HOW JOHN BROWN BECAME AN ABOLITIONIST
Reading edition
In the pagan ages and in the more distant days of savagery, men were individuals. They had no social imagination. They could stand by and see another man writhe in tortures, and laugh at him. Civilization has been developing social imagination; it has been breeding more and more the type of human being who feels the suffering and injustice of another as his own.
John Brown was perhaps born with this strain in him. In 1857, when he had already plunged into his life-work, and was in the thick of bloody fights in Kansas, he sat down to write a most charming and tender letter to a little boy who was the son of one of his friends in the east. Those who think of fighters like John Brown as possessed by only a lust for battle, ought to read this letter. It reveals how soft was his heart under the grim mask of the Kansas warrior.
The letter is autobiographical. It tells how John Brown first became acquainted with the horrors of slavery, and what effect it had on his imagination.
This letter is so touching, and so remarkable for the picture it gives of John Brown’s early years, also for the picture of the man’s mature character as revealed by his own words, that I am tempted to give it in full. I shall give only parts of it, however.