Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown

Henry David Thoreau

Core works and topics Civil Disobedience Herald of Freedom The Last Days of John Brown Life Without Principle Paradise (to be) Regained A Plea for Captain John Brown Reform and the Reformers Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown The Service Sir Walter Raleigh Slavery in Massachusetts Thomas Carlyle and His Works Walden A Walk to Wachusett Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Thoreau Society

Related topics Abolitionism · Anarchism Anarchism in the United States Civil disobedience Concord, Massachusetts Conscientious objection Direct action · Ecology Environmentalism History of tax resistance Individualist anarchism John Brown · Lyceum movement Nonviolent resistance Ralph Waldo Emerson Simple living · Tax resistance Tax resisters · Transcendentalism The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Walden Pond

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Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown is a speech given by Henry David Thoreau on 2 December 1859 at the time of John Brown’s execution. Thoreau gave a few brief remarks of his own, read poetry by Sir Walter Raleigh (“The Soul’s Errand”), William Collins (“How Sleep the Brave”), Friedrich Schiller (excerpts from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s translation of “The Death of Wallenstein”), William Wordsworth (excerpts from “Alas! What boots the long laborious quest”), Alfred Tennyson (excerpts from “Maud”), George Chapman (excerpts from “Conspirary of Charles, Duke of Byron”), and Henry Wotton (“The Character of a Happy Life”), and then quoted from his own translation of Tacitus.

On-line sources

• Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown at The Picket Line.

Printed sources

• My Thoughts are Murder to the State by Henry David Thoreau (ISBN 978-1434804266)
• The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform (ISBN 978-0691118765)