No Title.Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gazette [Republican](3 December 1859)
The immolation of John Brown was, in short,
in accordance with the philosophy of slavery --
a necessity. He had dared to act on the
conviction of his life, and these settled principles of
his were the only ones which such a man could
entertain. He was too brave to have thought
differently from what he did, and the same noble
impulses which inculcated a love of Freedom
and Right, impelled him constantly and
irresistibly to the practical development of his
theory. He has failed, according to the popular
mode of calculating failure and success; but
that his life and tragic death must of necessity
constitute a failure, is a point too broad and
high to be disposed of in this summary manner.
We cannot but disapprove his mad and folly-striken
act, but the unselfishness of the deed;
his moderation, when victorious, over the town
which he captured; his spartan courage in
defending himself and his fellows, and his sublime
contempt of death while overborne and made the
manacled tenant of a prison; his stern integrity
in scorning the technicalities of the law, and his
manliness in all things, will not be quickly
forgotten; but rather a contemplation of this heroic
old man's character will irresistibly compel
thinking men to ask themselves whether it is
John Brown, of Ossawatomie, or the system of
slavery which has failed in this conflict.
The execution of the old man at Charlestown
yesterday, was a plain admission on the part of
Slavery that they dare not spare a brave man's
life, and that magnanimity is impossible to a
system based on wrong and upheld by violence.
History will do justice to the institution of
Slavery and its uncompromising foe alike, when
both are gone; and, in the meantime, the comparison
which this affair provokes between the
two, which none can clearly foresee, but enough
of which is now plainly visible to change the
popular judgment. Slavery in all the plenitude
of its triumph and power is a failure; and old
John Brown of Ossawatomie has succeeded --
Sampson-like -- in dragging down the pillars of
Slavery in his fall, and his victory is complete!
While millions of prayers went up for the old
martyr yesterday, so millions of curses were uttered
against the hellish system which so
mercilessly and ferociously cried out for his blood.
Every heart in which a free spirit throbbed gave
utterance to its pent-up agony in contemplating
the enormities of this bloody institution -- this
sum of all villainies -- in the dispensations of its
power and the exactions of its bloody code.
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