There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first when it was formed, and then again when it was perpetuated. The formative period included not merely the Revolutionary War, but the creation and adoption of the Constitution and the first dozen years of work under it. Then came sixty years during which we spread across the continent—years of vital growth, but of growth without rather than growth within. Then came the time of stress and strain which culminated in the Civil War, the period of terrible struggle upon the issue of which depended the justification of all that we had done earlier, and which marked the second great period of growth and development within. The name of John Brown will be forever associated with this second period of the Nation’s history; and Kansas was the theater upon which the first act of the second of our great National life dramas was played. It was the result of the struggle in Kansas which determined that our country should be in deed as well as in name devoted to both union and freedom, that the great experiment of democratic government on a national scale should succeed and not fail. It was a heroic struggle; and, as is inevitable with all such struggles, it had also a dark and a terrible side. Very much was done of good, and much, also, of evil; and, as was inevitable in such a period of revolution, often the same man did both good and evil. For our great good fortune as a nation, we, the people of the United States as a whole, can now afford to forget the evil, or at least to remember it without bitterness, and to fix our eyes with pride on the good that was accomplished. Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed. Looking back, we are all of us now able to do justice to the valor and the disinterestedness and the love of the right as to each it was given to see the right, shown both by the men of the North and the men of the South in that contest which was finally decided by the attitude of the West. We can see the Puritan soldier, the man of the Bible and the sword, embodied again in Stonewall Jackson, just as we see that Puritan embodied in the stern soldiers who warred against Jackson. We can admire the heroic valor, the sincerity, the self-devotion shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray; and our sadness that such men should have had to fight one another is tempered by the glad knowledge that ever hereafter their descendants shall be found fighting side by side, struggling in peace as well as in war for the uplift of their common country, all alike resolute to raise to the highest pitch of honor and usefulness the nation to which they all belong.
I do not speak of this struggle of the past merely from the historic standpoint. Our interest is primarily in the application to-day of the lessons taught by the contest of half a century ago. It is of little use for us to pay lip loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises. It is half melancholy and half amusing to see the way in which well-meaning people gather to do honor to the men who, in company with John Brown, and under the lead of Abraham Lincoln, faced and solved the great problems of the nineteenth century, while at the same time these same good people nervously shrink from or frantically denounce those who are trying to meet the problems of the twentieth in the spirit which was accountable for the successful solution of the problems of Lincoln’s time.
John Brown stands to us now as representing the men and the generation who rendered the greatest service ever rendered this country. He stood for heroic valor, grim energy, fierce fidelity to high ideals. A great debt is owed to John Brown because he is one of the most striking figures in the mighty struggle which was to keep us forever a free and united nation, which was to secure the continuance of the most tremendous democratic experiment ever tried. He did much in his life and more in his death; he embodied the inspiration of the men of his generation; his fate furnished the theme of the song which most stirred the hearts of the soldiers. John Brown’s work was brought to completion, was made perfect, by the men who bore aloft the banner of the Union during the four terrible years which intervened between Sumter and Appomattox. To the soldiers who fought through those years—and of course to a very few of their civilian chiefs, like Lincoln—is due the supreme debt of the Nation. They alone, of all our people since we became a nation, rendered to us and to all who come after us a service literally indispensable. They occupy the highest and most honorable position ever occupied by any men of any generation in our country.
Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Valor, energy, disinterestedness, idealism—all these were his; and his also was that lofty and far-seeing wisdom which alone could make the valor, the disinterestedness, the energy, the idealism, of service to the Republic. Here again, in meeting the problems of to-day, let us profit by, and welcome, and co-operate with the John Browns; but let us also remember that the problems can really be solved only if we approach them in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.
John Brown prepared the way; but if the friends of freedom and union had surrendered themselves to his leadership, the cause of freedom and union would have been lost. After his death Lincoln spoke of him as follows:
“John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little less than his own execution. Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on Old England in the one case and on New England in the other does not disprove the sameness of the two things.”
In our struggle to-day we can study Lincoln’s career purely as an example to emulate; we can study John Brown’s career partly as such an example, but partly also as a warning. I think such study is especially necessary for the extremists among the very men with whom my own sympathy is especially keen. I am a progressive; I could not be anything else; indeed, as the years go by I become more, and not less, radically progressive. To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who profit by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra proslavery men finally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery.
In one of Lincoln’s addresses immediately after his second election, at a time when any man of less serene magnanimity would have been tempted to advocate extreme measures and to betray personal exultation, or even to show hatred of his opponents, he said:
“Human nature will not change. In any future great national affair, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged. May not all having a common interest reunite in a common effort to save our common country? For my own part, I have striven and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom. May I ask those who have not differed with me to join with me in this same spirit towards those who have?”
Surely such a union of indomitable resolution in the achievement of a given purpose, with patience and moderation in the policy pursued, and with kindly charity and consideration and friendliness to those of opposite belief, marks the very spirit in which we of to-day should approach the pressing problems of the present.