Question

In what way did John Brown embody the Transcendentalist philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau? He died for a cause he believed in. He put family and religion above all else. He used any means necessary to fight an unjust law. He trusted his conscience regardless of what the laws said.

Answer 1

Answer: He used any means necessary to fight an unjust law.

In spite of the fact that Thoreau advocates peaceful activity in "Protection from Civil Government," he later upheld the savage activities of John Brown, who executed unarmed expert subjugation pilgrims in Kansas, and in 1859 assaulted the bureaucratic weapons store at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. In "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau depicts Brown as a "Holy messenger of Light" (R, 137) and "a visionary most importantly" (115) who trusted "that a man has an ideal appropriate to meddle by power with the slaveholder, so as to safeguard the slave" (R,132). In mid 1860, only months previously the episode of the Civil War, he and Emerson took an interest out in the open recognitions of Brown's life and activities.