseries”).2 The box is full of red huckleberries, warranted not to change their hue, or lose their virtues in any climate, though I will not speak for the condition of this box when opened. BIGELOW The other contains half a dozen cherries (Sand Cherries, Bigelow?) The last grew within a rod of my lodge. I plucked them all today The third box — which should contain the seeds of the Carpinus Americana — hop-wood — False Elm &c waits for their seeds to ripen Yrs Henry D Thoreau Aug 5th 1845

BOTANIZING FLORULA BOSTONIENSIS

2. Edwin Morton of Plymouth was trained in Greek and Transcendentalism by Benjamin Marston Watson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

May: The family of the William Jackman who had become the author of a captivity-and-escape narrative sold their land claim near Madison, Wisconsin and traveled overland to Prairie Du Chein, where they boarded the War Eagle and traveled on the Mississippi River to Prescott, Wisconsin.

A formal “conversation” was staged in Waldo Emerson’s study, between 2 and 3 in the afternoon, with Bronson Alcott and Emerson as two of the conversants, the audience consisting of young Harvard men, primarily from the Harvard Divinity School. Among these was Edwin Morton of Plymouth. Emerson opened the event by stating with confidence that literature could be, in America, a young man’s occupation and bread- winner. There followed a consideration of various Harvard professors and tutors, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Ticknor, Edward Everett, Jones Very, James Walker, etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

January: Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by Edwin Morton titled “Thoreau and His Books” in the Harvard Magazine, 1:92, 98-99. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The sounds ... of Nature,—from the chirping sparrow to the screeching owl; from the lowing cow to the tr- r-o-o-nking frog,—who has ever heard them as [Thoreau] has? That chapter in Walden on Sounds! I have read and re-read it, always with delight. It deserves binding by itself, and gilt binding at that. * * * The critic will remember that Mr. Thoreau, where he speaks of “browsing Olive-Branches,” has some excellent remarks upon newspapers; that reformers, alas! may sometimes begin with themselves; and that society, God knows, is bad enough. The question is, whether Mr. Thoreau takes the right way, or any way, to mend it. On the whole, we think he has no business with it. He has as distinct an office— mission, if you will—as any which Mr. Pierce can dispense, and many times more honorable. As the critic says, he is the “priest and poet of Nature,” but, as the Night-song runs,—

“Zu was anderm taugt er nicht.”

Further alluding to Walden, as a “book, though less artistic than its predecessor, yet in other respects superior, and in every way worthy the attention (he might have added, the admiration) of all honest readers,” the critic disappears in the sunset cloud of this farewell apostrophe. Speaking of the discontent of some of his friends with society, and what prompted them to organize (?) the “Brook Farm Community,” as “a true and noble aspiration for a better life,” and of this joined with a certain “natural wildness” as shaping the destiny of Mr. Thoreau, he says: “This is the dæmon, seemingly satyrical, with a head for the stars, and hoofs to dig in the earth, which harries you now, as it ever will. This it is which causes you to shift from ‘pencil-making,’ ‘huckleberrying,’ or thy more praiseworthy and excellent surveying, ‘from fear of doing a good business’;—a Brahministic antipathy to what is, in a worldly sense, practical. This, which sent you dreaming down the Concord River, and up the Merrimack. Spiritually, poetically Quixotic pilgrimage! Rozinantean bark! Quaint navigators! Dreams infinitely beautiful, and sometimes, as the best dreams are, infinitely unintelligible!—Ah, Pliniogenes, if, in that divine pilgrimage, that Ulyssean wandering, (for the fates are not idle with thee,) thou hadst met with some Calypso’s island, what dreams should we not have had!—And this, at last, which drove thee restless from a peaceful home, to live like a Gaboon savage, materially, at Walden Pond; spiritually, a true—the truest— prophet of Nature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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TIMELINE OF WALDEN

BROOK FARM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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George Eliot also reviewed Henry Thoreau’s literary production: In other critical comments, Marian [Mary Anne Evans (Lewes) = “George Eliot”] criticized Kingsley’s WESTWARD HO! for being too “parsonic,” an amusing remark given her own penchant for sermonistic writing.... Marian was not duped by Tennyson’s war cries [in MAUD], the male song of blood and sacrifice [in regard to the Crimean War]. Her taste is revealed in her approval of Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN, which she reviewed in the January 1855 issue of the Westminster [Review] and found quite sympathetic. How could she not have found a receptive voice in Thoreau’s paean to solitude and to natural splendor! She found particularly gratifying his joining of a clear eye with a poetic strain which allowed him to turn realism into imaginative prose. But she also found Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “HIAWATHA” sympathetic, and recommended it; that she failed to object to its childish moralism cannot be explained.... In all, she covered over 150 books in her seven contributions to this segment of the [Westminster] Review, including favorable comments on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s DRED, in October 1856. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Into the Valley of Death rode the 500, tra-la, tra-la....

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Early in the year: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn encountered Bronson Alcott at Bartlett’s bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, according to Sanborn, Alcott indicated that he was entirely pleased with Edwin Morton’s reviews of Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in The Harvard Magazine. When Sanborn returned to Harvard and told Morton of this, Morton insisted that they go together to visit Alcott, and according to Sanborn, Alcott met them “with his serene smile at his study door.” The trio then went to Bartlett’s bookshop and he and Morton looked at a magazine together, but then Alcott then took that magazine with him when they left. “He explained his special arrangement with the store, laughing about the look on my face when I’d seemed to have caught him, in his old age, stealing.” TIMELINE OF A WEEK TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 16, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau came in from Concord to Cambridge and Boston on various errands, and dropped off a bound copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS in the Holworthy Hall room of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who at that time was the editor of the Harvard Magazine. This copy, inscribed “To the ‘Unknown’ (but / guessed at) Critic of the / Harvard Magazine, / from / the Author. / Jan. 16 1855”, is now in the Rare Books Library of the University of Florida. [WHAT SPECIFIC JOTTING DID SANBORN ADD? “*Lent me by / Mr. Thoreau, in xxxxxxx / of a xxxxx in the Har./ Mag. for Dec. ‘54”] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He checked out, from the Harvard Library at Gore Hall, Thomas Bewick’s A HISTORY OF BRITISH BIRDS (Volume I, Land Birds, 1797; Volume II, Water Birds, 1804).

He also checked out Father Gabriel Sagard-Théodat’s HISTOIRE DU CANADA ET VOYAGES QUE LES FRÈRES MINEURS RECOLLECTS Y ONT FAI C TS POUR LA CONVERSION DES INFIDÈLLES (Paris: 1636). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 30, Tuesday: On approximately this date Henry Thoreau was being written to by Thomas Cholmondeley in England.

Hodnet Salop [Jan. 30] Tuesday 1855. Dear Thoreau You will be glad to hear that I am safe at my Brothers house in Salop after a most disagreeable passage to England in the steamer HDT WHAT? INDEX

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America. I have accepted the offer of a Captaincy in the Salop Militia, & it is probable that we shall be sent before very long to relieve other troops who are proceeding to the seat of the war: but if the strife continues to consume men at its present rate of 1000 a week we shall be involved

Page 2 in it I hope before the year is out by volunteering into the Line. Meanwhile I shall use my best diligence to learn all I can of my men &c & prepare myself for the active service to which I impatiently look forward. Nothing can be more awful than the position of our poor army. At the present rate of mortality they will be finished up by the time they are most wanted; & it will be reserved for the French to take Sabastopel. We are learning a tremendous lesson: I hope we shall profit by [it] & so far from receding I trust we

Page 3 shall continue hostilities with greater energy & greater wisdom than before. I would rather see the country decimated than an [in]glorious or even an accommodating peace. My passion is to see the fellows crushed or to die in the attempt. Lord John has resigned & the ministry is, we all think, breaking up. It was high time considering the mismanagement of New Castle. We are in the midst of a great HDT WHAT? INDEX

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snow (great at least for us). Colds are rife in the Parish so that “coughing drowns the Parsons saw”. I find the red brick houses are the most striking feature on revisiting

Page 4 this country. Though a great deal smaller than your elegant villas our cottages on the whole please my eyes & look more homey, & very suggestive of good cheer. There is such a quietness & excessive sleepiness about Shropshire — the only excitement being an occasional alehouse brawl — that it is hardly possible to imagine we are at war! The fact is the common people never see a newspaper — & such [is] their confidence in “the Queen's army[”] that they believe prolonged resistance on the part of any power would be impossible & absurd. My cousin in

Page 5 the Crimea still survives contrary to my expectations — we have heard a good anecdote from him. Early on Christmas morning the remains of the regiment to wh. he belongs gatherd painfully together, & as day dawned they all sung the fine English Carol “Christmas Awake.” It is rather touching. I find all here quite well & hearty & hope your people will be the same when this arrives at Concord — a place I shall often revisit in spirit– Pray remember me to your father mother & sister — to Mr Emerson & [C]hanning & do not forget your promise to come over some time

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to England, which you will find a very snug & hospitable country — though perhaps decaying, & not on such a huge scale as America. My romance — the Dream of my life — without which it is not worth living for me — is — a glorious commonwealth– I am persuaded that things must in their way to [ ] be greatly worse before they can become better. Turn it how you will our English nation no longer stands upon the Living Laws of the Eternal God — we have turned ourselves to an empire & cotton bags & the luxury [?] of prodigious manufacture. Let [ ] all go & let us grow great men again

Page 7 instead of dressing up dolls for the market. I feel we are strong enough to live a better life than this one which now festers in all our joints. So much for the confession of a thorough English conservative as you know me to be! You have my direction so pray write — your letter will be forwarded to wherever I may be. Dear Thoreau Ever affectionately your[s] Thos Cholmondeley. ______Henry Thoreau Esqre Concord Massachusetts U.S. North America.

Thoreau was written to by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.

{No MS — printed copy Sanborn, 1882} “HAMPTON FALLS, N. H., Jan’y 30th, ’55. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“MY DEAR SIR,— I have had it in mind to write you a letter ever since the day when you visited me, without my knowing it, at Cambridge. I saw you afterward at the Library, but refrained from introducing myself to you, in the hope that I should see you later in the day. But as I did not, will you allow me to seek you out, when next I come to Concord? “The author of the criticism in the ‘Harvard Magazine’ is Mr. Morton of Plymouth, a friend and pupil of your friend, Marston Watson, of that old town. Accordingly I gave him the book which you left with me, judging that it belonged to him. He received it with delight, as a gift of value in itself, and the more valuable for the sake of the giver. “We who at Cambridge look toward Concord as a sort of mecca for our pilgrimages, are glad to see that your last book finds such favor with the public. It has made its way where your name has rarely been heard before, and the inquiry, ’Who is Mr. Thoreau?’ proves that the book has in part done its work. For my own part, I thank you for the new light it shows me the aspects of Nature in, and for the marvelous beauty of your descriptions. At the same time, if any one should ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be apt to answer that it is not worth a straw. Whenever again you visit Cambridge, be assured, sir, that it would give me much pleas- ure to see you at my room. There, or in Con- cord, I hope soon to see you; if I may intrude so much on your time. “Believe me always, yours very truly, “F.B. SANBORN.”

Minott ... [t]old how Jake Lakin lost a dog, a very valuable one, by a fox leading him on to DOG the ice on the Great Meadows and drowning him.3 GEORGE MINOTT

3. Compare this entry with the entry for January 2, 1859: “Minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to the ice in order that he may get in. Tells of Jake Lakin losing a hound so, which went under the ice and was drowned below the Holt; was found afterward by Sted. Buttrick, his collar taken off and given to Lakin. They used to cross the river there on the ice, going to market, formerly.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 2, Friday: Henry Thoreau skated. He wrote to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn saying he would like to meet him if he comes to Concord.

Concord Feb 2nd ’55 Mr F. B. Sanborn, Dear Sir, I fear that you did not get the note which I left with the Librarian for you, and so will thank you again for [your] politeness. I was sorry that I was obliged to go into Boston almost immediately. How- ever, I shall be glad to see you whenever you come to Concord, and I will suggest nothing to discour- age your coming, so far as I am concerned, trusting that you know what it is to take a partridge on the

Page 2 wing. You tell me that the author of the criticism is Mr. Morton. I had heard as much, & indeed guessed more. I have latterly found Concord nearer to Cambridge than I believed I should, when I was leaving my Alma Mater, and hence you will not be surprised if even I feel some interest in the success of the Harvard magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Believe me [Yrs] truly Henry D. Thoreau

February 2. Quite clear and colder, yet it could not refrain from snowing half an inch more in the night, whitening the ground now, as well as the ice Brown is again filling his ice-house, which he commenced to do some weeks ago I got another skate this afternoon, in spite of the thin coating of snow. This, then, is the fourth day of this rare skating, though since yesterday noon the slight whitening of snow has hurt it somewhat The river at 4 P. M. has fallen some eight or ten inches. In some places there are thin flakes of ice standing on their edges within an inch or two of each other over more than a quarter of an acre, either ice blown into that position (which in this case is not likely, since there is a great deal too much for that surface) or crystallized so while the water suddenly ran off below. There are large tracts of thin white ice, where the water ran off before it had time to freeze hard enough to bear This last half-inch of snow, which fell in the night, is just enough to track animals on the ice by. All about the Hill and Rock I see the tracks of rabbits which have run back and forth close to the shore repeatedly since the night. In the case of the rabbit the fore feet are further apart than the hind ones, the first say four or five inches to the outside, the last two or three [Thoreau afterward discovered his mistake and learned that the hind feet come down outside and in front of the fore feet.]. They are generally not quite regular, but one of the fore feet a little in advance of the other, and so with one of the hind feet. There is an interval of about sixteen inches between each four tracks. Sometimes they are in a curve or crescent, all touching. I saw what must have been either a muskrat’s or mink’s track, I think, since it came out of the water, — the tracks roundish and toes much rayed, four or five inches apart in the trail, with only a trifle more between the fore and hind legs, and the mark of the tail in successive curves as it struck the ice, thus: Another track puzzled me, as if a hare had been running like a dog and touched its tail, — if it had any. This in several places Snowed again half an inch more in the evening, after which, at ten o’clock, the moon still obscured, I skated on the river and meadows. The water falling, the ice on the meadow occasionally settles with a crack under our weight. It is pleasant to feel these swells and valleys occasioned by the subsidence of the water, in some cases pretty abrupt. Also to hear the hollow, rumbling sound in such rolling places on the meadow where there is an empty chamber beneath, the water being entirely run out. Our skates make but little sound in this coating of snow about an inch thick, as if we had on woollen skates, and we can easily see our tracks in the night. We seem thus to go faster than before by day, not only because we do not see (but feel and imagine) our rapidity, but because of the impression which the mysterious muffled sound of our feet makes. In the meanwhile we hear the distant note of a hooting owl, and the distant rumbling of approaching or retreating cars sounds like a constant waterfall. Now and then we skated into some chippy, crackling white ice, where a superficial puddle had run dry before freezing hard, and got a tumble.

April 11, Wednesday: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn made the following entry in his journal (the “we” in the note probably refers to Edwin Morton): To-night we had a call from Mr. Thoreau, who came at eight and stayed till ten. He talked about Latin and Greek —which he thought ought to be studied— and about other things. In his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson, so that it was annoying to listen to him, though he said many good things. He looks like Emerson, too, — coarser, but with something of that serenity and sagacity which E. has. Thoreau looks eminently sagacious — like a sort of wise, wild beast. He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his throat, and has a brown complexion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A beard craze had begun in London during the winter of 1853/1854, as described in David R. Cheney’s “The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt and Charles Ollier in the Winter of 1853-54” (Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1976). At this time of considerable cold and asthma, accounts in the newspapers were describing beards as “natural respirators.”

