A Plea for Captain John Brown: Read to the Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday Evening, October Thirtieth, Eighteen Fifty-Nine
1859
A Plea for Captain John Brown: Read to the Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday Evening, October Thirtieth, Eighteen Fifty-Nine
1859
This is Thoreau at his most dangerous. Delivered in Concord just weeks after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, this speech is not a cautious philosophical treatise but a passionate defense of armed resistance to slavery. Thoreau doesn't merely excuse Brown, he celebrates him, calling him a man of incomparable courage and moral clarity in a nation that had grown comfortable with complicity. The essay crackles with the urgency of a country teetering toward civil war, as Thoreau mounts a scathing critique of a society that would execute a man for trying to free the enslaved while remaining blind to the violence inherent in slavery itself. He challenges his neighbors to look inward: are they on the side of justice, or are they simply afraid? This is Thoreau unshackled from academic distance, speaking directly about life, death, and what it means to truly act on one's convictions. It remains one of the most radical statements a major American writer ever made about moral obligation and political violence.
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“No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.””
— Henry David Thoreau
“The only government that I recognize,”
— Henry David Thoreau
“I should say that [John Brown] was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the Consitution, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined foe.””
— Henry David Thoreau
“When we heard at first [John Brown] was dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away" because he resisted the government. Which ways have they thrown their lives, pray?”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Think of him,”
— Henry David Thoreau
“We talk about a government; but what a monster is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the heart, are not represented.””
— Henry David Thoreau
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Thoreau, Henry David. A Plea for Captain John Brown: Read to the Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday Evening, October Thirtieth, Eighteen Fifty-Nine. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-plea-for-captain-john-brown-read-to-the-citizens-of-concord-massachusetts-on-s-9d24a331-7b6f-4eac-b561-49f774c50cab.Thoreau, H. D. (1859). A Plea for Captain John Brown: Read to the Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday Evening, October Thirtieth, Eighteen Fifty-Nine. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-plea-for-captain-john-brown-read-to-the-citizens-of-concord-massachusetts-on-s-9d24a331-7b6f-4eac-b561-49f774c50cabThoreau, Henry David. A Plea for Captain John Brown: Read to the Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday Evening, October Thirtieth, Eighteen Fifty-Nine. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-plea-for-captain-john-brown-read-to-the-citizens-of-concord-massachusetts-on-s-9d24a331-7b6f-4eac-b561-49f774c50cab.
