Disunion Feed

"I have, may it please the court, a few words to say. In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, — the design on my part to free the slaves. [...] had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great [...] it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment."

Spoken on receiving the death sentence. Brown's last speech survives in genuinely variant printings, and they differ on this passage: the Library of Congress broadside (item 2021770281) reads “what I have already admitted, of a design on my part to free slaves,” while the wording here — the widely anthologized one — is cited to a printing that carries it (Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, 1885). The Famous Trials transcription matches this wording word for word; the LoC broadside remains a real artifact of the variant reading.

Read it in the original — Sanborn’s Life and Letters of John Brown (1885) ↗

"Altho vengeance is not mine, I confess, that I do feel gratified to hear that you ware stopt in your fiendish career at Harper's Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress, in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free our slaves, we had none and never expected to own one [...] I do hope & trust that you will meet your just reward."

The widow of James Doyle, killed by Brown's men at Pottawatomie, Kansas, in 1856, writes to Brown in jail. Five days outside the Oct 16 – Nov 15 window; kept because the feed needs what it says about who Brown also was. The best available transcription is secondary rather than from the manuscript, and 'vengeance' vs. the manuscript's 'vengence' is uncertain.

Read it in the original — transcription; original ms. Gilder Lehrman GLC07590 ↗