April 11. Rained in the night. Awake to see the ground white with snow, and it is still snowing, the sleet driving from the north at an angle of certainly not more than thirty or thirty-five degrees with the horizon, as I judge by its course across the window-panes. By mid-afternoon the rain has so far prevailed that the ground is bare. As usual, this brings the tree sparrows and F. h yemalis into the yard again.

May 5, Saturday: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn made his entry in his Harvard College Classbook. He and his buddy Edwin Morton were graduating at the same time.

May 5: P.M. — To Beck Stow’s. Cold weather for several days. Canada plum and cultivated cherry and Missouri currant look as if they would bloom to-morrow. The sugar maples on the Common have just begun to show their stamens peeping out of the bud, but that by Dr. Barrett’s has them an inch and a half long or more. The trees and shrubs which I observe to make a show now with their green, without regard to the time when they began, are (to put them in the order of their intensity and generalness): —

Gooseberry, both kinds Raspberry Meadow-sweet Choke-cherry shoots Some young trembles Very young apples Red currant, and probably black Pyrus, probably arbutifolia Young black cherry Thimble-berry Probably wild red cherry in some places Salix alba with bracts (?) Some small native willows Cultivated cherry Some mountain-ash (i.e. European) Some horse-chestnut Excepting the S. alba, I am inclined to stop with the Pyrus arbutifolia. The Andromeda Polifolia will apparently open about the 10th. High blueberry began to leaf in some places yesterday. Larch began to leaf, say when it opened, the 28th of April, but not noticeably till to-day. I find one bundle with needles a quarter of an inch long and spreading. The small andromeda has lost its reddish leaves, probably about the time it blossomed, and I can neither get the red cathedral-window light looking toward the now westering sun in a most favorable position, nor the gray colors in the other direction, but it is all a grayish green. But the patches of cranberry in the swamp, seen at some distance toward the sun, are a beautiful crimson, which travels with you, keeping between you and the sun, like some rare plant in bloom there densely. I could not believe it was cranberry. Looking over my book, I found I had done my errands, and said to myself I would find a crow’s nest. (I had heard a crow [American Crow Corvus brachyrhynchos] scold at a passing hawk a quarter of an hour before.) I had hardly taken this resolution when, looking up, I saw a crow wending his way across an interval in the woods toward the highest pines in the swamp, on which he alighted. I directed my steps to them, and was soon greeted with an angry caw, and, within five minutes from my resolve, I detected a new nest close to the top of the tallest white pine in the swamp. A crow circled cawing about it within gunshot, then over me surveying, and, perching on an oak directly over my head within thirty-five feet, cawed angrily. But suddenly, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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as if having taken a new resolution, it flitted away, and was joined by its mate and two more, and they went off silently a quarter of a mile or more and lit in a pasture, as if they had nothing to concern them in the wood.

Early Summer: After giving his last recitation for the term, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn took a summer vacation, initially in Boston and along the north shore, but then spending 3 weeks at his family home in Hampton Falls. Sanborn sent off a note to Henry Thoreau who, on January 16th, had made a brief visit to Sanborn’s room in Holworthy Hall in Cambridge to drop off worms intended for Thaddeus William Harris, and to drop off also a complimentary copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS for Edwin Morton (Sanborn not being there, he simply left the packages in the room), and who had written to him on February 2d. When on January 30th Sanborn had acknowledged receipt of the volume, he had praised Thoreau’s descriptions but had opinioned that were anyone to ask him what he thought of Thoreau’s philosophy, “I should be apt to answer it is not worth a straw.”

Walt Whitman had been going every day from the 2-story wooden home into which the Whitman family had moved in May at 99 Ryerson north of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn to the print shop of the Rome brothers in a 3-story red brick building on the corner of Cranberry and Fulton (now the Cadman Plaza West), to help produce his book LEAVES OF GRASS. His brother George Washington Whitman remembered later how unimpressed he and their mother had been:

I saw the book — didn’t read it all — didn’t think it worth reading — fingered it a little.

Mother thought as I did — did not know what to make of it.

No mention being made of the father, clearly at this point he must have been too far along in his final illness (he would die on July 11).4 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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4. An acerbic 1855 review of Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS concluded with the phrase “Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum,” which translates as “That horrible sin unable to be mentioned among Christians.” In BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND (1765-1769) and in BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY, this phrase was a euphemism for what the lay person would term “Sodomy.” What legal types, and paralegals, precisely meant at the time by this Latin would, of course, have depended upon the peculiar circumstances of the various cases that were in process at the time under such a rubric. What the population in general would have supposed to have constituted “Sodomy” would be, perhaps, another question entirely. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

February: The governor of Texas, Sam Houston, introduced a resolution proposing the establishment of a US protectorate over the “so-called Republic of Mexico.”

The problem that he needed to solve was the problem of runaway Texas slaves obtaining refuge in Mexico (something that some of his own slaves had in fact succeeded in doing). To “provide for the reclamation of our slaves who escape into her territory,”5 since the mongrel Mexicans were entirely incapable of maintaining a democracy or creating a “good neighborhood,” Mexico needed to be reduced to the status of a protectorate of the United States of America.6 Restoring human enslavement in Mexico would, Sam pointed out benevolently, improve its ability to feed its citizenry.

After college Edwin Morton had become the tutor of Greene Smith, son of Gerrit Smith of Peterboro, New York. He would reside as the houseguest with that family for 4 years, becoming also the private secretary and protégé of the father. He was one of the persons of that household who would become cognizant of Captain John Brown’s plan for the forcible emancipation of the American slaves.7 He wrote to his former classmate Franklin Benjamin Sanborn from this upstate manor, to inform him of a letter Smith had recently received. Brown had written that he believed that he could accomplish considerably more with the money that had been entrusted to him, than had yet been accomplished: in fact he was hoping that he might be able to overthrow slavery in a large part of the nation. In order to maintain secrecy he was not himself going to visit the Smith home, nor would he visit his family in North Elba. Sanborn wrote to the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he had himself recently received 2 letters from Brown, hinting at this a new plan, one that could be executed in just 2 months. “I would not wonder if his plan contemplated an uprising of slaves, though he has not said so to me.”

5. Sam Houston. THE WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, Volume VII. Ed. Amelia Williams and Eugene Barker. (Austin TX: U of Texas P, 1942), page 362. 6. Sam Houston. THE WRITINGS OF SAM HOUSTON, Volume VII. Ed. Amelia Williams and Eugene Barker. (Austin TX: U of Texas P, 1942), page 104. 7. John Brown, Jr. would reveal that he had met Edwin Morton “nearly every time” he had visited Gerrit Smith’s home, and that Morton was “to some extent” acquainted with his father’s plans and spoke “familiarly” on that topic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 22, Monday: John Brown made contact with two black leaders, the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen of Syracuse, New York and Doctor J.N. Gloucester of New-York, for assistance in the recruitment of free black fighters for his scheme to make a raid into slave territory.

Henry Thoreau wrote to James Russell Lowell.

Concord Feb. 22d 1858 My Dear Sir, I think that I can send you a part of the story to which I referred within a fortnight. I am to read some of my latest Maine Wood experiences to my townsmen this week; and in this case I shall not hesitate to call names. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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{One-fourth page missing}

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn trusted that meeting with Captain Brown in Peterboro in upstate New York would reveal the actual threat level of Hugh Forbes’s letters, and therefore, when Stearns was unable to attend, Sanborn himself made the journey, arriving that evening. Brown and a few of his friends, such as Edwin Morton, had already assembled. Morton sang Schubert’s “Serenade” for those assembled, and Brown sang along softly with this, tears in his eyes. Then the whole outline of Brown’s campaign in Virginia was laid before them “to the astonishment and almost the dismay of all present.” The constitution which had been drawn up was exhibited, and a map indicating the territory they intended to capture, and Brown specified that he wanted to attack during the middle of May 1858. He needed only perhaps $800, and $1,000 would be more than ample. Plan A was a fortification in the Southern mountains and Plan B would be a retreat through the North. But to strike at once at the existence of slavery, by an organized force, acting for years, if need be, on the dubious principles of guerrilla warfare, and exposed, perhaps, to the whole power of the country, was something they had never contemplated. That was the long-meditated plan of a poor, obscure, old man, uncertain at best of another ten years’ lease of life, and yet calmly proposing an enterprise which, if successful, might require a whole generation to accomplish. His friends listened until late at night, proposing objections and raising difficulties, but nothing shook the purpose of the old Puritan. To every objection he had an answer; every difficulty had been foreseen and provided for; the great difficulty of all, the apparent hopelessness of undertaking anything so vast with such slender means, he met with the words of Scripture, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” and “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” To all suggestions of delay until a more favorable time, he would reply, “I am nearly sixty years old; I have desired to do this work for many years; if I do not begin soon, it will be too late for me.” He had made nearly all his arrangements; he had so many hundred weapons, so many men enlisted, all that he wanted was the small sum of money. With that he would open his campaign with the spring, and he did not doubt that his enterprise would pay. But those who heard him, while they looked upon the success of Brown’s undertaking as a great blessing and relief to the country, felt also that to fail, contending against such odds, might hazard for many years the cause of freedom and union. They had not yet fully attained the sublime faith of Brown when he said, “A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 23, Tuesday: In Peterboro in upstate New York, the discussion of the previous evening by the conspirators continued. The question became, very simply, whether they should turn John Brown over to the authorities, or cooperate. In the sunset the delegate went for a walk while Captain Brown engaged in a conversation about religion with another guest in the establishment, an elderly captain of Wellington’s army. The comment was made, during this sunset walk, “You see how it is; our old friend has made up his mind to this course of action and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must stand by him. I will raise so many hundred dollars for him; you must lay the case before your friends in Massachusetts and see if they will do the same. I see no other way.” It had become clear that the old man was determined to tilt against this windmill whether they cooperated with him or not.

April: John Brown returned to the Maxson home in North Liberty, Iowa near Springdale with funds and gave orders for the expedition to begin. By this point Moses Varney may have had some knowledge of what was about to take place. Each of the men of the God Squad wrote his name in pencil on the plaster wall of the “great room” of the Maxson house.

Friend Thomas James, speaking with Brown for the last time, warned him, “Thee must be careful or thee will get a rope around thy neck,” and Brown responded “Yes, I expect it.” According to one story, Friend John Hunt Painter said, “Friend, I can’t give thee money to buy powder and lead but here’s $20 toward thy expenses.” According to another story, when Painter bought the expedition’s mules that they no longer needed, as a sort of contribution to the cause he paid an overly generous $125 each. Barclay Coppoc was wanted by the authorities on suspicion of participating in the Underground Railroad, and needed to get out of the area. When Painter took Coppoc through a furious blizzard 25 miles to Mechanicsville to catch a train for Chicago, Coppoc was wearing a false beard. Coppoc was deposited at the home of a black American who had collected funds from other negroes in the city for Coppoc’s flight (when the authorities arrived in Springdale with the proper papers and the sheriff, Coppoc was ahead of the curve).

When Ellery Channing returned to Concord, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would report, he had his Main Street house quite to himself. Sanborn’s sister, his cousin Louisa, and he took rooms together at Charles Wetherbee’s. Wetherbee had skill in serving dinners, and we dined, 4 or 5 of us, with some luxury. Sanborn’s friend and former classmate Edwin Morton sang some college songs, inducing Henry Thoreau to hum along. Then Thoreau came forward, singing “Tom Bowline,” the only time Sanborn would ever hear Thoreau sing. Morton, a tactful musician, joked there seemed to be some deficiency but he could not make out whether it was in Thoreau’s voice, or in the tune. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

November: Early in the month Edwin Morton sailed from Boston for England as a means of protecting Gerrit Smith from exposure before the investigative committee (while Smith, as a way to provide cover for himself, was spending some time in an insane asylum). While in England he would be chumming around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Thomas Cholmondeley (whom he had recently met while Cholmondeley was visiting Henry Thoreau in Concord). He would remain through the winter and then briefly visit France before returning across the Atlantis when the coast had become clear in 1860.

Although he characterized himself as a “pretty rigid Episcopalian,” Amos Adams Lawrence claimed to harbor no prejudice against “any body of men who love the Lord Jesus Christ,” and agreed that the Congregationalists did love the Lord Jesus Christ. He therefore assented to the use of his $10,000 for a Congregational college in the Kansas Territory.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was publishing his long poem “America.”

Mrs. Mary Ann Day Brown wrote to Governor of Virginia Henry A. Wise, petitioning for the “mortal remains of my husband and sons.” With his response the Governor enclosed a copy of an order to Major General William Taliaferro to “deliver to your order the mortal remains ... [and] to guard you sacredly in your solemn mission.” On the Governor’s orders, a party of men under Alfred Barbour, Superintendent of the United States Armory, gathered at the site of the mass burial upstream from Harpers Ferry on the bank of the Shenandoah River and found “two large mounds of earth, freshly thrown up.” One foot down they came upon “a body which had been buried with the face down, and was then in so advanced a state of decomposition as apparently to render identification impossible.”

These words by Sanborn were appearing in Douglass’ Monthly: “It is an effeminate and cowardly age which calls a man a lunatic because he rises to such self-forgetful heroism, as to count his own life worth nothing in comparison with the freedom of millions of his fellows.... The Christian blood of Old John Brown will not cease to cry from the ground long after the clamors of alarm and consternation of the dealers in the bodies and souls of men will have ceased to arrest attention.”8

An editorial bearing the title “Captain John Brown Not Insane” argued that “His entire procedure in this matter disproves the charge that he was prompted by an impulse of mad revenge, and shows that he was moved by the highest principles of philanthropy. His carefulness of the lives of unarmed persons —his humane and courteous treatment of his prisoners —his cool self-possession all through his trial —and especially his calm, dignified speech on receiving his sentence, all conspire to show that he was neither insane nor actuated by vengeful passion; and we hope the country has heard the last of John Brown’s madness.” Bob Pepperman Taylor would point up, in 1996, the similarities between this and Henry Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John

8. Philip S. Foner. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Volume II, page 458. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Brown,” delivered as a lecture in Boston at a meeting in which Thoreau had been asked to stand in for Douglass: “Like Thoreau, Douglass insists that slavery is a system of brute force that must be ‘met with its own weapons.’ Like Thoreau, Douglass’s primary concern is to defend John Brown’s acts from those who discredit them as insane or irrational or desperate. Like Thoreau, Douglass holds that our lack of sympathy for Brown’s moral principles is evidence of our own moral sloth and deterioration. And, like Thoreau, Douglass holds that what is compelling about Brown is that he is an example of a just man who found the strength to resist injustice, a rare case of a man acknowledging and living up to the moral obligations facing every citizen: ‘Posterity will owe everlasting thanks to John Brown for lifting up once more to the gaze of a nation grown fat and flabby on the garbage of lust and oppression, a true standard of heroic philanthropy, and each coming generation will play its installment of the debt.’” WHAT I WONDER IS, IN WHICH DIRECTION THE INFLUENCE WAS FLOWING. WHAT IS THE TIME SEQUENCE HERE? DID THIS NEWSPAPER ARTICLE APPEAR FIRST? DID THOREAU READ IT? MIGHT THOREAU HAVE BEEN SAYING SOME THINGS, AS DOUGLASS’S REPRESENTATIVE, THAT WERE MORE TYPICAL OF DOUGLASS’S ATTITUDES THAN OF HIS OWN?

