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A Plea for Captain John Brown - Read to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday evening, October thirtieth, eighteen fifty-nine by Henry David Thoreau
page 4 of 28 (14%)
Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for
the most part, see nothing at all,--the Puritans. It would be in
vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he
reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock
are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were
a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers'
day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. They
were neither Democrats nor Republicans, but men of simple habits,
straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not
fear God, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available
candidates.

"In his camp," as one has recently written, and as I have myself
heard him state, "he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals
was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war.
'I would rather,' said he, 'have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and
cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle....
It is a mistake, sir, that our people make, when they think that
bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose
these Southerners. Give me men of good principles,--God-fearing
men,--men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will
oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.'" He said
that if one offered himself to be a soldier under him, who was
forward to tell what he could or would do, if he could only get
sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him.

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 sons, in
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