 Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence. Therefore, we citizens of the United States and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following provisional constitution and ordinances the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions. These two paragraphs are the preamble to John Brown's provisional constitution and ordinances for the people of the United States. Notice the reference to the Dred Scott ruling citing the infamous line that black people had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. John Brown wasn't an incredibly smart man. He wasn't a political thinker or much of a writer. And all of these shortcomings are apparent in his provisional constitution. Like the United States constitution, he established the same three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial. But instead of listing the specific powers of each branch, he simply offered a small paragraph of how they would be composed. It isn't much of a constitution, but John Brown obsessed over it for quite some time between the Pottawatomie massacre and the raid on Harper's Ferry. While drafting it, he lived for three weeks with Frederick Douglass, who set of Brown's work on the constitution, quote, his whole time and thought were given to this subject. It was the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Till I confess, it began to be something of a bore to me. End quote. Brown also revealed his plans to Douglass, a plan that Douglass thought was too foolhardy to take any part in. To this day, historians debate over whether John Brown's plan was the idiot concoction of a lunatic doomed to failure from the beginning, or if Brown was planning to make himself a martyr from the very beginning. For my part, I lean toward the former interpretation. Brown loved reading about George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, and it's pretty clear that he conceived of himself as a great general, which was quite a delusion. But over the next few episodes, when I tell the story of Harper's Ferry, I'll do my best to stick to the facts and let people come to their own conclusion about John Brown's enigmatic train of thought. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. Today we begin what many people, including myself, see as the climax of the antebellum controversy, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. And I'll be spending several episodes on this because it's important, of course, but also because I really think it's just a fascinating story, and it's worth diving into some of the details people don't usually get, if for no other reason than the entertainment value of a good historical episode. In today's episode, I want to talk about Brown's recruitment of men and financial backers leading up to the raid. John Brown's plan to wage war on slavery was backed financially by six abolitionists, many of whom came up in the previous episodes on the Fugitive Slave Act. Five of them were from Boston. This would be Samuel Gridley-Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, George Luther Stearns, Frank Sanborn, and Theodore Parker. The first and most important backer, though, was a New Yorker named Garrett Smith, who also helped finance some of Lysander Spooner's writings. If you go to lysanderspooner.org, which is run by Randy Barnett, you can read transcripts of the letters between Spooner and Smith, in fact. It's a great website. If you're not familiar with Randy Barnett, he used to write for Rothbard's Liberty Forum and his early writings on anarchist legal theory are fantastic, but I digress. These men, the Secret Six, were interesting enough to merit some biographical overview, especially Samuel Gridley-Howe. Howe knew all kinds of people whose names we still know today. As a kid, he was the neighbor and family friend of Paul Revere. As an adult, he became friends with Charles Dickens. In fact, even before Helen Keller and the miracle worker, Samuel Howe, became the first person in America to teach language to a blind death mute named Laura Bridgeman. And Charles Dickens wrote about them in his book, American Notes for General Circulation, which you can get for like 12 bucks on Amazon. He also had some early experiences that would affect his response to Brown's arrest at Harpers Ferry. He studied medicine in Europe, and while he was there, Howe participated in the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris, which was an uprising against the restored bourbon monarchy. While he was there, he befriended Marquis de Lafayette, who helped in the American Revolution. So this guy made friends with so many famous people, and it was on an errand for Lafayette that Howe was arrested and imprisoned. And Howe's imprisonment made a significant imprint on his mind that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. He was held in solitary confinement for five weeks in a Berlin dungeon. He had no contact with the outside world during this time, and he wasn't even sure if his family or friends elsewhere in the world even knew what happened to him. Howe developed an extreme fear of prisons after this that was so pronounced that when he visited a British prison with his friend Charles Dickens to give a testimony, Dickens observed that Howe was strangely anxious to leave the prison, and Dickens had, quote, never seen a man so nervous. Later, when Howe was asked to testify in Washington in regards to the raid on Harpers Ferry, Howe wrote in a letter to Henry Wilson that he was, quote, a little wary, for I once hurried into a prison under pretext that my testimony was wanted by legal authority about matters and things on the frontiers of rebelling in Poland, and I did not find it easy to get out. I have since learned that no European despotism is more regardless of justice than is the one we have at home, end quote. Worried about his own possible arrest as part of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, Howe