Wendell Phillips’s “The Puritan Principle and John Brown” (1859)

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The revelation of despotism is the great lesson which the Puritan of one month ago [John Brown] has taught us. He has flung himself, under the instinct of a great idea, against the institutions beneath which we sit, and he says, practically, to the world, as the Puritan did: “If I am a felon, bury me with curses. I will trust to a future age to judge between you and me. Posterity will summon the State to judgment, and will admit my principle. I can wait.” Men say it is anarchy, that this right of the individual to sit in judgment cannot be trusted. It is the lesson of Puritanism. If the individual criticising law cannot be trusted, then Puritanism is a mistake, for the sanctity of individual judgment is the lesson of Massachusetts history in 1620 and ’30.…

I affirm that this is the lesson of our history,—that the world is fluid; that we are on the ocean: that we cannot get rid of the people, and we do not want to; that the millions are our basis; and that God has set us...