No Title.Frankfort, Kentucky, Commonwealth [Opposition](11 November 1859)
[Pointing Finger] The following article from the
Richmond Whig in the main expresses
our own views so exactly that we adopt
them. We do not doubt but that John
Brown conscientiously believed he was
doing right in his mad attempts to excite
an insurrection in Virginia, but he like
other men must be responsible when his
opinions develop into acts which violate
the laws. He is certainly a monomaniac,
but death is the only mode by which such
a peculiar idiosyncrasy can be cured. The
Whig says, "Thomas Carlyle in all of his
fierce assaults on the 'shams' and 'wind
bags,' never struck a harder blow or one
more needed than the one he dealt to that
sympathy for criminals, which, in late
years, has characterized the English people.
In the good times of honest loves
and honest hates, this precious fruit of
civilization -- this sympathy for crime --
had no place in the breasts of men. To
love the good and to hate the hateful, was
the simple rule. An eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth was the old law; and
though a milder creed has obtained under
a better dispensation, it were folly and
perversion Christianity to expend
sympathy only upon the most hardened criminals
as has become the practice of
modern times."
"Take for example the case of John
Brown. With folly unparalleled, the
Northern papers and people are trying to
make a hero of this wretched outlaw.--
Except in its atrocity, we see but little in
the crime which he committed to distinguish
it from other crimes, or in the criminal,
except a maniacal hardihood and
unbearable insolence, anything to distinguish
him from other criminals. No amount of
morbid sympathy can shield him from the
fate which awaits him, nor from the
condemnation of posterity as a brutal ruffian.
The crime he meditated embraced all other
crimes -- murder, robbery, arson, treason,
and another, worse than all, too hideous
to be named, too revolting to be thought
of. The great and almost the only
significance of the event, at Harper's Ferry, to
our thinking, is the fact that those who
participated in it should have received any
sympathy whatever. This sentimental
madness argues badly for the peace of the
country, and the safety of our institutions.
The occasion seems to us to call for a more
emphatic expression of the conservative
feeling of the North than we have yet had.
Shall we not have it?"
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