Midnight Rising Quotes

“Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves!” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary on December 2. “This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“Draw your revolvers & bowie knives, & cool them in the heart’s blood of all those damned dogs, that dare defend that damned breathing hole of hell,” David Atchison, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, told cheering Southerners encamped outside Lawrence on May 21, “never to slacken or stop until every spark of free-state, free-speech, free-niggers, or free in any shape is quenched out of Kansas!” When”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“Pierce also blamed the nation’s deepening divide on “wild and chimerical schemes of social change” and “a fanatical devotion to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States.” Rarely had the U.S. government’s acquiescence to the Slave Power been so plainly expressed—and done so by a dough-faced Yankee from New Hampshire.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“Every Slaveholding State,” John junior wrote in May, “is furnishing men and money to fasten Slavery upon this glorious land, by means no matter how foul.” The worst threat came from “Border Ruffians” based in neighboring Missouri who moved in and out of Kansas, harassing anyone who showed free-soil leanings. The Border Ruffians were particularly adept at voter fraud and intimidation. A territorial census in early 1855 found 2,905 eligible voters in Kansas. Yet proslavery forces “won” an early election that March with 5,427 votes.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion,” the preamble began, “WE, CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE … ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH FOR OURSELVES, THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONAL CONSTITUTION.” Brown’s”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“BROWN DIDN’T WAIT LONG to take up arms in the battle he’d come to join. A few weeks before his arrival, the territory’s proslavery legislature—“elected” amid rampant fraud—put into force some of the most extreme laws in antebellum America. Anyone who expressed antislavery views was guilty of a felony, punishable by two years’ hard labor. Aiding a fugitive slave brought ten years’ imprisonment; inciting blacks to rebel brought death. As if this weren’t draconian enough, a proslavery editor warned: “We will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“Cuba must be ours,” declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become “a basin of water belonging to the United States.” His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. “I want these countries for the spread of slavery,” he said. “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“I came here from Kansas,” he announced to his captive. “This is a slave state. I want to free all the Negroes in this state. I have possession now of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“My life has been of but little worth mostly fild [sic] up with vanity.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War