Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/222

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214
JOHN BROWN

counties, cities, towns, societies, or churches, or in some other way? I think the little beggar children in the street are sufficiently interested to warrant their contributing, if there was any need of it, to secure the object.

"I was told that the newspapers in a certain city were dressed in mourning on hearing that I was killed and scalped in Kansas, but I did not know of it until I reached the place. Much good it did me. In the same place I met a more cool reception than in any other place where I have stopped. If my friends will hold up my hands while I live, I will freely absolve them from any expense over me when I am dead. I do not ask for pay, but shall be most grateful for all the assistance I can get."[1]

On the day that Buchanan was inaugurated and two days before the Dred Scott Decision, he published a similar appeal in the New York Tribune "with no little sacrifice of personal feeling." Once he writes: "I am advised that one of Uncle Sam's hounds is on my track, and I have kept myself hid for a few days to let my track get cold. I have no idea of being taken, and intend (if God will) to go back with irons in, rather than upon, my hands."[2]

Dr. Wayland met him in Worcester where a Frederick Douglass meeting was being arranged just after Taney's decision and says: "I called at the house of Eli Thayer, afterward member of Congress from that district, to ask him to sit on the

  1. Speech of John Brown, Sanborn, p. 379.
  2. Letter to Eli Thayer, 1857, in Sanborn, p. 382.