A Plea For Captain John Brown Essay

, Research Paper

After reading A Plea for Captain John Brown, I find it difficult to make up one’s mind which side to take. Knowing a small history about the topic, I originally sided against the Captain, but by reading Thoreau s essay, I am swayed the other manner. He makes a really strong statement for John Brown and likely persuaded many people at the clip of his authorship.

I look at what John Brown did and the first thing that comes to my head is that it is illegal. I think many people likely looked at the state of affairs and thought the same thing. This is why everyone sided against him so fast. Thoreau points out that Captain Brown was making what was morally right. However, we can t all go around interrupting the jurisprudence because we find other facets of it immoral. That would be anarchy.

I think it takes off from my image of Thoreau as a really intelligent adult male, when he attempts to warrant what John Brown did. I could utilize Thoreau s same doctrine to bomb an abortion clinic. Because my moral beliefs say that abortion physicians have taken the lives of at least five kids, it is my sacred responsibility to take retaliation on five of these liquidators. I could besides compare this to state that if these were my beliefs and person else took retaliation on the physicians, I would clap them. Which is precisely what Thoreau is making.

Another thing I don t regard about Thoreau is how he made a generalisation of the modern Christian. Th

oreau says that the modern Christian is a adult male who prays for unfairnesss being done to halt, but at the same clip will non make anything to halt them himself, and alternatively leaves it all in God s custodies. How unjust for him to state that! How precisely does he cognize what the modern anything believes when he subscribes to no faiths? Who is Thoreau to do premises of people in one sentence and shame others for making the same in the following? When he chides the newspapers and editors for publishing narratives that viewed John Brown in an unfavourable visible radiation, it was someway different than him printing an essay which showed all Christians as inactive.

For a free mind, I find Thoreau to be really closed-minded to other people s sentiments. I will non state that John Brown was wholly incorrect in what he did, but I think anyone would hold that the acceptance of this morally right policy could rupture the state apart. When push comes to jostle Thoreau is merely like everyone else: a individual who will flex the regulations in a state of affairs where their ethical motives conflict with person else s. His lone difference is that he can compose persuasively plenty that he might change over you, this and he is immovably strong in his beliefs so as non to follow anyone else. After reading this composing I noticed that it was written more than ten old ages after Civil Disobedience, and it shows. Sadly, by this clip, Thoreau has become more of a slavery-hating overzealous than a philosopher.