Historical voices

He alone of all our Presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.

It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions.

It is something to couple one’s name with great occasions, and it was a great thing to me to be permitted to bear some humble part in this, the greatest that had thus far come to the American people.

Upon his own head he invited all the bolts of slaveholding vengeance.

Those who looked for confession heard only the voice of rebuke and warning.

Had he wavered, had he retreated or apologized, the case had been different.

What he had lost by the sword, he had more than gained by the truth.

He had spoken great words in the face of death and the champions of slavery.

His defeat was already assuming the form and pressure of victory, and his death was giving new life and power to the principles of justice and liberty.

The old hero, in the trial hour, had behaved so grandly that men regarded him not as a murderer, but as a martyr.

No one who has not himself been compelled to leave his home and country and go into permanent banishment, can well imagine the state of mind and heart which such a condition brings.

Nobody could then see that in the short space of four years this power would be broken and the slave system destroyed.

Slavery seemed to be at the very top of its power; the national government with all its powers and appliances were in its hands, and it bade fair to wield them for many years to come.

England had given me shelter and protection when the slavehounds were on my track fourteen years before, and her gates were still open to me now that I was pursued in the name of Virginia justice.

Captain Brown urged us both to go with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.

I looked at him with some astonishment, that he could rest upon a reed so weak and broken, and told him that Virginia would blow him and his hostages sky-high, rather than that he should hold Harper’s Ferry an hour.

It would be an attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole country against us.

To me, such a measure would be fatal to running off slaves (as was the original plan), and fatal to all engaged in doing so.

In the worse case, too, if the plan should fail, and John Brown should be driven from the mountains, a new fact would be developed by which the nation would be kept awake to the existence of slavery.

Men do not like to buy runaway horses, nor to invest their money in a species of property likely to take legs and walk off with itself.

I readily saw that this plan could be made very effective in rendering slave property in Maryland and Virginia valueless by rendering it insecure.

Hating slavery as I did, and making its abolition the object of my life, I was ready to welcome any new mode of attack upon the slave system which gave any promise of success.

A government recognizing the validity of the Dred Scott decision at such a time as this, is not likely to have any very charitable feelings towards me, and if I am to meet its representatives I prefer to do so at least upon equal terms.

They have by the single act of slaveholding, voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates--the common enemies of God and of all mankind.