took refuge in Canada for a time. Theodore Parker was another interesting member of the Secret Six. His grandfather was a Revolutionary War veteran famous for his command of Minutemen on Lexington Green, where he uttered the famous line, don't fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have a war, let it begin here. The shadow of his grandfather stayed with him and certainly seems to have influenced his participation in John Brown's actions and his other abolitionist activities. He once said of his resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, quote, you know I do not like fighting, but what could I do? I was born in the little town where the fight and the bloodshed of the revolution began. My grandfather drew the first sword in the revolution. When I write in my library at home on the one side of me is the Bible which my father's prayed over for nearly a hundred years. On the other side hangs the firelock my grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried it, the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used in the Battle of Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the first gun taken in the revolution, taken also by my grandfather. Would these things before me, these symbols, would these memories in me? When a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman pursued by the kidnappers came to my house, what could I do less than take her in and defend her to the last end, quote. In one episode demonstrating his radicalism and movement away from pacifism, he married a pair of fugitive slaves named Ellen and William Craft. He performed the ceremony in his own home and during the service Parker gave a sword to the groom and said, quote, with this sword, IV wed, and then told the groom to use it to kill any United States officer or slave owner who tried to take him or his new wife back into slavery. For many years in the 1850s, Howe and Parker met as part of a vigilance committee in Boston that was attended by a third member of the future secret six, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Influenced by William Lloyd Garrison, Higginson advocated northern secession under the cry, no union with slaveholders, but he eventually gave in to the encouragement of Charles Sumner to try his lot as a politician on the Free Soil Party ballot for congressmen of his district. He lost this election, but as minister of a church, he frequently lectured about the evils of slavery, which caused enough consternation that he was pressured to resign in 1849, which means he was doing this before the fugitive slave law made abolitionism somewhat more acceptable in the north. And he became an itinerant preacher and abolitionist activist. In contrast to these three was George Luther Stearns, who is a successful businessman who made a respectable fortune for himself. His mansion served as frequent station for the underground railroad where he would hide fugitive slaves under the floorboards of his bathroom. One of the slaves he helped smuggle to Canada, he eventually brought back into the United States and set him up with a barber shop in Harvard Square, which made newspaper headlines for its brazen defiance of the fugitive slave law. This was not an unusual act for Stearns, who helped many fugitive slaves set up some business in which they were able to work for themselves. And he believed that personal entrepreneurship was the best way to help liberated blacks as well as to help free white people. This is worth mentioning too, because while all members of the secret six were radical abolitionists, meaning they believed not just in the immediate uncompensated emancipation of slaves, but they also believed in equal rights for blacks as part of the 19th century natural rights doctrine. Many abolitionists like Theodore Parker did believe that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. John Brown actually impressed Frederick Douglass for rejecting this notion, and George Stearns seemed to have rejected it as well, meaning that they were ahead of their time on racial views even compared to other abolitionists. George Stearns was also a significant financial backer of the Free State movement in Kansas. He invested roughly 48 grand into the movement, the equivalent to about one and a half million dollars today, and his wife Mary Stearns invested 20 or 30 grand herself through some women's groups formed to support the Free State cause in Kansas. The final Bostonian member of the secret six was Franklin Sandborn. He was kind of a morbid romantic. He married his wife even though he knew she was dying. In fact, he agreed to marry her because she was dying after he learned that she had a rare neurological condition, and she died only days after their wedding. For the rest of his life, he would keep a lock of her hair. This might sound sweet, maybe it was, but this kind of tragic romance was somewhat fattish at the time. This was at the height of the Victorian era fixation on weird sexual stuff and tragic youthful death, so Sandborn was probably at least partly caught up in this. There was a lot of weird romantic sexual stuff that came out of the Victorian era literature. In the movie Braveheart, for instance, the king instates the tradition of prima nocta, which was the traditional right for nobles to take a newly wed woman's virginity on her wedding night. But this was never actually policy in history. The idea was born out of Victorian era literature among other various weird fixations. But again, I digress. In any case, Sandborn's morbid romantic gesture seems at least to be partly an outgrowth of this culture. But his marriage is important to our story if only because it was his deceased wife's brother who encouraged Brown to seek support from Sandborn, and Sandborn introduced Brown to some of the other members of the Secret Six. The only non-Bostonian member of the Secret Six was Garrett Smith, but I already talked about him in