He did not go to Harvard. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished, but he went to the University of the West where he studied the science of Liberty, and having taken his degree, he finally commenced the practice of humanity in Kansas.
Of Thoreau, Mr. Alcott wrote in his diary, Saturday. November 5, 1859:
... Thoreau talks freely and enthusiastically about Brown, denouncing the Union, the President, the States, and Virginia particularly; wishes to publish his late speech, and has seen Boston publishers, but failed to find any to print it for him.[495]
Mr. Sanborn said:
Such was the man—of the best New England blood, of the stock of the Plymouth Pilgrims, and bred up like them "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord"—who was selected by God, and knew himself to be so chosen, to overthrow the bulwark of oppression in America. He seems to have declared a definite plan of attacking slavery in one of its strongholds, by force, as early as 1839; and it was to obtain money for this enterprise that he engaged in land-speculations and wool-merchandise for the next ten or twelve years.... Other men might have been spared but Brown was indispensable.[496]
Said Wendell Phillips:
God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to the American people that, whether this old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood as a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were pirates that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. The banks of the Potomac are doubly dear now to History and to Man! The dust of Washington rests there; and History will see forever on that river side the brave old man on his pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the Father of his Country would be proud to make room for beside his own.
Mr. Higginson said:
Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore, he reared them in his sons.
John A. Andrew, who did not believe that Brown was present or in any way connected with the robberies and murders on the Pottawatomie, said: