es from among his former followers in Kansas, and assembled
them for drill and training in Iowa; four others joined him there.
These, together with his son Owen, counted, all told, a band of twelve
persons engaged for, and partly informed of, his purpose. He left them
there for instruction during the first three months of the year 1858,
while he himself went East to procure means.

[Sidenote] "Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 51.

At the beginning of February, 1858, John Brown became, and remained
for about a month, a guest at the house of Frederick Douglass, in
Rochester, New York. Immediately on his arrival there he wrote to a
prominent Boston abolitionist, T.W. Higginson: "I now want to get, for
the perfecting of by far the most important undertaking of my whole
life, from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days. I have written
Rev. Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, and F.B. Sanborn, Esquires,
on the subject."

[Sidenote] Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 438.

Correspondence and mutual requests for a conference ensued, and
finally these Boston friends sent Sanborn to the house of Gerrit
Smith, in Peterboro, New York, where a meeting had been arranged.
Sanborn was a young man of twenty-six, just graduated from college,
who, as secretary of various Massachusetts committees, had been the
active agent for sending contributions to Kansas. He arrived on the
evening of Washington's birthday, February 22, 1858, and took part in
a council of conspiracy, of which John Brown was the moving will and
chief actor.

[Sidenote] "Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 52. Sanborn in "Atlantic,"
March, 1875, p. 329; also, Mason Report, pp. 48-59.

Brown began by reading to the council a long document which he had
drafted since his stay in Rochester. It called itself a "Provisional
Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,"
which, as it explained, looked to no overthrow of States or
dissolution of the Union, but simply to "amendment and repeal." It was
not in any sense a reasonable project of government, but simply an
ill-jointed outline of rules for a proposed slave insurrection. The
scheme, so far as any comprehension of it may be gleaned from the
various reports which remain, was something as follows:

[Sidenote] Mason Report, p. 55.

[Sidenote] Blair, Testimony, Mason Report, pp. 121-5.

[Sidenote] Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 438.

Somewhere in the Virginia mountains he