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Famous Quotes | I am here to plead his cause...

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character,—his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.
I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear that I may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death.
“Misguided!” “Garrulous!” “Insane!” “Vindictive!” So ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded responds from the floor of the armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of nature is: “No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form.” - Henry David Thoreau Attribution: Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, pp. 438-439, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

Categories: Author, Brown, John, Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, John Brown’s Raid, Naturalist, Philosopher

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Henry David Thoreau

Titles by Henry David Thoreau:

• Civil Disobedience
• Transcendentalism
• Walden

eNotes:

• Henry David Thoreau (The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail)
• Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts (Transcendentalism)

Salem on History:

• Henry David Thoreau

Encyclopedia:

• Thoreau, Henry David (The Oxford Companion to American Military History)
• Thoreau, Henry David (The Oxford Companion to English Literature)
• Thoreau, Henry David (The Oxford Companion to American Literature)
• Thoreau, Henry David (West's Encyclopedia of American Law)

Salem on Literature:

• The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Masterplots, Definitive Revised Edition)
• Henry David Thoreau (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Primary Sources:

• John Brown and Henry David Thoreau (Terrorism Reference)

Literary Criticism:

• Thoreau, Henry David (Poetry Criticism)
• Walden; or, Life in the Woods Henry David Thoreau (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism)
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David Thoreau (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism)

Calendar of Literary Facts:

• Henry David Thoreau dies
• Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden; or, Life in the Woods
• Henry David Thoreau establishes residence at a cabin on Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts
• Henry David Thoreau is born