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preachers whose sermons her sons liked to read, and “ whose antislavery principles she enjoyed, though she could not agree with all their doctrines.”
She seemed to regard their positions as essentially the same.
I need not say who the two are — the thunders of
Brooklyn and of
Boston acquire much the same sound as they roll up among the echoes of the Adirondacks.
Politics.
In respect to politics,
Mrs. Brown told me that her husband had taken little interest in them since the election of
Jackson, because he thought that politics merely
followed the condition of public sentiment on the slavery question, and that this public sentiment was mainly created by actual collisions between slavery and freedom.
Such, at least, was the view which I was led to attribute to him, by combining this fact which she mentioned with my own personal knowledge of his opinions.
He had an almost exaggerated aversion to words and speeches, and a profound conviction of the importance of bringing all questions to a direct issue, and subjecting every theory to the test of practical application.
The charge of insanity.
I did not, of course, insult
Mrs. Brown by any reference to that most shallow charge of insanity against her husband, which some even of his friends have, with what seems most cruel kindness, encouraged, -thereby doing their best to degrade one of the age's prime heroes into a mere monomaniac,--but it may be well to record that she spoke of it with surprise, and said that if her husband were insane, he had been consistent in his insanity from the first moment she knew him.
Pecuniary condition of the family.
Now that all is over, and we appear to have decided, for the present, not to employ any carnal weapons, such as steel or iron, for the rescue of
John Brown, but only to use the safer metals of
gold and
silver for the aid of his family, it may be natural for those who read this narrative to ask, What is the pecuniary condition of this household?
It is hard to answer, because the whole standard is different, as to such matters, in
North Elba and in
Massachusetts.
The ordinary condition of the
Brown family may be stated as follows: They own the farm, such as it is, without incumbrance, except so far as unfelled forest constitutes one.
They have ordinarily enough to eat of what the farm yields, namely, bread and potatoes, pork and mutton — not any great abundance of these, but ordinarily enough.
They have ordinarily enough to wear, at least of woollen clothing, spun by themselves.
