It appears from the closing sentences of this letter, that Brown had succeeded in discrediting the men, who were steadfastly working out the Free-State problem, in order to ingratiate himself with the people whom he then sought to delude. His turpitude should not provoke surprise. The crime of ingratitude cannot further degrade the character of this mendacious mendicant. Having assassinated his unoffending neighbors in the West, and robbed them, he now assassinated the fame of honorable men, and robbed them of the measure of confidence and esteem to which they were justly entitled because of their public services.
Disappointed in his scheme to have money legislated into his pocket, and in his effort to raise the thirty thousand dollars in large sums, he proceeded to canvass the East personally, for money, and to draw upon every possible source of supply--sailing under false colors and doing business under false pretenses. Referring to this, Mr. Villard says:[230]
It must not be forgotten in this connection that very little was known in Boston at this time, about the Pottawatomie murders, and still less about Brown's connection with them. Frank Preston Stearns, the biographer of his father, states that the latter never knew of John Brown's connection with the crime, and it may be well that Theodore Parker and others passed off the scene without a full realization of the connection between the Harper's Ferry leader and the tragedy of May 24, 1856.
Brown was proficient in the art of dissimulation. Mr. Thoreau was thus impressed with what, to him, seemed to be the sanctity of a Christian character. He said:[231]
He was never able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would accept, and only about a dozen (among them his own sons) in whom he had perfect faith. When he was here, he showed me a little manuscript book,--his "orderly book" I think he called it,--containing the names of his company in Kansas, and the rules by which they bound themselves and he stated that several of them had already sealed the contract with their blood. When some one remarked that with the addition of a chaplain, it would have been a perfect Cromwellian troop, he observed that he would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could have found one man who could fill the place worthily. I believe he had prayers in his camp morning and evening, nevertheless. He is a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier, or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life of exposure. A man of rare common-sense and directness of speech as of action, a transcendentalist, above all a man of ideas and principles,--that is what distinguishes him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. I noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. I remember particularly how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his pent up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney flue. Also referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier keeping a reserve of force and meaning: "They had a perfect right to be hung." He was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to buncombe or his constituents anywhere. He had no need to invent anything, but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in Congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king.