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Henry David ThoreauA Plea for Captain John Brown
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1859A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and natural philosopher. His work is considered foundational to the American literary and philosophical movement known as transcendentalism, which promoted an idealist sense of nature and the prevalence of spirit and intuition in crafting personal morality. He sought a transcendent state through direct action, as opposed to what he saw as the idle sentiments of many of his contemporaries.
As a young man, Thoreau attended Harvard before returning to Concord, Massachusetts, where he remained most of his life. He worked as an intermittent school teacher, tutor, and land surveyor. Under the tutelage of his benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau spent two years living in the woods near Walden Pond, where he wrote Walden (1854), the most prominent work of his life. Walden encapsulated Thoreau’s commitment to transcendent moral virtues, hard work, naturalism, and self-reliance.
Thoreau became increasingly agitated by the political situation regarding slavery in the United States. In the final years of his life, abolition became the primary cause to which he dedicated himself. Following the arrest of John Brown in 1859, Thoreau was frustrated by abolitionists in the mainstream press who dismissed Brown as a man of low moral character. Thoreau recognized, sooner than many of his contemporaries, that abolition would require a costlier and more violent reconstitution of the country than the current civil institutions could provide.
Thoreau is retrospectively considered one of the most important American writers of the 19th century, though he never achieved broad literary success during his lifetime. His advocacy for the abolition of slavery and civil disobedience would serve as inspiration for many liberation movements of the 20th century, including Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement and the American Civil Rights Movement.
John Brown
John Brown was an abolitionist known for engaging in armed insurrection as a means to end slavery in the United States. Before becoming a guerrilla fighter, Brown worked as a tanner, land surveyor, and briefly as a minister. Brown was a fervent Christian and member of the Free Church, where he attended lectures by prominent Black abolitionists such as Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. He stated on numerous occasions that he had been personally called by God to end slavery. Brown fathered 20 children, several of whom participated in his abolitionist work. Before engaging in the terrorist violence that came to be known as “Bleeding Kansas,” Brown offered his Pennsylvania tannery as a sanctuary to fugitive enslaved people traveling north as a part of the network known as the Underground Railroad.
Brown’s notoriety in the Kansas Territory preceded his raid on the Harpers Ferry Compound, a federal armory in what is now West Virginia, in 1859. By then, he had become well-known for enforcing violent retribution on the pro-slavery militias called the border ruffians, whom he blamed for the ransacking of the anti-slavery settlement of Lawrence in 1856. Brown and his sons formed a posse of vigilantes who sought out the accused five men and executed them in their homes. Later, Brown’s posse confronted pro-slavery forces much larger than their own while attempting to defend the abolitionist stronghold of Osawatomie. Though the town was decimated, Brown’s bravery made him notable in abolitionist circles. In 1858, Brown crossed the border into Missouri, killing an enslaver and freeing 11 enslaved people whom he escorted to safety in Canada.
Brown claimed he enacted violence as part of a strict code of ethics that superseded man’s laws. The results of the raid on Harpers Ferry led to Brown’s conviction of treason, murder, and conspiracy, for which he was hanged on December 2, 1859.
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English statesman and radical Puritan leader who led his forces to victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War in the 17th century. Following the war, Cromwell established himself as the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth and successfully advocated for the death penalty for the deposed king, guided in his ascension and the implementation of his new religious order by the unwavering belief that he was an instrument of God’s will. Cromwell’s violent tactics in procuring power in England were contentious, as was his use of brutal military force throughout his rule. Though many of Cromwell’s contemporaries, such as John Milton, revered him as a hero of liberty, later English leaders such as Winston Churchill referred to him as a military dictator.
Though Cromwell’s despotism was viewed with skepticism by many of America’s Founding Fathers, the purity of his religious cause was admired in the US, especially after the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s. Both Brown and Thoreau praised the bravery of Cromwell’s ecclesiastical devotion and use of direct action despite great personal risk. Thoreau admired the Puritans more generally for their uncompromising beliefs, their self-direction, and their simple habits. In Brown, he identified a surrogate for Cromwell’s particular blend of Protestantism and righteous violence. The adherence of both Brown and Cromwell to a strict and abiding Puritan dogma made them stand out in Thoreau’s mind as men uniquely guided by transcendent moral values.
William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison was a leading American journalist and anti-slavery advocate from Boston, Massachusetts. His renowned abolitionist journal The Liberator was an integral component in disseminating anti-slavery viewpoints. He also established the American Anti-Slavery Society, which called for an immediate end to slavery in the US without compensation to enslavers, a radical position at the time.
Garrison was a pacifist who rejected the authority of the United States government on the grounds that it conducted violent colonialism and war. Because of his pacifism, Garrison was skeptical of Brown and disagreed that his tactics were meaningfully advancing the cause of liberation. Following Brown’s arrest, The Liberator referred to Brown as “insane” and “misguided” (70), appealing to the Northern abolitionists’ academic understanding of civil society and prioritizing the legislative fight for abolition.
There is evidence that Garrison shifted his beliefs on the use of violence following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, when the use of nonviolent methods for enforcing the law had proved untenable. The beginning of Garrison’s realignment on the question of violence evolved after Brown’s arrest and execution in December 1859: A letter penned by Garrison after the execution signals his recognition of Brown as a liberator, though it still hesitates to advocate for the use of violence and retains a romantic view of disarmament as the means through which liberation will be attained.
Related Titles
By Henry David Thoreau