the episode on the Pottawatomie Massacre, because he was Brown's first major financial backer, and it was on his land that Brown settled his family prior to going to Kansas. Brown's dealings with the Six guys are, I think, some of the most telling actions about his personality and character. The first thing worth mentioning is that all six of them were completely bought into Brown's persona. Whether it was accurate or not, Brown had no qualms about playing up his moral superiority to guilt his financiers into backing him. In one of Brown's most famous documents left behind, he wrote a letter to George Stern's 12-year-old son, Henry, in which he told the boy about how he came to dedicate himself to abolitionism. In the letter, he writes in the third person, and he lays his moralism on thick. In the passage explaining his very early conversion to abolitionism, Brown writes, quote, he, referring to himself in the third person, was staying for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord since the United States Marshal, who held a slave boy near his age, very active, intelligent, and good-filling, and to whom John was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of John, brought him to the table with his first company, and friends, called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did, and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles away from home with a company of cattle alone, while the negro boy, who was fully, if not more than his equal, was badly clothed, poorly fed, and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or any other thing that came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children, for such children have neither fathers nor mothers to protect and provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question, is God their father? End quote. Historians have pretty much dismissed this passage as largely a fabrication by Brown. This was supposedly when Brown was only about nine years old, which means it would be absurd that he would be out conducting a cattle drive on his own, and there is of course no corroborating evidence that Brown did any such thing. It's also unlikely that Brown ever witnessed such a beating of a slave, not because slave masters were kind, but because they were conscientious of what they saw as their own property, and using iron shovels to beat a slave child would have been pretty unheard of behavior, likely something a child wouldn't survive. So historians don't really consider the letter important for what it tells us about John Brown's actual life, but it's considered important because when he wrote it, it's quite clear that he was aiming it at George Stearns, and it does give us an idea of the persona he was presenting to other people as part of his fundraising propaganda. It worked, and Henry Stearns even offered his meager savings as a young child to support John Brown's cause. Another interesting anecdote that illustrates Brown's character when interacting with his benefactors was when he was staying with an abolitionist named Thomas Russell, a judge, and his wife. She recalled that one day she turned, quote, stiff with fright, unquote, when Brown smiled and pulled out, quote, a long evil looking knife, unquote, as well as several revolvers. Then he said to her, according to her recollections, that he would hate to ruin her nice carpet with blood, but he would never allow himself to be taken alive. In Miss Russell's view, Brown enjoyed torturing his benefactors in such a manner, and she was fully aware of his deliberate demonstrations of his monkish superiority compared to their extravagant standard of living. At the dinner table, he would often bring up the subject of their wealth and his poverty, constantly, quote, gravely mentioning unspeakable articles upon which he said he had lived, joints and toes of creatures that surely no human being ever tasted, end, quote. But Brown's moralism worked on his financial backers, though they did go through periods of doubt about supporting Brown as the 1857 recession left them financially stretched, and at times, Brown seemed slow to act. But in the end, they supported him all the way up to Harper's Ferry, and it's clear that Brown's persona as their moral superior contributed to their dedication. In one meeting, just before the raid took place, Garrett Smith stood up in front of a group of friends with John Brown present and said, quote, if I were asked to point out, I will say it in his presence, to point out the man in all the world I think most truly a Christian, I would point to John Brown, end quote. But funds were easier to obtain, apparently, than men and much of Brown's efforts focused on trying to recruit volunteers for his war against slavery. His need for recruits also exposed him to certain vulnerabilities that jeopardize the plan before it even took place. In 1857, John Brown met a man named Hugh Forbes. Forbes was a British fencing instructor who gained military experience in the Italian revolution led by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Forbes said he was a colonel and offered to act as the drill master for Brown's army. He was working on a training manual for soldiers, in fact, and Brown found the offer attractive and he gave Forbes an advance of $600 as pay for the next six months of work in training his recruits. But months went by and even though Brown didn't yet have anybody for Forbes to train, he was upset that he hadn't seen any return on his investment and he was still waiting for the training manual. Forbes did eventually complete the manual titled the manual of a patriotic volunteer. But unbeknownst to Brown, while Forbes was supposed to be working on his manual, he was expending a lot of effort trying to get funds from Brown's backers for himself. Forbes met with Garrett Smith four months after Brown hired him and introduced himself as Brown's deputy military strategist. Without mentioning the $600 Brown had already paid him, Forbes asked Smith for another $750. Garrett Smith gave him some money. I'm not sure if he gave him the full $750 as Garrett Smith's journal entry about the event only says that he did fork over some money of an unspecified amount. And when Forbes showed up for work in August, there were hardly any recruits for him to train, though Brown promised that many more were on their way. In the meantime, Forbes was instructed to drill a single soldier, John Brown's son Owen. Forbes did run drills with Owen, but he also spent much of his time arguing over John Brown's plan, each man viewing himself as the better general. This is where John Brown suggested the idea of waging an attack on Harper's Ferry as a possible starting point to start moving their army south with a growing army of liberated slaves. Forbes did not believe that freed blacks would flock into the army the way Brown imagined, and he wanted to stick to rapid-fire guerrilla raids conducted by an all-white militia so they could free slaves and smuggle them to Canada. Add to these disagreements the fact that Brown was out of money for the moment to pay Forbes any further. Hugh Forbes had a family he'd left behind in Europe that he claimed he needed to support. And Forbes developed a growing perspective that his time with John Brown was squandering his destiny, so Forbes left with his head full of John Brown's treasonous plans. After this, Forbes went to various other abolitionists blaming John Brown for leaving him and his family in poverty. He started writing accusatory letters to members of the Secret Six. Apparently, he was telling them that Brown had sent him to collect the money he'd been promised. It was a mixture between begging, bullying, and blackmail, with Forbes mentioning to them the wealth of information he had about Brown's plan that could put them all in legal jeopardy. Forbes also visited Frederick Douglass. Douglass was completely unaware of the fallout between Forbes and Brown, and he welcomed Forbes into his home, gave him travel money, and a letter to serve as a character reference to give to a wealthy community of German refugees who might donate to John Brown's cause. It was only after Forbes left that Douglass realized he'd been swindled. Forbes made an attempt to swindle and extort anybody he could think of by either pretending to be still working for John Brown or making veiled threats about revealing everything he knew to the authorities. It worked on some and it failed on others, but Forbes served as a major thorn in Brown's side in 1858. Forbes's threats were more effective against the Secret Six than anybody else, as they were worried he might reveal information that could incriminate them. In early 1858, John Brown revealed to his backers the plan to incite insurrection in Virginia, but after they started to worry about Forbes, they told John Brown to stop giving them any details of what he planned to do. They would still support him, but they didn't want to know any incriminating details themselves. They also encouraged Brown to postpone his plan until the threat of Forbes was no longer hanging over their heads. Brown and Higginson were the only ones who did not want to delay, but with the other five getting cold feet, funding was suspended for some time in the spring of 1858, and this did delay Brown's plans. Sharing Brown's impatience, one of his recruits, John Cook, the guy I mentioned in the last Kansas episode, who was a ladies man in a crack shot, offered to start spying on Harper's fairing. He would ingrain himself in the community and gain helpful information. Brown agreed and Cook took up residence in Harper's fairing, and this did lead to information that would be used in the raid among other developments. Cook did seem to have been a decent spy, though it's questionable how much good this did. He befriended the locals, he was charming and sociable, he found employment with several people in the town, and he joined a debate club. As usual, he found favor with the ladies in the town, both young and old. One woman, whose daughter Cook had complimented, wrote of him, quote, I was really pleased with him. He spoke so fluently and intelligently, and had all the nice little graces of a gentleman. He seems to have made a favorable impression upon everyone, end quote. One of the ladies he attracted was the 18-year-old daughter of his landlady named Virginia. On April 18th, 1859, the two got married with the bride already five months pregnant. As far as we can tell, his relationship with Virginia was sincere, but it also helped him ingrain himself further and gain information for the raid. When he was getting his marriage license, for example, he asked the clerk how many slaves lived in Harper's Ferry, claiming that it was to settle a bet he had with a friend. Another interesting anecdote from his role as a spy, and one that would come up during the raid itself, was John Cook's meeting with Colonel Lewis Washington, who was a slave owner and a local celebrity because he was the great grand-nephew of George Washington. Lewis Washington had inherited some of his great uncle's heirlooms, including a sword gifted to General Washington by Frederick the Great, an epistle that was a gift from Lafayette. One afternoon, Lewis Washington was taking a stroll by the armory that Brown would eventually get trapped in, and he was stopped by John Cook. I believe you have a great many interesting relics at your house, Cook said. Could I have permission to see them if I should walk out some day? This is according to Washington's testimony at the trial after the raid. It was not uncommon for people to ask to see Washington's treasures, and he enjoyed showing them off to people, so he agreed, thinking Cook was just a friendly armory worker. So Cook showed up at Washington's mansion a week later, and Washington happily let him admire the sword and the pistol. As I already mentioned, Cook