Meanwhile the body of Douglass was sailing away on the Nova Scotian, for the safety of English soil.

The Reverend Edwin M. Wheelock declared, in the Boston Music Hall renowned for its comfortable seating of huge audiences, that “The gallows from which he ascends into heaven will be in our politics what the cross is to our religion.”9 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Brutus” to Governor Henry A. Wise, undated, presumably November: Sir You are very Eloquent in denouncing old Brown, as a Vile traitor Because he wished to free the Poor Black Slaves; But how different you are in speaking of George Washington; the Chief of the White Rebels, “Consistency thou are a jewel” Oh how gloriously, and God-like to oppose British Slavery, To shoot, murder, hang confiscate, axe any thing to gain Freedom; Boston then was the Cradle of Liberty, now the nursery of treason; “How very strange that wrong and right; “Should all depend on Black and white” If it was right for the whites, Pray inform us how it is wrong for the Blacks, “Sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander” George Washington could hang Major Andre, and help to Rob England of her Property; and he Elevated to the Presidentcy But, old Brown must be Elevated to a gibbet, “honest Iago” Now Sir we wish to inform you, that this is not the last attempt that will be made to aid the Poor Slaves; you may tremble For fear, for come it will like a thunderbolt; though one Two, or ten may fail and suffer, others will arise untill The “Black star is erased from america’s flag Yours until Death Brutus There as many a wise been a wisecare

9. Actually, that gallows, after it had served its purpose a number of times, would be reworked and would become the front portico of a home in Charlestown, Virginia. –Sorta makes one wonder what became of the True Cross, doesn’t it? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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An anonymous missive to Governor Henry A. Wise, undated, presumably November: Mr Wise Sir, By a Virginia jury John Brown has been convicted as a criminal. And for what? For daring to obey that divine Command “If ye would that men should do too you do ye even so too them,” If Mr. Brown commited an error it was an error of the head— not of the heart. But Sir, “Too err is human. to forgive divine.” You have it in your power to prove you can be magnanamous to a noble foe. do it— and the blessings of millions shall be yours— Fail to do it— and you shall have touched a chord that shall not cease to vibrate till “The bonds of the oppressor shall be broken and the oppressed go free” Yea, though this Union of ours should be dissolved in blood

Give me Liberty, Or give me death HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

March 17, Saturday: The Japanese embassy including Nakahama Manjiro, known to the Americans as John Manjiro, arrived near Washington DC aboard the Canrin-maru, Japan’s 1st large ocean-going ship, which he had helped to create.

During this visit Manjiro would return to Fairhaven to pay his respects at the grave of his friend Captain William H. Whitfield, and to have a reunion with the elderly sisters who had taught him English there when he had been 14 years of age.

We learn by way of a letter from Edwin Morton at Peterboro in upstate New York (he had returned from Switzerland) that Henry Thoreau had lent him, to read, the file of letters from Thomas Cholmondeley.

Peterboro 17. March Dear Sir: I must not fail to [tell] you what pleasure the Cholmondely letters gave me, & how fresh & entertaining & instructive I found them. I thank you.

Page 2 My appointments were so ridiculously in Boston numerous, before ^ leaving the East, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that my Hack man at last would allow me no time to stop at Mr Parker's, where I had agreed to cach_ you the [l]etters for San[-] born. So I perforce took them a journey.

Page 3 [Conferring them] Cholmondeley is a brave fellow, I should say, & a man of parts. Will not his numina sometime insist on his putting his life into some es- pecial work, so that it shall be had in [an] attainable form? Very Respectfully, Edwin Morton Henry D Thoreau Esq.

March 17. P.M.— To Walden and Goose Pond. Thermometer 56; wind south, gentle; somewhat overcast. There is still perhaps a half-acre of ice at the bottom of the deep south bay of Walden. Also a little at the southeast end of Goose Pond. Ripple Lake is mostly covered yet. I see a large flock of sheldrakes, which have probably risen from the pond, go over my head in the woods. A dozen large and compact birds flying with great force and rapidity, spying out the land, eyeing every traveller, fast and far they “steam it” on clipping wings, over field and forest, meadow and flood; now here, and you hear the whistling of their wings, and in a moment they are lost in the horizon. Like swift propellers of the air. Whichever way they are headed, that way their wings propel them. What health and vigor they suggest! The life of man seems slow and puny in comparison, — reptilian. The cowslip leaves are now expanded. The rabbit and partridge can eat wood; therefore they abound and can stay here all the year. The leaves on the woodland floor are already getting to be dry. How handsome a flock of red-wings, ever changing its oval form as it advances, by the rear birds passing the others! Was not that a marsh hawk, a slate-colored one which I saw flying over Walden Wood with long, slender, curving wings, with a diving, zigzag flight? [No doubt it was, for I see another, a brown one, the 19th.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Summer: Edwin Morton, back from Switzerland, commenced the study of law in Plymouth.

Gerrit Smith, discharged from the Utica Insane Asylum, was expressing great admiration for John Brown while explaining that he had never become aware of Brown’s plans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

March 6, Wednesday: Edwin Morton of Plymouth entered Harvard Law School (he would need to leave in 1862 without completion, having contracted typhoid fever that made it impossible to study).

The 1st state mental hospital in Iowa, Mount Pleasant State Hospital, opened for the receipt of patients. R. J. Patterson was the 1st superintendent of the institution and was paid a salary of $1,600 per year.10 PSYCHOLOGY

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR MARCH 6th]

10. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

Accused of treason in his own neighborhood in Connecticut, fearing arrest during these Civil War times, Elihu Burritt gave up on America and settled his family for the time being in England. President Abraham Lincoln, putting a good face on a bad thing, would appoint him as a United States consul in Birmingham, England.

While recovering from typhoid fever in Plymouth, Edwin Morton attempted to join the Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant but wasn’t found healthy enough. He therefore continued his study of the law in the offices of Judge C.G. Davis of Plymouth, and when admitted to the bar would be at first associated with Chief Justice Mason. He would practice law in Boston for several years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1872

July 31, Wednesday: At some point during the summer Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau had moved from Concord, Massachusetts to Bangor, Maine. Upon her departure, she had left with Franklin Benjamin Sanborn the outstanding note of obligation pertaining to a debt that the Flannery family of Concord owed to the Thoreau family, representing some of the money that Henry Thoreau had loaned to Michael Flannery in 1854, fully eighteen years before, so that he could bring his wife Ann and his little children over from Ireland as he so longed to do. Both Michael and Ann Flannery were still living, and they were in Concord, and all their children were now mature, and there seemed no reason why they should continue and continue to owe the remainder of this money. She had instructed Sanborn that if, for any reason, either inability to pay or unwillingness to pay, he was unable to collect on this note from the Flannery family, Sanborn should simply make a present of the note to them, thus discharging their obligation forever.11 Sophia wrote on this day from Bangor to her cousin Marianne (or Mary Anne) Mitchell Dunbar of Bridgewater about having left Concord, as well as about the Emerson home having burned.

[This is what the Emerson home looked like after it had been burned and restored:]

Midhat Pasha replaced Mahmud Nedim Pasha as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.

11. When asked later about Thoreau, by historians collecting impressions, after both Michael and Ann Flannery were deceased, one of the Flannery sons and one of the grandsons would speak contemptuously of him: he had been lazy and insulting. Neither of these ingrates would refer to the manner in which Henry had helped their parents, or to the respect in which he had held Michael, or to the friendship that had existed between them, or take any notice at all of this forgiven family debt. THOREAU ON THE IRISH HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1874

Early January: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn hoped, in meeting with Octavius Brooks Frothingham, who was at work on a biography of Gerrit Smith, to put to rest some issues still haunting members of the “Secret Six” finance committee. He wanted Frothingham to ascertain the authenticity of a note sent from Peterboro, New York to Sanborn by Ann Smith, which included a statement signed by her husband, Gerrit Smith. The statement was as follows: Mr. Edwin Morton of Boston was for several years a member of my family. During that time Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, of Concord, Massachusetts, repeatedly visited him. They were classmates in Harvard University. On his visit in February, 1858, he met John Brown, who often took my home in his way between Kansas and his residence in Essex County, New York. He and Mr. Frank Benjamin Sanborn were much in Mr. Morton’s room. I was in it a part or all of the time whilst John Brown was reading his plan for entering the South and summoning the slaves to the mountains, where they could defend themselves and thence escape to Canada. This plan, I have been informed, was drawn up by himself not long before, under the roof of Mr. Frederick Douglass in Rochester. My heart responded to his merciful interest in the victims of oppression, and he had my warmest wishes for his success. I had but little conversation with John Brown respecting his enterprise. He told me he was not decided in what State to begin it. As the execution of it was long delayed, I thought it was abandoned. His invasion of Harper’s Ferry in the fall of 1859 grew, as I supposed, out of an entirely new and suddenly adopted plan. I was astonished to hear of it, so unlike was it to that of going to the mountains. I came afterwards to believe that this invasion was in pursuance of the revival of his old plan. He addressed a large anti-slavery meeting in our village in April, 1859. I never saw him after that time, and I kept up no communication with him.

On January 25th, after having posted the above document to Sanborn, Smith contacted Edwin Morton, directing him to change certain parts of it, in particular his statement that he never saw John Brown after April 1859, the very time during which Smith had most actively helped fund Brown’s projects. Sanborn had decided, on the basis of this attempt at correction, that he could not make any public use of the document.

Summer: Two of Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson’s watercolors, “The Milkmaid” and “Wait For Me,” were displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and sold, and she received commissions for further such works.

Edwin Morton went on a sail around the world by way of Japan and India. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

Edwin Morton sailed from Egypt to Rome. His health was still bad, so he went to the baths of Baden in Aargau, Switzerland. He would remain in that locale for about a decade. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1878

When Franklin Benjamin Sanborn became entangled with General John Cochrane, one of Gerrit Smith’s nephews, in a controversy over the accuracy of the original edition of Octavius Brooks Frothingham’s biography of his uncle (accusing Sanborn of distortions as to his uncle’s complicity in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry), he was able to disengage himself by letting General Cochrane inspect letters sent to himself and to Edwin Morton that were in the handwriting of his aunt, and were clearly signed by his uncle.

Friend John Greenleaf Whittier voiced the nature of the post-Civil War compromise which allowed American whites to pretend that slavery had been prohibited by the XIIIth Amendment:

For myself I do not feel called upon to enter into these present contests. The game seems to me hardly worth the candle. The issues seem small and poor. I suppose I am getting old, and am disposed to ask for peace in my day. I have had enough of fighting in the old days. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s JOUR À JOUR, POÉSIES INTIMES. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Edwin Morton had his picture taken: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1881

February 19, day: Kansas made itself the 1st state to ban all alcoholic beverages.

The initial complete public performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony no.3 D.200 was given in the Crystal Palace, London, 66 years after it had been composed.

May 30, Monday: Frederick Douglass, a trustee of Storer College, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, delivered, as the Decoration Day address upon the institution’s 14th anniversary, a speech entitled simply “John Brown.”

Among the guests on the platform was Andrew Hunter, who had while Douglass had been fleeing to Canada and then England been the District Attorney of Charles Town, participating in the prosecution and conviction of Captain Brown for murder and treason. Imagine what he must have been thinking! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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HARPERS FERRY, FROM THE POTOMAC SIDE

HARPERS FERRY, FROM THE BLUE RIDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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INTRODUCTION. In substance, this address, now for the first time published, was prepared several years ago, and has been delivered in many parts of the North. Its publication now in pamphlet form is due to its delivery at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on Decoration day, 1881, and to the fact that the proceeds from the sale of it are to be used toward the endowment of a John Brown Professorship in Storer College, Harpers Ferry — an institution mainly devoted to the education of colored youth. That such an address could be delivered at such a place, as such a time, is strikingly significant, and illustrates the rapid, vast and wonderful changes through which the American people have been passing since 1859. Twenty years ago Frederick Douglass and others were mobbed in the city of Boston, and driven from Tremont Temple for uttering sentiments concerning John Brown similar to those contained in this address. Yet now he goes freely to the very spot where John Brown committed the offense which caused all Virginia to clamor for his life, and without reserve or qualification, commends him as a hero and martyr in the cause of liberty. This incident is rendered all the more significant by the fact that Hon. Andrew Hunter, of Charlestown, – the District Attorney who prosecuted John Brown and secured his execution,– sat on the platform directly behind Mr. Douglass during the delivery of the entire address and at the close of it shook hands with him, and congratulated him, and invited him to Charlestown (where John Brown was hanged), adding that if Robert E. Lee were living, he would give him his hand also. ADDRESS. Not to fan the flame of sectional animosity now happily in the process of rapid and I hope permanent extinction; not to revive and keep alive a sense of shame and remorse for a great national crime, which has brought own punishment, in loss of treasure, tears and blood; not to recount the long list of wrongs, inflicted on my race during more than two hundred years of merciless bondage; nor yet to draw, from the labyrinths of far-off centuries, incidents and achievements wherewith to rouse your passions, and enkindle your enthusiasm, but to pay a just debt long due, to vindicate in some degree a great historical character, of our own time and country, one with whom I was myself well acquainted, and whose friendship and confidence it was my good fortune to share, and to give you such recollections, impressions and facts, as I can, of a grand, brave and good old man, and especially to promote a better understanding of the raid upon Harpers Ferry of which he was the chief, is the object of this address. In all the thirty years’ conflict with slavery, if we except the late tremendous war, there is no subject which in its interest and importance will be remembered longer, or will form a more thrilling chapter in American history than this strange, wild, bloody and mournful drama. The story of it is still fresh in the minds of many who now hear me, but for the sake of those who may have forgotten its details, and in order to have our subject in its entire range more fully and clearly before us at the outset, I will briefly state the facts in that extraordinary transaction. On the night of the 16th of October, 1859, there appeared near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, a party of nineteen men — fourteen white and five colored. They were not only armed themselves, but had brought with them a large supply of arms for such persons as might join them. These men invaded Harpers Ferry, disarmed the watchman, took possession of the arsenal, rifle-factory, armory and other government property at that place, arrested and made prisoners nearly all the prominent citizens of the neighborhood, collected about fifty slaves, put bayonets into the hands of such as were able and willing to fight for their liberty, killed three men, proclaimed general emancipation, held the ground more than thirty hours, were subsequently overpowered and nearly all killed, wounded or captured, by a body of United States, troops, under command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, since famous as the rebel Gen. Lee. Three out of the nineteen invaders were captured whilst fighting, and one of these was Captain John Brown, the man who originated, planned and commanded the expedition. At the time of his capture Capt. Brown was supposed to be mortally HDT WHAT? INDEX

