When comparing and contrasting John Brown’s last speech and William Cullen Bryant’s “The Death of Lincoln,” a very specific image comes to mind. I picture John Brown, though nine years Abraham Lincoln’s senior, as a young boy in a crowd. His father has taken him to listen to a memorial for Lincoln where Bryant’s speech is read. Brown is so struck by the heroic imagery and martyrdom of Lincoln that Brown decides, at his juvenile age, to take up abolition as his cross to bear.
If I continue this image of John Brown a few years further, he becomes obsessed with the cause of abolition and his desire to follow the footsteps of Lincoln. Brown’s life in the perspective of the American dream is one of passion. He has found something to build his life upon, and he will stop at nothing to achieve it. He is even willing to die for it, just as Lincoln did. Lincoln’s life in the perspective of the American Dream is very similar, except that he went about achieving his goals in a more organized and civil way. In this sense, Brown almost seems like the overshadowed younger brother of Lincoln, wanting to exceed his older sibling’s accomplishments and going rogue to pursue them.
Brown would probably have liked to believe that his life and death were comparable to Lincoln, especially the in Bryant’s poem. Lincoln is depicted as a martyr and Christ-like savior, liberating the slaves. This image of him appealed to the majority of Americans at this time, because the majority belonged to some branch of Christianity. If Lincoln was the sage of abolition and savior to slaves, then to John Brown he was God, calling Brown to further “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them” and calling him to “act up to that instruction” (1356).
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