Pictured above: The house where Brown was born in Torrington, Conn., 207 years ago today. The house is no longer standing but the site is designated with a historical marker

Happy Birthday Old Man,
Marvelous Old Man!
May 9, 1800-May 9, 2007

"God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to the American people that, whether that old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were pirates that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. . . ."

Wendell Phillips

"He could not have been tried by his peers, for his peers did not exist."

Henry David Thoreau