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wounded as he had several ugly gashes and bayonet wounds on his head and body; and apprehending that he might speedily die, or that he might be rescued by his friends, and thus the opportunity of making him a signal example of slave-holding vengeance would be lost, his captors hurried him to Charlestown two miles further within the border of Virginia, placed him in prison strongly guarded by troops, and before his wounds were healed he was brought into court, subjected to a nominal trial, convicted of high treason and inciting slaves to insurrection, and was executed. His corpse was given to his woe-stricken widow, and she, assisted by Antislavery friends, caused it to be borne to North Elba, Essex County, N.Y., and there his dust now reposes amid the silent, solemn and snowy grandeur of the Adirondacks. Such is the story; with no line softened or hardened to my inclining. It certainly is not a story to please, but to pain. It is not a story to increase our sense of social safety and security, but to fill the imagination with wild and troubled fancies of doubt and danger. It was a sudden and startling surprise to the people of Harpers Ferry, and it is not easy to conceive of a situation more abundant in all the elements of horror and consternation. They had retired as usual to rest, with no suspicion that an enemy lurked in the surrounding darkness. They had quietly and trustingly given themselves up to “tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep,” and while thus all unconscious of danger, they were roused from their peaceful slumbers by the sharp crack of the invader’s rifle, and felt the keen-edged sword of war at their throats, three of their numbers being already slain. Every feeling of the human heart was naturally outraged at this occurrence, and hence at the moment the air was full of denunciation and execration. So intense was this feeling, that few ventured to whisper a word of apology. But happily reason has her voice as well as feeling, and though slower in deciding, her judgments are broader, deeper, clearer and more enduring. It is not easy to reconcile human feeling to the shedding of blood for any purpose, unless indeed in the excitement which the shedding of blood itself occasions. The knife is to feeling always an offence. Even when in the hands of a skillful surgeon, it refuses consent to the operation long after reason has demonstrated its necessity. It even pleads the cause of the known murderer on the day of his execution, and calls society half criminal when, in cold blood, it takes life as a protection of itself from crime. Let no word be said against this holy feeling; more than to law and government are we indebted to this tender sentiment of regard for human life for the safety with which we walk the streets by day and sleep secure in our beds at night. It is nature’s grand police, vigilant and faithful, sentineled in the soul, guarding against violence to peace and life. But whilst so much is freely accorded to feeling in the economy of human welfare, something more than feeling is necessary to grapple with a fact so grim and significant as was this raid. Viewed apart and alone, as a transaction separate and distinct from its antecedents and bearings, it takes rank with the most cold- blooded and atrocious wrongs ever perpetrated; but just here is the trouble — this raid on Harpers Ferry, no more than Sherman’s march to the sea can consent to be thus viewed alone. There is, in the world’s government, a force which has in all ages been recognized, sometimes as Nemesis, sometimes as the judgment of God and sometimes as retributive justice; but under whatever name, all history attests the wisdom and beneficence of its chastisements, and men become reconciled to the agents through whom it operates, and have extolled them as heroes, benefactors and demigods. To the broad vision of a true philosophy, nothing in this world stands alone. Everything is a necessary part of everything else. The margin of chance is narrowed by every extension of reason and knowledge, and nothing comes unbidden to the feast of human experience. The universe, of which we are a part, is continually proving itself a stupendous whole, a system of law and order, eternal and perfect. Every seed bears fruit after its kind, and nothing is reaped which was not sowed. The distance between seed time and harvest, in the moral world, may not be quite so well defined or as clearly intelligible as in the physical, but there is a seed time, and there is a harvest time, and though ages may intervene, and neither he who ploughed nor he who sowed may reap in person, yet the harvest nevertheless will surely come; and as in the physical world there are century plants, so it may be in the moral world, and their fruitage is as certain in the one as in the other. The bloody harvest of Harpers Ferry was ripened by the heat and moisture of merciless bondage of more than two hundred years. That startling cry of alarm on the bank of the Potomac was but the answering back of the avenging angel to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the midnight invasions of Christian slave-traders on the sleeping hamlets of Africa. The history of the African slave-trade furnishes many illustrations far more cruel and bloody. Viewed thus broadly our subject is worthy of thoughtful and dispassionate consideration. It invites the study of the poet, scholar, philosopher and statesman. What the masters in natural science have done for man in the physical world, the masters of social science may yet do for him in the moral world. Science now tells us when storms are in the sky, and when and where their violence will be most felt. Why may we not yet know with equal certainty when storms are in the moral sky, and how to avoid their desolating force? But I can invite you to no such profound discussions. I am not the man, nor is this the occasion for such philosophical enquiry. Mine is the word of grateful memory to an old friend; to tell you what I knew of him –what I knew of his inner life –of what he did and what he attempted, and thus if possible to make the mainspring of his actions manifest and thereby give you a clearer view of his character and services. It is said that next in value to the performance of great deeds ourselves, is the capacity to appreciate such when performed by others; to more than this I do not presume. Allow me one other personal word before I proceed. In the minds of some of the American people I was myself credited with an important agency in the John Brown raid. Governor Henry A. Wise was manifestly of that opinion. He was at the pains of having Mr. Buchanan send his Marshals to Rochester to invite me to accompany them to Virginia. Fortunately I left town several hours previous to their arrival. What ground there was for this distinguished consideration shall duly appear in the natural course of this lecture. I wish however to say just here that there was no foundation whatever for the charge that I in any wise urged or instigated John Brown to his dangerous work. I rejoice that it is my good fortune to have seen, not only the end of slavery, but to see the day when the whole truth can be told about this matter without prejudice to either the living or the dead. I shall however allow myself little prominence in these disclosures. Your interests, like mine, are in the all-commanding figure of the story, and to him I consecrate the hour. His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine –it was as the burning sun to my taper light– mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him. The crown of martyrdom is high, far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, and yet happily no special greatness or superior moral excellence is necessary to discern and in some measure appreciate a truly great soul. Cold, calculating and unspiritual as most of us are, we are not wholly insensible to real greatness; and when we are brought in contact with a man of commanding mold, towering high and alone above the millions, free from all conventional fetters, true to his own moral convictions, a “law unto himself,” ready to suffer misconstruction, ignoring torture and death for what he believes to be right, we are compelled to do him homage. In the stately shadow, in the sublime presence of such a soul I find myself standing to-night; and how to do it reverence, how to do it justice, how to honor the dead with due regard to the living, has been a matter of anxious solicitude. Much has been said of John Brown, much that is wise and beautiful, but in looking over what may be called the John Brown literature, I have been little assisted with material, and even less encouraged with any hope of success in treating the subject. Scholarship, genius and devotion have hastened with poetry and eloquence, story and song to this simple altar of human virtue, and have retired dissatisfied and distressed with the thinness and poverty of their offerings, as I shall with mine. The difficulty in doing justice to the life and character of such a man is not altogether due to the quality of the zeal, or of the ability brought to the work, nor yet to any imperfections in the qualities of the man himself; the state of the moral atmosphere about us has much to do with it. The fault is not in our eyes, nor yet in the object, if under a a murky sky we fail to discover the object. Wonderfully tenacious is the taint of a great wrong. The evil, as well as “the good that men do, lives after them.” Slavery is indeed gone; but its long, black shadow yet falls broad and large over the face of the whole country. It is the old truth oft repeated, and never more fitly than now, “a prophet is without honor in his own country and among his own people.” Though more than HDT WHAT? INDEX

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twenty years have rolled between us and the Harpers Ferry raid, though since then the armies of the nation have found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted to do on small one, and the great captain who fought his way through slavery has filled with honor the Presidential chair, we yet stand too near the days of slavery, and the life and times of John Brown, to see clearly the true martyr and hero that he was and rightly to estimate the value of the man and his works. Like the great and good of all ages –the men born in advance of their times, the men whose bleeding footprints attest the immense cost of reform, and show us the long and dreary spaces, between the luminous points in the progress of mankind,– this our noblest American hero must wait the polishing wheels of after-coming centuries to make his glory more manifest, and his worth more generally acknowledged. Such instances are abundant and familiar. If we go back four and twenty centuries, to the stately city of Athens, and search among her architectural splendor and her miracles of art for the Socrates of today, and as he stands in history, we shall find ourselves perplexed and disappointed. In Jerusalem Jesus himself was only the “carpenter’s son” –a young man wonderfully destitute of worldly prudence –pestilent fellow, “inexcusably and perpetually interfering in the world’s business,” –“upsetting the tables of the money-changers” –preaching sedition, opposing the good old religion –“making himself greater than Abraham,” and at the same time “keeping company” with very low people; but behold the change! He was a great miracle-worker, in his day, but time has worked for him a greater miracle than all his miracles, for now his name stands for all that is desirable in government, noble in life, orderly and beautiful in society. That which time has done for other great men of his class, that will time certainly do for John Brown. The brightest gems shine at first with subdued light, and the strongest characters are subject to the same limitations. Under the influence of adverse education and hereditary bias, few things are more difficult than to render impartial justice. Men hold up their hands to Heaven, and swear they will do justice, but what oaths against prejudice and against inclination! In the face of high-sounding professions and affirmations we know well how hard it is for a Turk to do justice to a Christian, or for a Christian to do justice to a Jew. How hard for an Englishman to do justice to an Irishman, for an Irishman to do justice to an Englishman, harder still for an American tainted by slavery to do justice to the Negro or the Negro’s friends. “John Brown,” said the late Wm. H. Seward, “was justly hanged.” “John Brown,” said the late John A. Andrew, “was right.” It is easy to perceive the sources of these two opposite judgments: the one was the verdict of slave-holding and panic- stricken Virginia, the other was the verdict of the best heart and brain of free old Massachusetts. One was the heated judgment of the passing and passionate hour, and the other was the calm, clear, unimpeachable judgment of the broad, illimitable future. There is, however, one aspect of the present subject quite worthy of notice, for it makes the hero of Harpers Ferry in some degree an exception to the general rules to which I have just now adverted. Despite the hold which slavery had at time on the country, despite the popular prejudice against the Negro, despite the shock which the first alarm occasioned, almost from the first John Brown received a large measure of sympathy and appreciation. New England recognized in him the spirit which brought the pilgrims to Plymouth rock and hailed him as a martyr and saint. True he had broken the law, true he had struck for a despised people, true he had crept upon his foe stealthily, like a wolf upon the fold, and had dealt his blow in the dark whilst his enemy slept, but with all this and more to disturb the moral sense, men discerned in him the greatest and best qualities known to human nature, and pronounced him “good.” Many consented to his death, and then went home and taught their children to sing his praise as one whose “soul is marching on” through the realms of endless bliss. One element in explanation of this somewhat anomalous circumstance will probably be found in the troubled times which immediately succeeded, for “when judgments are abroad in the world, men learn righteousness.” The country had before this learned the value of Brown’s heroic character. He had shown boundless courage and skill in dealing with the enemies of liberty in Kansas. With men so few, and means so small, and odds against him so great, no captain ever surpassed him in achievements, some of which seem almost beyond belief. With only eight men in that bitter war, he met, fought and captured Henry Clay Pate, with twenty-five well armed and mounted men. In this memorable encounter, he selected his ground so wisely, handled HDT WHAT? INDEX

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his men so skillfully, and attacked the enemy so vigorously, that they could neither run nor fight, and were therefore compelled to surrender to a force less than one-third their own. With just thirty men on another important occasion during the same border war, he met and vanquished four hundred Missourians under the command of Gen. Read. These men had come into the territory under an oath never to return to their homes till they had stamped out the last vestige of free State spirit in Kansas; but a brush with old Brown took this high conceit out of them, and they were glad to get off upon any terms, without stopping to stipulate. With less than one hundred men to defend the town of Lawrence, he offered to lead them and give battle to fourteen hundred men on the banks of the Waukerusia river, and was much vexed when his offer was refused by Gen. Jim Lane and others to whom the defense of the town was confided. Before leaving Kansas, he went into the border of Missouri, and liberated a dozen slaves in a single night, and, in spite of slave laws and marshals, he brought these people through a half dozen States, and landed them safely in Canada. With eighteen men this man shook the whole social fabric of Virginia. With eighteen men he overpowered a town of nearly three thousand souls. With these eighteen men he held that large community firmly in his grasp for thirty long hours. With these eighteen men he rallied in a single night fifty slaves to his standard, and made prisoners of an equal number of the slave-holding class. With these eighteen men he defied the power and bravery of a dozen of the best militia companies that Virginia could send against him. Now, when slavery struck, as it certainly did strike, at the life of the country, it was not the fault of John Brown that our rulers did not at first know how to deal with it. He had already shown us the weak side of the rebellion, had shown us where to strike and how. It was not from lack of native courage that Virginia submitted for thirty long hours and at last was relieved only by Federal troops; but because the attack was made on the side of her conscience and thus armed her against herself. She beheld at her side the sullen brow of a black Ireland. When John Brown proclaimed emancipation to the slaves of Maryland and Virginia he added to his war power the force of a moral earthquake. Virginia felt all her strong-ribbed mountains to shake under the heavy tread of armed insurgents. Of his army of nineteen her conscience made an army of nineteen hundred. Another feature of the times, worthy of notice, was the effect of this blow upon the country at large. At the first moment we were stunned and bewildered. Slavery had so benumbed the moral sense of the nation, that it never suspected the possibility of an explosion like this, and it was difficult for Captain Brown to get himself taken for what he really was. Few could seem to comprehend that freedom to the slaves was his only object. If you will go back with me to that time you will find that the most curious and contradictory versions of the affair were industriously circulated, and those which were the least rational and true seemed to command the readiest belief. In the view of some, it assumed tremendous proportions. To such it was nothing less than a wide- sweeping rebellion to overthrow the existing government, and construct another upon its ruins, with Brown for its President and Commander-in-Chief; the proof of this was found in the old man’s carpet-bag in the shape of a constitution for a new Republic, an instrument which in reality had been executed to govern the conduct of his men in the mountains. Smaller and meaner natures saw in it nothing higher than a purpose to plunder. To them John Brown and his men were a gang of desperate robbers, who had learned by some means that government had sent a large sum of money to Harpers Ferry to pay off the workmen in its employ there, and they had gone thence to fill their pockets from this money. The fact is, that outside of a few friends, scattered in different parts of the country, and the slave-holders of Virginia, few persons understood the significance of the hour. That a man might do something very audacious and desperate for money, power or fame, was to the general apprehension quite possible; but, in face of plainly-written law, in face of constitutional guarantees protecting each State against domestic violence, in face of a nation of forty million of people, that nineteen men could invade a great State to liberate a despised and hated race, was to the average intellect and conscience, too monstrous for belief. In this respect the vision of Virginia was clearer than that of the nation. Conscious of her guilt and therefore full of suspicion, sleeping on pistols for pillows, startled at every unusual sound, constantly fearing and expecting a repetition of the Nat. Turner insurrection, she at once understood the meaning, if not the magnitude of the affair. It was this understanding which caused her to raise the lusty and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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imploring cry to the Federal government for help, and it was not till he who struck the blow had fully explained his motives and object, that the incredulous nation in any wise comprehended the true spirit of the raid, or of its commander. Fortunate for his memory, fortunate for the brave men associated with him, fortunate for the truth of history, John Brown survived the saber gashes, bayonet wounds and bullet holes, and was able, though covered with blood, to tell his own story and make his own defense. Had he with all his men, as might have been the case, gone down in the shock of battle, the world would have had no true basis for its judgment, and one of the most heroic efforts ever witnessed in behalf of liberty would have been confounded with base and selfish purposes. When, like savages, the Wises, the Vallandinghams, the Washingtons, the Stuarts and others stood around the fallen and bleeding hero, and sought by torturing questions to wring from his supposed dying lips some word by which to soil the sublime undertaking, by implicating Gerrit Smith, Joshua Reed Giddings, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, Edwin Morton, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and other prominent Anti-slavery men, the brave old man, not only avowed his object to be the emancipation of the slaves, but serenely and proudly announced himself as solely responsible for all that had happened. Though some thought of his own life might at such a moment have seemed natural and excusable, he showed none, and scornfully rejected the idea that he acted as the agent or instrument of any man or set of men. He admitted that he had friends and sympathizers, but to his own head he invited all the bolts of slave-holding wrath and fury, and welcomed them to do their worst. His manly courage and self-forgetful nobleness were not lost upon the crowd about him, nor upon the country. They drew applause from his bitterest enemies. Said Henry A. Wise, “He is the gamest man I ever met.” “He was kind and humane to his prisoners,” said Col. Lewis Washington. To the outward eye of men, John Brown was a criminal, but to their inward eye he was a just man and true. His deeds might be disowned, but the spirit which made those deeds possible was worthy highest honor. It has been often asked, why did not Virginia spare the life of this man? why did she not avail herself of this grand opportunity to add to her other glory that of a lofty magnanimity? Had they spared the good old man’s life — had they said to him, “you see we have you in our power, and could easily take your life, but we have no desire to hurt you in any way; you have committed a terrible crime against society; you have invaded us at midnight and attacked a sleeping community, but we recognize you as a fanatic, and in some sense instigated by others; and on this ground and others, we release you. Go about your business, and tell those who sent you that we can afford to be magnanimous to our enemies.” I say, had Virginia held some such language as this to John Brown, she would have inflicted a heavy blow on the whole Northern abolition movement, one which only the omnipotence of truth and the force of truth could have overcome. I have no doubt Gov. Wise would have done so gladly, but, alas, he was the executive of a State which thought she could not afford such magnanimity. She had that within her bosom which could more safely tolerate the presence of a criminal than a saint, a highway robber than a moral hero. All her hills and valleys were studded with material for a disastrous conflagration, and one spark of the dauntless spirit of Brown might set the whole State in flames. A sense of this appalling liability put an end to every noble consideration. His death was a foregone conclusion, and his trial was simply one of form. Honor to the brave young Col. Hoyt who hastened from Massachusetts to defend his friend’s life at the peril of his own; but there would have been no hope of success had he been allowed to plead the case. He might have surpassed Choate or Webster in power — a thousand physicians might have sworn that Capt. Brown was insane, it would have been all to no purpose; neither eloquence nor testimony could have prevailed. Slavery was the idol of Virginia, and pardon and life to Brown meant condemnation and death to slavery. He had practically illustrated a truth stranger than fiction, —a truth higher than Virginia had ever known, — a truth more noble and beautiful than Jefferson ever wrote. He had evinced a conception of the sacredness and value of liberty which transcended in sublimity that of her own Patrick Henry and made even his fire-flashing sentiment of “Liberty or Death” seem dark and tame and selfish. Henry loved liberty for himself, but this man loved liberty for all men, and for those most despised and scorned, as well as for those most esteemed and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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honored. Just here was the true glory of John Brown’s mission. It was not for his own freedom that he was thus ready to lay down his life, for with Paul he could say, “I was born free.” No chain had bound his ankle,

