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"She is only a chronic insurrection. I mean exactly what I say. I am weighing my words now. She is a pirate ship, and John Brown sails the sea a Lord High Admiral of the Almighty, with his commission to sink every pirate he meets on God's ocean of the nineteenth century."

'She' is Virginia — Phillips, speaking at Beecher's church while Brown stood trial, argues the state itself is no lawful government. Two obvious OCR errors restored ('oi' -> 'of', 'sliip' -> 'ship'), otherwise character-exact.

Read it in the original — 1859 pamphlet, Internet Archive ↗

"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) ↗