out and hung him, and laid his body in the grave, where it still lies
moldering. But there was part of him not in the jurisdiction of
Virginia, a part which they could neither hang nor bury; and, to the
infinite surprise of the Governor of Virginia, his soul went marching
on.

[Illustration: John Brown.]

When they heard in Concord that John Brown had been captured, and was
soon to be hung, Thoreau sent notice through the city that he would
speak in the public hall on the condition and character of John Brown,
on Sunday evening, and invited all to be present.

The Republican Committee and the Committee of the Abolitionists sent
word to him that this was no time to speak; to discuss such matters
then was premature and inadvisable. He replied: "I did not send to you
for advice, but to tell you that I am going to speak." The selectmen
of Concord dared neither grant nor refuse him the hall. At last they
ventured to lose the key in a place where they thought he could find it.

This address of Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown," should be a
classic in American history. We do not always realize that the time of
American history is now. The dates of the settlement of Jamestown, and
Plymouth, and St. Augustine do not constitute our history. Columbus
did not discover us. In a high sense, the true America is barely
thirty years old, and its first President was Abraham Lincoln.

We in the North are a little impatient at times, and our politicians,
who are not always our best citizens, mutter terrible oaths, especially
in the month of October, because the South is not yet wholly
regenerate, because not all which sprang from the ashes of the
slave-pen were angels of light.

But let us be patient while the world moves on. Forty years ago not
only the banks of the Yazoo and the Chattahoochee, but those of the
Hudson, and the Charles, and the Wabash, were under the lash. On the
eve of John Brown's hanging not half a dozen men in the city of
Concord, the most intellectual town in New England, the home of
Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Alcott, dared say that they felt any
respect for the man or sympathy for the cause for which he died.

I wish to quote a few passages from this "Plea for Captain John Brown."
To fully realize its power, you should read it all for yourselves. You
must put yourselves back into history, now already seeming almost
ancient history to us, to the period when Buchanan was President--the
terr