no yoke had galled his neck. History has no better illustration of pure, disinterested benevolence. It was not Caucasian for Caucasian —white man for white man; not rich man for rich man, but Caucasian for Ethiopian —white man for black man —rich man for poor man —the man admitted and respected, for the man despised and rejected. “I want you to understand, gentlemen,” he said to his persecutors, “that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful.” In this we have the key to the whole life and career of the man. Than in this sentiment humanity has nothing more touching, reason nothing more noble, imagination nothing more sublime; and if we could reduce all the religions of the world to one essence we could find in it nothing more divine. It is much to be regretted that some great artist, in sympathy with the spirit of the occasion, had not been present when these and similar words were spoken. The situation was thrilling. An old man in the center of an excited and angry crowd, far away from home, in an enemy’s country —with no friend near —overpowered, defeated, wounded, bleeding —covered with reproaches —his brave companions nearly all dead —his two faithful sons stark and cold by his side —reading his death-warrant in his fast —oozing blood and increasing weakness as in the faces of all around him —yet calm, collected, brave, with a heart for any fate —using his supposed dying moments to explain his course and vindicate his cause: such a subject would have been at once an inspiration and a power for one of the grandest historical pictures ever painted.... With John Brown, as with every other man fit to die for a cause, the hour of his physical weakness was the hour of his moral strength —the hour of his defeat was the hour of his triumph —the moment of his capture was the crowning victory of his life. With the Allegheny mountains for his pulpit, the country for his church and the whole civilized world for his audience, he was a thousand times more effective as a preacher than as a warrior, and the consciousness of this fact was the secret of his amazing complacency. Might with the sword of steel, he was mightier with the sword of the truth, and with this sword he literally swept the horizon. He was more than a match for all the Wises, Masons, Vallandinghams and Washingtons, who could rise against him. They could kill him, but they could not answer him. In studying the character and works of a great man, it is always desirable to learn in what he is distinguished from others, and what have been the causes of this difference. Such men as he whom we are now considering, come on to the theater of life only at long intervals. It is not always easy to explain the exact and logical causes that produce them, or the subtle influences which sustain them, at the immense heights where we sometimes find them; but we know that the hour and the man are seldom far apart, and that here, as elsewhere, the demand may in some mysterious way, regulate the supply. A great iniquity, hoary with age, proud and defiant, tainting the whole moral atmosphere of the country, subjecting both church and state to its control, demanded the startling shock which John Brown seemed especially inspired to give it. Apart from this mission there was nothing very remarkable about him. He was a wool-dealer, and a good judge of wool, as a wool-dealer ought to be. In all visible respects he was a man like unto other men. No outward sign of Kansas or Harpers Ferry was about him. As I knew him, he was an even-tempered man, neither morose, malicious nor misanthropic, but kind, amiable, courteous, and gentle in his intercourse with men. His words were few, well chosen and forcible. He was a good business man, and a good husband and father: a man HDT WHAT? INDEX

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apparently in every way calculated to make a smooth and pleasant path for himself through the world. He loved society, he loved little children, he liked music, and was fond of animals. To no one was the world more beautiful or life more sweet. How then as I have said shall we explain his apparent indifference to life? I can find but one answer, and that is, his intense hatred to oppression. I have talked with many men, but I remember none, who seemed so deeply excited upon the subject of slavery as he. He would walk the room in agitation at mention of the word. He saw the evil through no mist or haze, but in a light of infinite brightness, which left no line of its ten thousand horrors out of sight. Law, religion, learning, were interposed in its behalf in vain. His law in regard to it was that which Lord Henry Peter Brougham described, as “the law above all the enactments of human codes, the same in all time, the same throughout the world — the law unchangeable and eternal-the law written by the finger of God on the human heart-that law by which property in man is, and ever must remain, a wild and guilty phantasy.” Against truth and right, legislative enactments were to his mind mere cobwebs —the pompous emptiness of human pride —the pitiful outbreathings of human nothingness. He used to say “whenever there is a right thing to be done, there is a ‘thus said the Lord’ that it shall be done.” It must be admitted that Brown assumed tremendous responsibility in making war upon the peaceful people of Harpers Ferry, but it must be remembered also that in his eye a slave-holding community could not be peaceable, but was, in the nature of the case, in one incessant state of war. To him such a community was not more sacred than a band of robbers: it was the right of any one to assault it by day or night. He saw no hope that slavery would ever be abolished by moral or political means: “he knew,” he said, “the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they never would consent to give up their slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads.” It was five years before this event at Harpers Ferry, while the conflict between freedom and slavery was waxing hotter and hotter with every hour, that the blundering statesmanship of the National Government repealed the Missouri compromise, and thus launched the territory of Kansas as a prize to be battled for between the North and South. The remarkable part taken in this contest by Brown has been already referred to, and it doubtless helped to prepare him for the final tragedy, and though it did not by means originate the plan, it confirmed him in it and hastened its execution. During his four years’ service in Kansas it was my good fortune to see him often. On his trips to and from the territory he sometimes stopped several days at my house, and at one time several weeks. It was on this last occasion that liberty had been victorious in Kansas, and he felt that he must hereafter devote himself to what he considered his larger work. It was the theme of all his conversation, filling his nights with dreams and his days with visions. An incident of his boyhood may explain, in some measure, the intense abhorrence he felt to slavery. He had for some reason been sent into the States of Kentucky, where he made the acquaintance of a slave boy, about his own age, of whom he became very fond. For some petty offense this boy was one day subjected to a brutal beating. The blows were dealt with an iron shovel and fell fast and furiously upon his slender body. Born in a free State and unaccustomed to such revolted at the shocking spectacle and at that early age he swore eternal hatred to slavery. After years never obliterated the impression, and he found in this early experience an argument against contempt for small things. It is true that the boy is the father of the man. From the acorn comes the oak. The impression of a horse’s foot in the sand suggested the art of printing. The fall of an apple intimated the law of gravitation. A word dropped in the woods of Vincennes, by royal hunters, gave Europe and the world a “William the Silent,” and a thirty years’ war. The beating of a Hebrew bondsman, by an Egyptian, created a Moses, and the infliction of a similar outrage on a helpless slave boy in our own land may have caused, forty years afterwards, a John Brown and Harpers Ferry Raid. Most of us can remember some event or incident which has at some time come to us, and made itself a permanent part of our lives. Such an incident came to me in the year 1847. I had then the honor of spending a day and night under the roof of a man, whose character and conversation made a very deep impression on my mind and heart; and as the circumstance does not lie entirely out of our present observations, you will pardon for a moment a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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seeming digression. The name of the person alluded to had been several times mentioned to me, in a tone that made me curious to see him and to make his acquaintance. He was a merchant, and our first meeting was at his store — a substantial brick building, giving evidence of a flourishing business. After a few minutes’ detention here, long enough for me to observe the neatness and order of the places, I was conducted by him to his residence where I was kindly received by his family as an expected guest. I was a little disappointed at the appearance of this man’s house, for after seeing his fine store, I was prepared to see a fine residence; but this logic was entirely contradicted by the facts. The house was a small, wooden one, on a black street in a neighborhood of laboring men and mechanics, respectable enough, but not just the spot where one would expect enough, but not just the spot where one would expect to find the home of a successful merchant. Plain as was the outside, the inside was plainer. Its furniture might have pleased a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in it, than what was; no sofas, no cushions, no curtains, no carpets, no easy rocking chairs inviting to enervation of rest or repose. My first meal passed under the misnomer of tea. It was none of your tea and toast sort, but potatoes and cabbage, and beef soup; such a meal as a man might relish after following the plough all day, or after performing a forced march of a dozen miles over rough ground in frosty weather. Innocent of paint, veneering, varnish or tablecloth, the table announced itself unmistakably and honestly pine and of the plainest workmanship. No hired help passed from kitchen to dining room, staring in amazement at the colored man at the white man’s table. The mother, daughters and sons did the serving, and did it well. I heard no apology for doing their own work; they went through it as if used to it, untouched by any thought of degradation or impropriety. Supper over, the boys helped to clear the table and wash the dishes. This style of housekeeping struck me as a little odd. I mention it because household management is worthy of thought. A house is more than brick and mortar, wood or paint; this to me at least was. In its plainness it was a truthful reflection of its inmates: no disguises, no illusions, no make-believe here, but stern truth and solid, purpose breathed in all its arrangements. I was not long in company with the master of this house before I discovered that he was indeed the master of it, and likely to become mine too, if I staid long with him. He fulfilled St. Paul’s idea of the head of the family — his wives believe in him, and his children observed him with reverence. Whenever he spoke, his words commanded earnest attention. His arguments which I ventured at some points to oppose, seemed to convince all, his appeals touched all, and his will impressed all. Certainly I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this house. “God and duty, God and duty,” run like a thread of gold through all his utterances, and his family supplied a ready “Amen.” In person he was lean and sinewy, of the best New England mould, built for times of trouble, fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships. Clad in plain American woolen, shod in boots of cowhide leather, and wearing a cravat of the same substantial material, under six feet high, less than one hundred and fifty lbs. in weight, aged about fifty, he presented a figure straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine. His bearing was singularly impressive. His head was not large, but compact and high. His hair was coarse, strong, slightly gray and closely trimmed and grew close to his forehead. His face was smoothly shaved and revealed a strong square mouth, supported by a broad and prominent chin. His eyes were clear and grew, and in conversation they alternated with tears and fire. When on the street, he moved with a long springing, race-horse step, absorbed by his own reflections, neither seeking nor shunning observation. Such was the man whose name I heard uttered in whispers —such was the house in which he lived —such were family and household management —and such was Captain John Brown. He said to me at this meeting, that he had invited me to his house for the especial purpose of laying before me his plan for the speedy emancipation of my race. He seemed to apprehend opposition on my part as he opened the subject and touched my vanity by saying, that he had observed my course at home and abroad, and wanted my co-operation. He said he had been for the last thirty years looking for colored men to whom he could safely reveal his secret, and had almost despaired, at times, of finding such, but that now he was encouraged for he saw heads rising up in all directions, to whom he thought he could with safety impart his plan. As this plan then lay in his mind it was very simple, and had much to commend it. It did not, as was supposed by many, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

contemplate a general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave masters (an insurrection he thought would only defeat the object), but it did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should act in the very heart of the South. He was not averse to the shedding of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of manhood. No people he said could have self-respect or be respected who would not fight for their freedom. He called my attention to a large map of the U. States, and pointed out to me the far-reaching Alleghanies, stretching away from the borders of New York into the Southern States. “These mountains,” he said, “are the basis of my plan. God has given the strength of these hills to freedom; they were placed here to aid the emancipation of your race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense would be equal to a hundred for attack; they are also full of good hiding places where a large number of men could be concealed and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these mountains well and could take a body of men into them and keep them there in spite of all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge me, and drive me out. I would take at first about twenty-five picked men and begin on a small scale, supply them arms and ammunition, post them in squads of fives on a line of gathering recruits from the surrounding farms, seeking and selecting the most restless and daring.” He saw that in this part of the work the utmost care must be used to guard against treachery and disclosure; only the most conscientious and skillful should be sent on this perilous duty. With care and enterprise he thought he could soon gather a force of one hundred hardy men, men who would be content to lead the free and adventurous life to which he proposed to train them. When once properly drilled and each had found the place for which he was best suited, they would begin work in earnest; they would run off the slaves in large numbers, retain the strong and brave ones in the mountains, and send the weak and timid ones to the North by the underground Rail-road; his operations would be enlarged with increasing numbers and would not be confined to one locality. Slave-holders should in some cases be approached at midnight and told to give up their slaves and to let them have their best horses to ride away upon. Slavery was a state of war, he said, to which the slaves were unwilling parties and consequently they had a right to anything necessary to their peace and freedom. He would shed no blood and would avoid a fight except in self-defense, when he would of course do his best. He believed this movement would weaken slavery in two ways-first by making slave property insecure, it would become undesirable; and secondly it would keep the anti-slavery agitation alive and public attention fixed upon it, and thus lead to the adoption of measures to abolish the evil altogether. He held that there was need of something startling to prevent the agitation of the question from dying out; that slavery had come near being abolished in Virginia by the Nat. Turner insurrection, and he thought his method would speedily put an end to it, both in Maryland and Virginia. The trouble was to get the right men to start with and money enough to equip them. He had adopted the simple and economical mode of living to which I have referred with a view to save money for this purpose. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial. From 8 o’clock in the evening till 3 in the morning, Capt. Brown and I sat face to face, he arguing in favor of his plan, and I finding all the objections I could against it. Now mark! this meeting of ours was full twelve years before the strike at Harpers Ferry. He had been watching and waiting all that time for suitable heads to rise or “pop up” as he said among the sable millions in whom he could confide; hence forty years had passed between his thought and his act. Forty years, though not a long time in the life of a nation, is a long time in the life of a man; and here forty long years, this man was struggling with this one idea; like Moses he was forty years in the wilderness. Youth, manhood, middle age had come and gone; two marriages had been consummated, twenty children had called him father; and through all the storms and vicissitudes of busy life, this one thought, like the angel in the burning bush, had confronted him with its blazing light, bidding him on to his work. Like Moses he had made excuses, and as with Moses his excuses were overruled. Nothing should postpone further what was to him his only apology for existence. He often said to me, though life was sweet to him, he would willingly lay it down for the freedom of my people; and on one occasion he added, that he had already lived about as long as most men, since he had slept less, and if he should now lay down his life HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

the loss would not be great, for in fact he knew no better use for it. During his last visit to us in Rochester there appeared in the newspapers a touching story connected with the horrors of the Sepoy War in British India. A Scotch missionary and his family were in the hands of the enemy, and were to be massacred the next morning. During the night, when they had given up every hope of rescue, suddenly the wife insisted that relief would come. Placing her ear close to the ground she declared she heard the Slogan — the Scotch war song. For long hours in the night no member of the family could hear the advancing music but herself. “Dinna ye hear it? Dinna ye hear it?” she would say, but they could not hear it. As the morning slowly dawned a Scotch regiment was found encamped indeed about them, and they were saved from the threatened slaughter.

