The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia

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Excerpt from The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia
In that "History of Napoleon I." which he never lived to complete, Lanfrey says: "Do not misconstrue events; history is not a school of fatalism, but one long plea for the freedom of man." In this pleading chronicle there are few chapters more pathetic than the career of my old friend John Brown, which I long since undertook to set forth, though strangely delayed in completing my task. It was begun in those dismal years when the Southern oligarchy and their humble followers at the North still controlled our degraded politics; and it has been continued through all the vicissitudes, the anxieties, and the assured repose of subsequent years. More than once in those earlier days recurred to me that gloomy magniloquence of the Roman annalist, where Tacitus complains that the tyranny of Domitian had suppressed the unheralded renown of Agricola: "Patient sufferance we showed, no doubt. Our ancestors saw the extreme of license, but we of servility; for our inquisitors would permit us neither to hear nor to tell, - and we might have lost the use of memory along with free speech, if to forget had been no harder than to forego praise.