A Plea for Captain John Brown

A Plea for Captain John Brown is by Henry David Thoreau, read to the citizens of Concord, Mass., on Sunday evening, October 30, 1859. The speaker says that, little as he knows of Captain Brown, he would fain do his part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of his countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. The speaker says that it costs us nothing to be just.

The speaker wishes he could say that Brown was the representative of the North, and calls him a superior man. The speaker says that when the troubles in Kansas began, the man he speaks of sent several of his sons thither to strengthen the party of the Free State men. The speaker says the man was an old-fashioned man in respect for the Constitution and in his faith in the permanence of this Union, and that he deemed slavery wholly opposed to these and was its determined foe. The speaker adds that the man was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical as that class is.