This circumstance, coming at such a time, gave Capt. Brown a new word of cheer. He would come to the table in the morning his countenance fairly illuminated, saying that he had heard the Slogan, and he would add, “Dinna ye hear it? Dinna ye hear it?” Alas! like the Scotch missionary I was obliged to say “No.” Two weeks prior to the mediated attack, Capt. Brown summoned me to meet him in an old stone quarry on the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Conecochequi river, near the town of Chambersburgh, Penn. His arms and ammunition were stored in that town and were to be moved on to Harpers Ferry. In company with Shields Green I obeyed the summons, and prompt to the hour we met the dear old man, with John Henry Kagi, his secretary, at the appointed place. Our meeting was in some sense a council of war. We spent the Saturday and succeeding Sunday in conference on the question, whether the desperate step should then taken, or the old plan as already described should be carried out. He was for boldly striking Harpers Ferry at once and running the risk of getting into the mountains afterwards. I was for avoiding Harpers Ferry altogether. Shields Green and Mr. Kagi remained silent listeners throughout. It is needless to repeat here what was said, after what has happened. Suffice it, that after all I could say, I saw that my old friend had resolved on his course and that it was idle to parley. I told him finally that it was impossible for me to join him. I could see Harpers Ferry only as a trap of steel, and ourselves in the wrong side of it. He regretted my decision and we parted. Thus far, I have spoken exclusively of Capt. Brown. Let me say a word or two of his brave and devoted men, and first of Shields Green. He was a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina, and had attested his love of liberty by escaping from slavery and making his way through many dangers to Rochester, where he had lived in my family, and where he met the man with whom he went to the scaffold. I said to him, as I was about to leave, “Now Shields, you have heard our discussion. If in view of it, you do not wish to stay, you have but to say so, and you can go back with me.” He answered, “I b’l’eve I’ll go wid de old man;” and go with him he did, into the fight, and to the gallows, and bore himself as grandly as any of the number. At the moment when Capt. Brown was surrounded, and all chance of escape was cut off, Green was in the mountains and could have made his escape as Osborn Perry Anderson did, but when asked to do so, he made the same answer he did at Chambersburg, “I b’l’eve I’ll go down wid de ole man.” When in prison at Charlestown, and he was not allowed to see his old friend, his fidelity to him was in no wise weakened, and no complaint against Brown could be extorted from him by those who talked with him. If a monument should be erected to the memory of John Brown, as there ought to be, the form and name of Shields Green should have a conspicuous place upon it. It is a remarkable fact, that in this small company of men. but one showed any sign of weakness or regret for what he did or attempted to do. Poor John Edwin Cook broke down and sought to save his life by representing that he had been deceived, and allured by false promises. But Aaron D. Stevens, Albert Hazlett and Green went to their doom like the heroes they were, without a murmur, without a regret, believing alike in their captain and their cause. For the disastrous termination of this invasion, several causes have been assigned. It has been said that Capt. Brown found it necessary to strike before he was ready; that men had promised to join him from the North who failed to arrive; that the cowardly negroes did not rally to his support as he expected, but the true cause as stated by himself, contradicts all these theories, and from his statement there is no appeal. Among the questions put to him by Mr. Vallandingham after his capture were the following: “Did you expect a general uprising of the slaves in case of your success?” To this he answered, “No, sir, nor did I wish it. I expected to gather strength from time to time and then to set them free.” “Did you expect to hold possession here until then?” Answer, “Well, probably I had quite a different idea. I do not know as I ought to reveal my plans. I am here wounded and a prisoner because I foolishly permitted myself to be so. You overstate your strength when you suppose I could have been taken if I had not allowed it. I was too tardy after commencing the open attack in delaying my movements through Monday night and up to the time of the arrival of government troops. It was all because of my desire to spare the feelings of my prisoners and their families.” But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life. The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? and to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail. Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught. Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown. Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia —not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal —not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone —the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union —and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1886

Edwin Morton relocated from Aargau to Morges near Lausanne, Switzerland, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Cadbury became one of the 1st firms to open dining rooms with kitchens, and with food on sale. CHOCOLATE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1889

Having devoted the remainder of his life to civic and social work, John Cadbury died.

A chocolate export department was set up in Bournville.

Edwin Morton’s VERSE (OCCASIONAL) was prepared by Lavanchy in Morges, Switzerland. Whatever is good herein — if aught — is inscribed to my sisters — if worthy of them. Edwin Morton. SONG In dreams I seemed of good to men, In church or state, by speech or pen. I woke, to find my dream of power The vision of a passing hour. Then bent my Guardian to mine ear In wisest Counsel ever clear: «To others greater deeds belong — Be thine, to cheer their work with Song.» With joy I take the humbler part, And sing my song with cheerful heart. Unseen, we list the unseen bird. Somewhere, perhaps, my song is heard: Is heard — tho’ not because I sing, But only for the good I’d bring. Unconscious, like the bird so dear, Yet glad, like him, if I but cheer.

A SEVENTIETH BIRTH DAY To those who climb these Alps sublime A calmer, purer sky is given. And so these bolder heights of Time But lift us to the calm of Heaven! From these clear heights we still behold The clouds which veiled our lives below; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But now beneath they softly fold In noonday light or evening glow! No more they hide the sun and stars, No more the tender blue above — The Eternal Day his Hand unbars Who guides us while we Heavenward move! (B.H.M.) ’80

MOTHER-LOVE The Mother-love is God’s love! By day ’tis there — by night ’tis there. The mother-love is God’s love. ’Tis with me every where! The mother-love is God’s love! It pardons all, in chastening all. And like that love from heaven above, ’Tis there whene’er I call. I see no more the patient smile, No more the face so dear — But the mother-love is God’s love, And I know it must be near! I hear no more the tender voice, — No more it calls my name — But the mother-love is God’s love, And is with me all the same! And the man-heart is the child-heart, To that love which beareth all; Still it pardons — still it chastens — And is there whene’er I call! And child and man are strengthened, Mid whate’er defeat or pain, When I feel once more the blessing Of the mother-love again! O Mother’s love — O God’s love — Help me the Race to run, Till smile and voice shall greet me, And say — at last — «Well done». Bend down, O Heavenly Presence! And make me strong and true, — Till thro’ the dust of battle I am borne, at last, to you! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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MY STAR As oft a sun-lit cloud at even Slow vanishing from mortal eye Melts slowly in the amber heaven To make a part of that sweet sky, So late a Heaven-lit soul I saw Upon life’s evening sky more fair, As gently into Heaven withdraw To add unto the glory there! As where that evening cloud has gone A new born star leads out the day, So now in Heaven a star is born And thither lights my darkening way! And thus while fades my evening light There beams a radiance sweeter far — The deeper grows my earthly night The brighter gleams my Heavenly star!

SUNRISE When comes the Sun with Heaven-born ray To fill the earth and sky with Day, I hasten to the hills away To greet the early morn! I drink deep draughts of balmy air — I joy in the world so fresh and fair — The soul with God the world doth share — To new Life I am born! And filled with its heavenly ecstasy I embrace the sea, the earth, the sky. O God! with trembling joy I cry, Is this of Heaven the dawn? * * * * * What time with murmuring heart I said, «A! sadly the lonely way I tread, «Dear Love, fond Hope, Oh! whither fled — «O unnatural strength of despair,» — I was gently drawn to a strong embrace, — Thro’ a vision of tears lo! Nature’s calm face! A Friend! — in whose infinite love and grace I rested from sorrow and care! And ne’er may I sigh with love unblest: From the north, the south, the east, the west, Is Nature’s constant love expressed — Love flows from One who loveth best — And all my days are fair! ’54 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PEACE «Let us have Peace», our chieftain cries — And million hearts, a million eyes, A million tongues the prayer increase And cry, O Father! give us Peace! From North to South, from East to West Let every race with peace be blest, Till Union shall the watchword be Of one great People, strong and free! Strong in the Right, then strong in might; Join kindred hands from shore to shore! To right the wrong, to guard the right, Our bond of Union ever more! Peace, whispers the Pacific Sea! Peace breathes the Atlantic’s solemn psalm! And Peace the Eternal song shall be Of Lake and Gulf, of Pine and Palm! 1868. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE LESSON Word is brought From heaven above That Love is Heaven, And Heaven is Love! I. See that dark and frowning face — Powers of Darkness in each trace! This, — in smiles of heavenly light, — Brightest angels there unite! — Where the heart expands with love, Light breaks in from Heaven above! Once let in the fiend of wrath, Fiends unnumbered crowd his path! Hear the lesson, From above: Love is heaven, And heaven is Love! II. Mark the scene of household strife! Love an exile — passion rife. Spirits dark rush in to reign, Bringing discord, clamor, pain! All is heavy — all is dark — Hearts with hate are cold and stark! — Once let in the fiend of wrath, Fiends unnumbered crowd his path! Once the tongue of hate unsheathe, Darkness mounts from depths beneath! Heed the lesson Heed it well: Love is Heaven, And hate is Hell III. Now the scene of fireside Peace! Heavenly joys its joys increase — Forms celestial hover there — Heavenly radiance fills the air! Where the heart expands with love Light breaks in from Heaven above! Let the soul with love expand Light breaks in on every hand! Bless the lesson From above: Love is Heaven, And Heaven is Love! IV. See these neighbouring nations — foes! — «Made of one blood» yet bitter woes Of war on war and strife on strife Have turned to hate each heart and life! Vengeance here has had its fill, Vengeance there must work its will! «Armed to the teeth», stand face to face The strength and flower of each great race! A million hearts with hate are stirred, Curses, centuries deep, are heard! — Mothers come with first born sons — Sisters, wives, with dearest ones! Children who their prayers rehearse, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Learn the prayer, — and learn the curse! Idle millions groan in arms — Millions groan to feed the swarms! Two great States are two great Camps! And all the air ’neath heaven’s lamps Where hate with hate is thus withstood, Smacks of powder, — smacks of blood! Rulers who with «God» would rule, Heed the lesson of His school! — Statesmen who would Him revere — Ye who Him would serve and «fear», Heed the Lesson, Heed it well: Love is Heaven, — Hate is Hell! 1888.

RICHES AND POWER The richest is he who has most hearts — A Croesus with none is the poorest of all! His is true Power where Love imparts A power more potent than monarch’s thrall! What are lands in fee without hearts in fee! Or bonds in a bank, without bonds in a heart! What a Scepter menacing Land and Sea, And hate in the household, the street, the mart! He has most Power who has most Love — A Caesar without it is weak on a Throne! Service bought, or enforced, is naught — ’Tis the service of Love which is good alone! Truth is Omnipotence: armed with this, Alone you may vanquish a world of lies! But only with Love it omnipotent is — Never with hate does it speak from the Skies! The Power of Love — the Riches of Love Are granted us freely from God above! These forever, in fee, we hold, While the power of gold is bought and sold! Thus Humility rules. ’Tis a power behind power. For with scepter unseen, of Love, it sways. The haughty may stride through his noisy hour, But Humility reigns with the Ancient of Days! And he has most love, who loves the most. Who in duty and deed his love doth prove! Who is sparing of words, but whose acts are a host To vouch is unfailing truth and love! 1889.

MAGIC 1, Kindness in look, and kindness in thought Tell of a heart where power is wrought. Kindness in word and kindness in deed Tell of a Power all powers must heed! The despot is brutal. And bluster is blindness! Kindness will conquer — There’s Magic in Kindness! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2. Kindness is wisdom, and wisdom is power! Tyranny, arrogance, rule but an hour. The high and the haughty may have their day, But Wisdom and Kindness will rule for aye! For the tyrant is weak, And bluster is blindness. Kindness will conquer — There’s magic in kindness! 3, Rage is the beast, — and Kindness an angel. Wrathful speech is the tiger’s growl! Vengeance a fiend. — and Love the Evangel Calling from God to the god-like soul! For the despot is brutal, And bluster is blindness! Kindness will conquer — There’s magic in kindness! 4. Master and Servant are names of two brothers. Harshness, arrogance, block their way. Only by kindness each heart is the others — All goes like Magic where Kindness has play! But the despot is brutal. And bluster is blindness! Kindness will conquer! There’s magic in Kindness! 5. Husband and Wife are the names of two friends — Thus «joined together» for God’s own ends! Tyranny, selfishness, darken their day, All goes like Magic, if Love but sway! For the despot is brutal, And bluster is blindness! Kindness will conquer! There’s magic in Kindness! 6. Love and devotion ne’er come by direction — The bright light of smiles no command will obey. But love will draw love, and affection affection, As flowers will unfold ’neath the sun-light of May. While the despot is brutal, And bluster is blindness! Kindness will conquer! There’s magic in Kindness! 7. Faces may smile — but who knows all the while What sorrows, what wrongs, may be crushing the heart! Kind thought, word, or deed, shall that sorrow beguile, And bind up the tears that are ready to start. While the despot is brutal, And bluster is blindness! Kindness will conquer! There’s magic in Kindness! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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8. Live to give pleasure. Spare giving pain! Hard words and harsh, you may call back in vain! God alone knows what each heart has to bear, Press not the burden that’s already there! Live to give pleasure, And pain not in blindness!’ To make life a treasure There’s magic in Kindness! 9. Live to give pleasure — kind without measure — Thought, word, and deed, with kindness fraught. So shall life here, be found a rich treasure, So for Hereafter still richer be wrought! Live to give pleasure — Pain not in blindness — To make life a treasure There’s magic in Kindness!

