Editorial on Harpers Ferry: October 1859
On October 16th, 1859, John Brown raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, aiming to acquire arms and a base from which to start a slave insurrection. For Juneteenth, here is a poem based on newspaper editorials denouncing Brown, and what they thought he stood for. The ending is a moment of dramatic irony: Psalm 58 says “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.”
Brown’s address to the court, after he was sentenced to die, is one of the great American speeches, and I commend it to you:
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here with I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction.
(This poem is part of the series Interviews With Vampires, and part 4 of ‘America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics.’)
Editorial on Harpers Ferry: October 1859
Bankrupt in fortune and in character,
An outlaw and an outcast, bent on murder
And spoliation, John Brown, with his raid,
Has only put ideas into action.
From the stump, Mister Lincoln prophesizes
That our America cannot endure,
And his America is full of souls
Fertile enough with Brown’s insanity
To germinate yet more disturbances.
They pinch and peck, these Black Republicans,
To fray and decompose a government
Woven in glory, won in war by men
Of honor, patriotic men who held
Black men as slaves, and were no less respected
For doing it. They knew, that wisdom lives
In local institutions, worn by time,
Whose iron roots secure the social order,
Whose easy rules promote the common good.
Bold innovation is for fools and madmen:
The rope slides smoothest where the wood is scarred.
In airy clouds, Republican ideals
May spin and sparkle, but their tendency
On hard soil is a hard and ghastly fact,
And now we see revealed their naked object:
To stir the southern slaves into rebellion,
Who, armed, will desolate the southern land
And southern lives, and wash their feet in blood.
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