d to capture the dreamer
and the sentimentalist. Sanborn, Howe, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, George L. Stearns and Gerrit Smith became his devoted
followers. He even made Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison his
friends.

Garrison met him at Theodore Parker's. The two men were one on
destroying Slavery: Garrison, the pacifist; Brown, the man who believed
in bloodshed as the only possible solution of all the great issues of
National life. Brown quoted the Old Testament; Garrison, the New.

He captured the imagination of Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He was raising funds for another armed attack on Slavery in Kansas. The
sentimentalists asked no questions. And if hard-headed business men
tried to pry too closely into his plans, they found him a past master in
the art of keeping his own counsel.

He struck a snag when he appealed to the National Kansas Committee for a
gift of rifles and an appropriation of five thousand dollars. They voted
the rifles on conditions. But a violent opposition developed against
giving five thousand dollars to a man about whose real mind they knew so
little.

H. B. Hurd, the Chairman of the Committee, had suspected the purpose
back of his pretended scheme for operations in Kansas. He put to Brown
the pointblank question and demanded a straight answer.

"If you get these guns and the money you desire, will you invade
Missouri or any slave territory?"

The old man's reply was characteristic. He spoke with a quiet scorn.

"I am no adventurer. You all know me. You are acquainted with my
history. You know what I have done in Kansas. I do not expose my
plans. No one knows them but myself, except perhaps one. I will not be
interrogated. If you wish to give me anything, I want you to give it
freely. I have no other purpose but to serve the cause of Liberty."

His answer was not illuminating. It contained nothing the Committee
wished to know. The statement that they knew him was a figure of speech.
They had read partisan reports of his fighting and his suffering in
Kansas--through his own letters, principally. How much truth these
letters contained was something they wished very much to find out. He
had given no light.

He declared that they knew what he had done in Kansas. This was the one
point on which they needed most light.

The biggest event in the history of Kansas was the deed on the
Pottawattomie. In the fierce political campaign that was in progress its