SERVICE (To ~) The precious precept comes in Jesus’ name: Your chiefest, let him serve! To Serve, I came! More precious yet he living, dying, gave: Live not for self, nor pelf, but live to serve and save! And thou, unselfish — living but to serve, — Serene o’er all that thee therefrom might swerve — To us repeats thy noble life so brave: Live not for self, nor pelf, but live to serve and save! For with thy Service came the gift divine To save the suffering! This too was thine. And countless blessings one sweet echo have: Live not for self, nor pelf, but live to serve and save! Use — Service — Sacrifice — God gave to thee! Thro’ tears of pride this coronal we see, — While thou, thro’ toilsome years, but this would crave: Live not for self, nor pelf, but live to serve and save! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NEW YEAR’S EVE (Sylvesterabend.) {Chimes.) I. Now the swift revolving sphere Swing’s into a glad new year! Christmas prophecies its birth And its peaceful reign on earth! Ushers in the happy day, — Showers blessings on its way! Presents fly from hand to hand, Blessings flow from heart to heart! Happy faces fill the land! Happy voices joy impart! Man begins a fresher life! Wears a smile of sunny youth! Goodness in the air is rife — Like the sunshine flows the truth. — Gayer sound the childrens’ voices, Merrier chime the merry bells! Fuller joy the heart rejoices, Higher praise to heaven swells! — Brighter beams the sun now launches, Bluer skies his rays release, Brighter gleam the crystal branches Of the ice-encrusted trees. While the swift revolving sphere Swings into a glad new year! II. Coming, coming, — going, going, — So the stream of Time sweeps on, — With its ceaseless, silent flowing Bearing us where all are gone! On its bosom sailing, sailing, Scarce we note its silent way, Busied with the cares and labors Joys and sorrows of each day, — Till by night we pass the tower — Landmark of the fleeting year — Where Time’s clock the solemn hour Knells upon the startled ear! Now, O friends, the tower we’re passing I List the year-clock’s measured peal! Ah! the thoughts that now are chasing Thro’ each heart, — who shall reveal? Who divine the lingering sorrow, Who the pangs of deep regret, Cruel error, wrongs, injustice. Coming till the cheek is wet? Errors not cf selfish foes — Lightest among earthly woes — Errors of mistaken friends. .Sharpest woe that heaven sends! Happy, he, who looking backward Sees the pathway he has trod Blossoming with deeds of goodness, — Leading ever up to God! And if any course may vary From intention at the start, Oh! despair not! Do not tarry! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But press on with braver heart. — For the stream is onward! onward! And unless we shape our way, We shall profitless be drifted To the larger, brighter Day! III. While the winged weeks fly o’er us, Changes are as swiftly wrought! Where are they, so late before us, And now with us but in thought! As the shell, from shore an exile. On the air no music flings, Yet to trustful ears will murmur All the song the ocean sings, — So, divine Imagination, — Glad we trust thy wondrous skill — Touch our eyes! and in their vision All the Past is with us still! Faces still of sister, brother, Smiling flit from room to room, — Voices still of father, mother, Touch the deepest chords of home: Still the vollied shouts of children Put to rout the ranks of gloom! Ever Fancy’s busy fingers Weave from out her magic loom All this scene of absent faces, All the priceless joys of home! See! O see that lovely vision! Is’t a child, an angel child, Strayed away from fields Elysian To this wintry, wintry wild? No! our Mabel! ’tis our Mabel, — There the curls, the laughing eye. There the coy, enticing beauty, — Jewel worth the earth and sky! IV. Thus the swift revolving sphere Swings into a glad new year! Christmas prophecies its birth And its peaceful reign on earth! Ushers in the happy day, — Showers blessings on its way! Offerings fly from hand to hand, Blessings flow from heart to heart! Happy faces fill the land! Happy voices joy impart! Man begins a fresher life! Wears a smile of sunny youth! Goodness in the air is rife — Like the sunshine flows the truth! Gayer sound the childrens’ voices, Merrier chime the merry bells! Fuller joy the heart rejoices, Higher praise to heaven swells! — Happy, he, who looking backward, Sees the pathway he has trod Blossoming with deeds of goodness, — Leading ever up to God! And if any course may vary From intention at the start, Oh! despair not! Do not tarry! But press on with braver heart: — HDT WHAT? INDEX

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For the stream is onward! onward! And unless we shape our way, We shall profitless be drifted To the larger, brighter Day! 1857

TO GERRIT SMITH12 (Birthday lines.) «Ferns in caelum redeas» Bend, winter skies, more gently bend To arch this day of hope and joy! Blow, winter wind, more softly blow And add thy music’s sweet alloy! Roll, swinging earth, more slowly roll This happy day’s recurring round! Shine, torch of heaven, more brightly shine To gild the day from bound to bound! Hail, sweetly hail, O gentle wife, The chosen day that dawned to be The herald of a noble life, — And noblest then, when worthiest thee! Shout, gladly shout, O captive race, And clank to heaven a myriad hands, To greet the day whose radiant face Brings promise unto darkening lands! — O hopeful month, the hint of spring, — Of life renewed, — of waving fields, — Uncounted thanks that thou did’st bring That life which richer promise yields! If days by deeds were numbered best, Strong Friend of Man! thou’rt full of years But Heaven, in thee so richly blest, Long spares her son, nor wakes our fears! 1859.

12. A life-long friend of the slave, — a sincere and unselfish lover of his country. — A heart always in sympathy with his fellow men, - their rights, and wrongs, — and a noble nature, where a great heart and a great head were constant rivals. — The idol of a family and social circle, because a husband, a father, a friend, beyond all praise. — A courteous gentleman, of whom king or courtier might learn dignity and courtesy; and of whom a distinguished lady once said, «God made Gerrit Smith, and then broke the mould!» HDT WHAT? INDEX

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FLOWERS IN WINTER (To A.C.S.) I. The earth is cold and bleak and bare. The leaves are fallen to graves of snow. And leafless trees in the chilly air Give sighs to all the winds that blow. The brook runs on thro’ the whitened mead, Seeking in vain the grass and flowers, Murmuring soft on its wandering tread, A song of the vanished summer hours. The golden-robin’s empty nest Swings sadly in the shivering tree; The sparrow and the dear red-breast Are fled, and sing no more for thee. The hills on snowy crowns receive The crimson light of East and West; — And in their prayers at morn and eve’ Transfigured stand, by heaven blest. II. Yet tho’ the earth be cold and bare. And tho’ the streamlet’s voice is sad. And tho’ no bird-songs thrill the air, And hill and vale with snow are clad, But look, dear friend, upon these flowers Which still for thee will strive to bloom, And they shall tell cf sunnier hours, And bring their light to winter’s gloom. Their fragrance, language void of art, Is the pure love they bring to thee! Oh! take them — take them to thy heart, And let that love my service be! III. Today a People’s thanks arise, And hearts are votive offerings! A nation’s anthem greets the skies With praises to the King of kings! Thanks, Father! thanks, for happy years; For this rich life Thy goodness sends; For wisest care mid all our fears, And thanks, o’er all, for love and friends! And not the less that boundless love Shall find acknowledgement from me, That thro’ these flowers I may approve The blessing which they bring to thee! O gentle Heart! and willing hand! And soul that burdens both with love, While loyal hearts around thee stand And ever their allegiance prove, I, among those who «stand and wait,» May only lift my thought to Heaven, And all my prayers with wishes freight That God’s best gifts to thee be given! Thanksgiving Day, 1855. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE GERMAN PRISONER.13 I. As thro’ a mother’s tears a mother’s eyes Gaze fondly on the child she fears to lose, So angels, from their seats in paradise With anxious faces bend o’er human woes. The strife for life is o’er, — where thro’ the night The Court House gleams, or now is lost in gloom, As thro’ the driving clouds the half-moon’s light Shines fitfully, and hints uncertain doom! Calm Justice there now silent vigil keeps, Nor heat nor hate nor wrong her cheek can pale. No passionate voice now tempts her marble lips, Nor vibrant air disturbs her even scale. Her chosen twelve, where glances yonder light, Are met to break the seals of Life and Death! While Discord elsewhere still breaks up the night, And vengeful wagers rise on drunken breath. Into the grated cell the moonlight flies, As fain to visit, where none else will come. Is it God’s blessing breathed from out the skies, — Or angel guardian, sent from heavenly home? It lights the gloom as with an angel’s smile — Trances the air as with a kiss of Peace. — . «My heart is breaking, wronged, and free from guile, — «Say, heavenly herald, bring’st thou not release? Thus the lone prisoner, suppliant, feebly cries, And breaks his solitude with trembling prayer. The silence startled with his mournful sighs, Re-echoes accents yet ne’er uttered there. — A heart nigh breaking, long oppressed with grief, Falls on a Father’s heart — the heart of God! Its seals are loosed, and there it finds relief — As fountains break spontaneous from the sod. «O God! no home, — no friends,—’neath alien skies,- - «A prisoner here,—and thoughts imprisoned in me, — «Be Thou my Country,—Home,—and Guardian wise.— «Thus doubly dungeoned, let me fly to Thee! «Since truth alone ’gainst vengeance powerless falls, «And fearful snares of chance my feet restrain, «Oh! would some heavenly power might shake these walls, «Some angel-messenger might loose my chain!» As one who striving long ’twixt hopes and fears, At last o’erworn, sinks helplessly away, So Willie yields to long resisted tears, And falls upon his couch to wait the day. Fair Slumber pillows him upon her breast, And wafts him to the mystic realm of dreams! Thro’ Memory’s halls she takes her silent quest, Till now in home, and Father-land he seems!

13. Since these «lines», Heaven as recalled him, — already long ago: and now, so far from his grave among the hills we both loved, — and here in a land whose earliest and most sacred traditions as well as later life and history are all bound up with Freedom and equal rights, — I am permitted to add this fresher and brighter leaf to my poor and fading laurel of 1859. That will fade, and perish; and this also. Hut the life of a good man is imperishable. It will «blossom in the dust». E.M. Morges, Switzerland, ’80. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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II. «O Heaven! what vision greets my eye! «Is this my native shore? «The angry strife I left behind — «Was that the ocean’s roar? «Is this the Rhine-stream flowing down? «And home do I regain? — «And see! are those the glittering spires «Of Frankfort on the Mayne?» «Dear Frankfort, where my wondering eyes «First opened to the light, «And boyhood’s fleeting holiday «Passed like a vision bright — «From all my weary wandering, «And years of toil, and pain, «My heart more fondly turns to thee, «O Frankfort on the Mayne!» «Thy towers against the evening sky «In ruddy splendor rise, But in my heart they pencilled are With more than sunset dyes! «And as the varying needle strives «Its wonted point to gain, «So turns my heart, where’er I roam, «To Frankfort on the Mayne!» «Yonder where St. Bartholomew «Lifts up its crude hands, «And o’er the busy swarm of life «In benediction stands, «My father’s humble cottage lay, — «And tho’ so poor and plain, «’Twas far the dearest spot to me «In Frankfort on the Mayne!» «And where St. Katherine’s ample dome «Reflects the rosy sky, «And points to a celestial home «With wondrous majesty — «There Mary’s gentle lot was cast, — «The hope of many a swain, — «And dearer far than all, to me, «In Frankfort on the Mayne!» Together ’neath its chimes we sat, As evening wore away, «Until its hymeneal bells «Rung in our marriage day! «O happy chimes! O magic bells! — «My tears fall like the rain, «When I recall those evening hours «In Frankfort on the Mayne!» «Beneath its golden crucifix «We plighted life for life, «And at its marble altar I «Received my wedded wife! «And then the old cathedral shook «With the organ’s swelling strain, — «And far the happiest man was I, «In Frankfort on the Mayne! s> i O blessed be this river — «And those sacred turrets high — «And every star that o’er them bends «In favoring prophecy! «By all my dearest memories, «And love that ne’er shall wane, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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«I ne’er will quit thy blessed gates, «O Frankfort on the Mayne!» III. Hark, that ringing! Upward springing, Willie lists with quickening breath! Ah! that calling — Heart appalling! Is it life, — or is it death? «Beauteous vision — «Dream Elysean — «Art thou thus forever fled? «Minster towers — «Native bowers — «Are ye but enchantment sped? «No! this bolting — «Harsh, revolting! — «This, is but a dream of night; «This long waiting «"Within grating — «Off! — away! —- and quit my sight! Hark! that tolling, — Echoing, — rolling, Far into the midnight sky! Solemn calling — Dread, — appalling! Summons it to live, — or die? IV. Now cheerily glances the gladdening light, And blithe are the voices of morning! And many a heart with expectancy bright Is blessing the day that is dawning! But gladlier rises the morning sun, And sweeter the voices of Day, And brighter the promise of hope to one Who has wasted in prison away! — For Willie is free! And Mary and he Are langhing, and weeping, in joy and glee Like gay-feathered birds in the fleecy sky Their frolicsome flight awinging, The sleighs o’er the glistening snow flash by, With their musical bells aringing. — But merrier far there is one whom I know, For all that these hours restore him, And whiter than even the glistening snow, Is the page of his life before him! — For Willie is free! And Mary and he Are langhing and weeping, in joy and glee! With a white-sailed regatta the heavens are flecked, Putting forth from the harbor of Dawning, For the silver-sparred bark of the Pleiades, wrecked In the orient waves of morning. — But a richer and costlier argosy bright Puts forth on its quest today, For visions and hopes which in misery’s night, Have wandered in darkness away! — For Willie is free! And Mary and he Are langhing and weeping, in joy and glee! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Oh! bright are the tears which are streaming today, For they are not tears of sorrow; For joy, when his deepest debt he will pay, From the fountain of Tears must borrow! And the radiant gems that sparkle so bright, With a richer than diamond splendor, Shall encircle the brow with a crown of light, Of him who arose in his strength and might, And became to the weak a defender. — For Willie is free! And Mary and he Are laughing and weeping in joy and glee! 1856.

THE KEY You think she is strange — but you have’nt the key; There are secrets of Nature beyond your poor art! Because you are stupid, — because you don’t see, Will you throw to the winds a priceless heart? Xhe first word and last word of Love, is Trust. To true hearts the very last word is fear! ’Tis with Courage and Trust and Love you must Find the key to a mystery evermore dear! For the womanly heart hath deep beneath deep, — As the womanly soul has sky above sky. But with plummet of Love you may soundings keep, And on wings of Trust you may mount thus high! ’89.

GEBURTSTAG To E.R. (Jurist — Artist — Soldier.) Near where the Aar brings down his Alpine tide To wed the Rhine and seek the ocean wide, There nature cradled erst a much-loved child, And his bright youth with brightest dreams beguiled. First to his cradle clear-eyed Justice came, And in his features read her own fair name. These lips, she said, my judgment shall declare — These stainless hands my stainless scepter bear! Next heaven-born Art, with face of heavenly light Bends o’er his slumbers in a vision bright, In beauteous dreams he walks in Beauty’s train, And Beauty’s world he takes for his domain; — Till Liberty, with nobler mien severe Claims him her child, and cries with accents clear: To thee my sword — my mandate this, to thee, «Guard well the Land I’ve chosen for the free» And thus these Three, none more divinely fair, Made their young hero all their jealous care. And round his deepening brow, to manhood grown, Each bent her wreath and claimed him for her own; — Till wiser Nature now with accents mild Rebuked their strife, and thus reclaimed her child: Nor Art, nor War, nor Law, completes my plan — Behold my noblest Work — A Noble Man! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE LAST ROSE The rose awaits your coming, And late it blooms for you, The bee around it humming Ne’er dares to taste its dew, But sighing sings: This precious wine Blushes for other lips than mine. Unto its fragrant bower The parting sunlight steals, And in that tranquil hour Its tender love reveals. «O loving light of day’s decline I bloom for other eyes than thine!» Thither with soft caressing The shadowy moonlight flies, Thither with purest blessing The trembling starlight hies. «O purest rays in heaven that shine I bloom for other eyes than thine!» O lips of purest sweetness, And eyes of purest light, — O soul whose rare completeness Is radiance in my sight, — This flower which shrinks from light divine Is yet scarce worthy eyes of thine! Yet on thy heart but wear it — ’Twill gather fragrance there — And with thy face compare it Till it learn to bloom more fair! To me no fairest angel shrine Could fairer, worthier be than thine. ’57.

PORTRAITS (M.B.M.) 1. A cherub sweet, with tranquil eyes, Viewing the world with mild surprise, Turning ever toward the Light, Of household fire, or sunshine bright. — 2. A Girlhood fresh as May or June. A voice with Spring-time birds in tune. A smile where Light from unseen skies With heavenly radiance fills her eyes. — 3. A Maidenhood where all things seem The current of some mystic dream: A stream which left some heaven behind And still winds on some heaven to find. — 4. In Womanhood serene and fair See childhood, girlhood, maiden rare! A beauteous Life, — o’erarched with Hope HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Beyond all mortal ken the scope! 5. Still turning ever toward the Light — Still ’neath that Light of unseen Skies Which guides her woaattrans14 steps aright To fairer Realms of sweet surprise!

ICHABOD MORTON (Funeral Hymn.) He dreamed that Heaven should come to earth And ceaseless toiled the day to view. O’er-borne he sank before its birth —. And lo! to him the dream is true! O weary heart! O weary hand! No more the anxious strife renew — A Power above the vision, planned, And Heaven indeed has come to you! Sweet May returns — with leaf and flower The garden of his love expands! Rewarding autumn brings her dower But gives the fruit to other hands! So blest is he, and ever blest, Who patient sows where others reap, And ever-ripening fields shall best His ever-growing memory keep! I.M.

SONG OF THE ROSE 1. (To an invalid.) I watch, with thee, the silent summer night. With thee 1 follow every friendly star, And waning moon late risen to our sole sight, Till, from their patient quest, All, all, are sunk to rest, Deep in the slumbrous west, And lady, thou and 1 still sleepless are.

14. «We can have Heaven here, if we but live rightly.» HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2. O weary heart, deem not thy watch unblest Though thou alone dost mark the lagging hours, While many voic-ed Day is hushed to rest, And stillness even sleeps Weary the watch it keeps, Tranced in midsummer deeps, And wandering zephyrs pause on beds of flowers. E’en while with night vou cool a throbbing brow And to that distant heaven so fondly gaze, God’s blessing hand is on his child e’en now! And all that pathway white In yonder azure height Is but, 1 ween, the flight Of angels. bringing peace for all thv days. 4. The perfume which I bear is but the kiss They breathed upon me in their bending flight. A token sweet they left for you, it is! And see, — this crystal dew, The tears they wept for you, Which, falling as they flew, I garner in my bosom all the night. 5. The morning breaks, — and nature is at prayer. And with the earliest light, and hush of dawn, Soothed with the song of birds, and freshening air, With suffering long oppressed At last thou findest rest, By gentle sleep caressed, — Sleep standing by, each ruder breath to warn! 6. Oh! sleep, fair lady, sleep’ Oh! sleep nor dream. All peacefully, as sinks the summer day, All tranquilly, as glides yon rippling stream. Sleep, sleep, Oh! sleep and rest. — Sleep, sleep, ( ) weary breast — Sleep, sleep, O dearest, best. — Too happy, I, to guard thy rest alway! 1857

GOLDEN WEDDING (L.S.-S.M.S.) (Song.) O Love! the sun is shining- in the east, Nor tires to shine, while ages have increased. So shines our love, and fills my tranquil breast. O Love! on yonder shore the ocean sings, As when it bore the Mayflower’s drooping wings. So in my heart our early love-song rings. O Love! with Spring the wild flower still appears, Fresh as the Pilgrims saw it thro’ their tears. So blooms our love, thro’ all the changing years! O Love! the moon and stars descend the west To make in fresher skies their happier quest. So, love, once more we’ll wed, among the blest! 1860 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ONE FRIEND One true friend — one friend really true, — This is enough, believe me, for you. One dear friend, — one friend truly dear, — Here is enough thy heart to cheer! In a whole life-time find but this one, Heaven for you on earth is begun! When among thousands this one you find, God is there manifest — His is that mind, Blow, storms of Evil! — this one is true! Here a sheet-anchor holds fast for you. Heart-weary, soul-weary, stemming the flood, Rest in this Heart of the Infinite God!

THE ARCHER15 With all my strength I bent my bow, And aimed the shaft with anxious eye. A sudden breath from Heaven, and lo! The arrow from its course did fly. With pain I sought — with joy I found The brighter mark to which it flew! A Hand unseen the trial crowned, And aimed it better than I knew.

15. It has been suggested that this poem “The Archer” is Edwin Morton’s veiled tribute to Captain John Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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«THE BUSY BEE» (E.S.M.) ( Paterfamilias loq u ilur.) This day ’tis thirty years ago — Yes, dearie, thirty five! — (My! how time flies! ’Tis much to do To count the years we live!) Why Lizzie, yes! ’twill be, — dear me! — Septembers thirty five, Since you, a «little busy bee,» Came buzzing to our hive! And when I heard the breezy hum, I kissed the good Queen Bee! We scarcely guessed what prize had come, Yet smiled and wept with glee! E’en then I saw your wings unfold And waff you here and there To gather sweets, or dust of gold, From gardens rich and fair. Was it a father’s tender love That you so lovely seemed? Or was’t that on thee from above Some angel’s smile had gleamed! For sure the rose fresh color earned Anear that tender cheek, And like a torch in midday, burned The lily on thy neck? Your voice has filled the hive with cheer Oh! many a long, long day, — Twas music, dearie, to my ear, ’Twas sunshine on the way! Yes, filled the hive with joy and cheer. The sweetest, dearest lay That ever sent a careworn year With music on its way! To count the honey you have stored And gathered in the hive, And fields of labor you’ve explored For years full thirty five, ’Twere all in vain: no precious hoard Can vie with that of Lizzie. For industry, find some new word. The bee’s not half so «busy.» The bee forsooth, the winter near, Sleeps in his waxen dome. While Lizzie dear, from year to year, Illumes a happy home. And when I see thy watchful care Of one both mine and thine; A matchless love which seems to share Of human and divine; Oh God! I cry, if love there shines More pure than all, all other — Tis that which binds, and ever binds The daughter dear, and mother! — Yes, many a year has come and gone — Septembers thirty five, — Since your sweet life began to dawn, Dear Lizzie, in our hive. And tho’ we cannot count the stores Our «busy bee» has earned, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Be sure there’s One has kept the scores, They’ll be ten times returned!

M ETEO RS When Sylvia raised to heaven her eyes Where sliding stars so softly trailed, Methought new splendor touched the skies And other fires as sudden paled. And when from her I looked above, — Or when we both the meteors sought, My blinded eyes wtih darkness strove, Or lights were drowned in light she brought. Ah! heed not stars which blaze and burst While loving planets constant burn, Nor while for thee one flame is nursed May’st thou to fitful splendors turn.

TO LULIE I saw a rosebud on its bush Unconscious of its opening flush, Yet reigning in its perfumed bower The pet of wind and sun and shower. Again a blowing rose I saw Whose beauty every eye did draw, Yet shunned, or half allowed the gaze Of hommage or of honest praise. You guess my moral Lulie. The opening bud was thine — But tell, oh tell me truly, Shall not the rose be mine? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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MABEL {To father and mother in Italy.) Mamma, the rivulet hurries past our door, With ever hastening footsteps to the shore, — Through lake and river speeding to the sea, To bear the sounds from home e’en there to thee! Today, mamma, they say that winter’s gone, And all the promise of the summer born! Ah! mother dear, its richest boon will be That it shall bring your own dear self to me! Dear Grandpa says the willows by their streams Glow all with summer in their winter-dreams. And ever warm at heart, ’neath lingering snow, Springs the brave snow-bell, hastening first to blow! The blue-bird too brings greeting fresh today, And even one bold robin tilts the spray! And this home-love which draws them to our Land, Does it not also in your breast expand? Come soon then, mother, to the dear old nest, Where I so long have slept upon your breast. Its maples green and simple vines, and flowers, Are dearer, sure, than all Italian bowers! And there, you know, six years ago today, A stranger came, from some far clime astray, — And from your boundless love so dear has grown, That every year she’s more and more your own! And, dear mamma, somehow this time it seems, In wakeful hours, or in my deepest dreams, That over widening lands, and seas and storms, My childish heart to you and father warms! March 4th, 1862. CLASS ’55 (Sophomore song.) 1. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ah! cheerily, joyfully, bounds every heart In the jovial festival throng, When around the bright board loving classmates are met, (J) And each voice mingles glad in the song! Each heart seeks to seal the warm vows of each heart, Every eye flashes greeting sincere! While the notes of the song as its tide rolls along Fill the bosom with liveliest cheer! 3. Alma Mater, two winters have peacefully decked Thy head with a crown white and hoar, Two summers with beauty have arched their green shade O’er thy paths, since we first sought thy lore. And soon, ay! too soon, will the bright days of June Twine our wreath round the old parting tree, And the evening breeze to the whispering trees Reecho the parting glee! 4. As the moon gilds her track from the clouds that would dim And ascends all so queenly the skies, May each victory won in our path ever on Give us strength ever higher to rise! As the parting sun greeting new climes with his light Leaves the tenderest light behind, So, Harvard, when life calls us far from thy scenes May we leave with thee memories kind! 5. Now with hand clasping hand, form one unbroken band Seal the bonds of our friendship around! And above the bright chain swell aloft the glad strain. Till each link is with harmony bound! Now a health to Fair Harvard! Fill high! boys, fill high! For what name to our hearts is more dear! And a double health now to the «Class fifty five»! And may God bless its onward career! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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«THANKSGIVING» (Postprandium.) Under the «Old Hen»16 scramble once more, Now while the winter winds whistle and roar! Hear her quick «Cluck! cluck!» calling you home! Run! every chick of ye-! «Come», she cries, «Come!» «Don’t go so far, for the dinners you’re scratching! Don’t stay so long, while I’m waiting and watching! Are there no pickings a thought nearer home That afar and astray you must wander and roam? In the darkest long night, thro’ the longest bright day I’ve spread my wings o’er you, at work or at play. Running in, running out, with laugh, tears, or shout, You’ve nestled beneath me — I’ve closed you about. Thro’ days, weeks, and years, since you first pecked the shell, I’ve gathered you under me, loved you full well! In health or in sickness, in life — ay! in death, I’ve sheltered ye all, since the first tender breath! And for all these long years that I’ve watched so above ye, Is it strange, truant chicks, that so fondly I love ye? So come back to the «Old Hen», wanderers, come! And learn the old adage, There’s no place like home! But bless me! what’s this! not a bird of my feather, y. Coming bound to my boy by some mystical tether! No nestling of my flock has such gentle mien, — No sweetness and grace like to this have I seen! Ah! my truant has strayed to the land of the fays, And there, with their beauty and grace all amaze, Has brought back, in a dream, to my plain homely brood The gentlest and best of the true and the good! Ah! sonny! this comes of not asking your mother Before going out, like your dutiful brother! You would always be going to those dreadful wars! And now, (always daring), you’ve climbed to the stars— And seeking the fairest and brightest and best, You’ve brought it (just like you) right home to my nest! Well, there’s one thing, — my chicks know what’s good when they see it, — Sure sign that when evil comes near, they will flee it! And this fairer child I will count in with mine; Till they catch from her presence, a charm so divine! Welcome and cherish, and make her mine own, Till my boy’s spell is sundered, and homeward she’s flown! Or, if Love and Devotion may aid the soft charm, He shall keep her forever, and safe from all harm! So come back to the «Old Hen», wanderers, come! And learn the old adage, There’s no place like home! Nestle beneath me, dear children, once more, And let the world’s winter blast whistle and roar. Gather together close under my wing! And rest from all care, in the love that I bring!» Homestead, 1871.

16. «The Homestead.» HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE SECRET 1. Guard no ill feeling toward any — Keep only love for all. And the joyous hours shall be many, And Heaven within thy call! 2. The sunlight is brighter the day When you’ve thrown to the winds your hate. For the soul with love is elate! Still fairer the day, — thy work but play. And at every turn of the gladsome way Glad angels upon thee wait!

THE TIE A silken lasso round my neck My cousin throws, and so I’m caught. Nor may I ever wish to break The bonds her loving hands have wrought. Oh! than the finest silk more fine, Yet stronger than the bolts of Jove, The subtile mesh they easy twine Which knits me to the hearts I love. The bond rowan gods nor men can part, Nor Time, nor change, nor mortal strife, Is wrought from out a noble heart, And strengthened by a noble life!

NIGHTFALL 1. The world rolls away from the light And God draws the curtain of Day. In the darkness and silence and calm of night, I think of my daily way. Before Thee O God! as Thy world speeds on, — Thou guiding by day, protecting till dawn, — I turn my heart to the day now gone, And think of my daily way. 2. Have I heeded Thy laws this day — For Thou and Thy laws are one. Have I made Thy laws my laws this day — With Thee has all been done? For in these Thou art near, ever near, O Lord, — Immutable — Infinite — One! In obeying Thy laws Thou art best adored! In obeying Thy laws, Thou dost help afford! With this worship, this love, has my heart been stored,— With Thee has all been done? 3. Have I faithfully toiled this day — Have I earned this day my bread — Have I kept Thy just and primal Law HDT WHAT? INDEX

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That each shall earn his bread. Have I shunned the degrading and shameful sin On another’s toil to be fed. Oh! let me not idle, the earth despoil, While another for me must doubly toil, — Another must doubly cleave the soil To spread my board and bed! 4. Have I been just this day — Have I heeded the rights of others. In this duty of striving for self and mine Have I kept the immutable law divine, To be just to my striving brothers! Ah! meanest of all, if while toiling for self I degrade this duty to greed for pelf — If I make it a scramble for power and pelf To the wrong of my toiling brothers! 5. Was I thoughtful of father and mother — Was I loving with wife and child — Was I helpful to sister and brother — Have I served this sacred guild. Ah! help me, O God, more faithful to be, In Duty and Love, until I may see In the love of these hearts the best blessing from Thee!— Till I win the true love of this guild! 6. Was I just to the toiling poor — Have I heeded their rights, and dues, — The friend who sweeps my floor — The brother who cleans my shoes. The widow who washes; and they who prepare My food and my bed with constant care. Ah! smite me, O God! if I prove unfair To the toiling, humble poor! 7. Have I heeded the feelings of others, — In wish, thought, creed, or plan — In the rights which first of all others Are the sacredest rights of man! God forbid I should be, of all tyrants the worst, That despot of thought, — whose opinion comes first, Who rides rough-shod, in conceit accurst, O’er the thoughts and the feelings of others! 8. Have I done a kind act this day — Have I cheered with love some heart; — For in all our varied earthly way, ’Tis the act of love which day by day Will the highest life impart! In the battle of life comes the zest to succeed, — In work and achievement is highest meed, — But life is yet sweetest when word and deed Have gladdened with love some heart! 9. Thus while God draws the curtain of day, And the world rolls away from the sun, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As I think of my earthly way And review the day that is done, Let me feel in my heart that sweetest joy, Let me taste that pleasure without alloy, That some kind act did my time employ, — As I think of the day that is done. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1900

February 16, Friday: Edwin Morton died where he had resided since 1886, at Morges near Lausanne, Switzerland.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: October 14, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.