was an absolute crackshot, and he wanted to fire the pistol, so he asked if Washington had ever done so. Washington told him that he fired it one time a decade earlier, and then he cleaned it out, put it in the cabinet, and the gun would never be fired again. But Cook wanted to see more of Washington's largest state, so he started talking to him about firearms. Then he revealed that he had been part of a hunting party in Kansas, where he killed Buffalo to sell their hides. After this failed to elicit an interested response from Washington, Cook unbuttoned his coat and showed the Colonel his two silver-mounted revolvers. These were very ornate weapons, and finally, Washington seemed interested. Cook said he needed the guns to hunt Buffalo, which was baloney, but he obviously didn't want to tell the slave owner that he was a free-state gorilla. Washington questioned a story about Cook hunting Buffalo with revolvers, and Cook said that he was able to do so because his horse was so well-trained. This seemed to be enough of a save to satisfy Washington, and Cook asked if he'd like to try out his weapons. Washington eagerly agreed, so they went outside and set up a target under a tree in the front of Washington's house. While they were shooting, Washington noticed the engravings on the gun saying John E. Cook, and he asked if that was the man's name. Cook said it was, and claimed that he engraved the guns himself, saying he borrowed the tools from a silversmith. The silversmith he referenced was actually a free black man, named James Monroe Jones, but Cook didn't mention this, of course. So the men each shot off 24 rounds, and John Cook could have easily outshot Washington by all accounts of his reputation with a revolver, but apparently he hid his skills and let Washington seem like the better shot, flattering the man by saying that Washington was the best shot he had ever met. So Cook successfully charmed the man, and in October, Washington tried to visit Cook again only to learn that Cook was out of town. The next time Washington would meet Cook in person would be during the raid, where Cook would arrest him in his home and announce to his slaves that they were officially liberated. But Brown found recruits hard to come by. All in all, John Brown's army consisted of 22 men, including himself, though three of them would be left behind in the hideout to guard the weapons while the rest raided Harper's Ferry. Brown hoped to recruit free blacks to his cause, visiting with both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, in the hopes of gaining their support, and with their influence the support of many fugitive slaves. When he met with Frederick Douglass, Brown was disappointed that Douglass refused to participate in the raid, but Douglass was accompanied by a fugitive slave named Shields Green, who did join Brown. Another black member of Brown's party was an escaped slave named Dangerfield Newby. He was around 40 years old, much older than the other recruits, but he was also the most desperate person in Brown's group. His family was still in slavery, and their owner had originally agreed to sell them to Dangerfield for $700, which was a very high price. But Newby had saved up the money only to have the slave owner renege on the agreement and refuse to sell. So Newby's wife Harriet wrote him a letter imploring him to come see her and the children with or without money, because the thought of seeing him was the only thing that kept her going. So Dangerfield was desperate and out of option, so he joined John Brown hoping to liberate his wife and children, and he was the most anxious member of the party to make their move. Aaron Stevens might be the most different from Dangerfield Newby, in that he seems to have joined John Brown for the fun of it more than anything else. At age 16, Stevens had volunteered to fight in the Mexican-American War, and afterwards he became a burglar in the West. He stayed in the military to fight Indians until he was court-martialed for drunkenness and mutiny after he pulled a gun on an officer. Stevens was sentenced to death by firing squad, but his sentence was reduced to three years' hard labor at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. After less than six months, he escaped and joined the Free State Gorillas using the alias Colonel Whipple. He was very much an abolitionist, and in one raid he fired the shot that killed a Missouri slave owner while freeing the slaves. But Stevens seemed to largely be driven by the excitement of it all more than the moral crusade. Three of Brown's sons would participate in the raid as well, Oliver Watson and Owen, though Owen, due to his physical handicap, would be one of the three left behind, and he ended up escaping from Harper's Ferry and living until 1889, so his testimonies are one of the major sources historians have about all this. I'm not going to detail the backstory of every raid, or that would be tedious, and most of them aren't as interesting as these few, but they'll come up when I talk about the raid itself as they're either killed or captured. At one point, in his attempt to recruit allies, John Brown revealed his plan to some Quakers in Springdale, Iowa, where he was based during the winter of 1857 and 58. The Quakers were indeed anti-slavery, of course, but they were worried about the foolishness of the plan, thinking that Brown was going to put his young recruits in danger, which was obviously true. So a handful of them decided to get together and write a letter to the US Secretary of War, John Floyd. This would have been shortly after John Brown picked Harper's Ferry as his target, and the Quakers revealed as much in a letter. They also named him as Old John Brown of Kansas Infamy and said that his men would go through Pennsylvania and Maryland to enter Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The letter might have stopped Brown's raid before it had even started, if not for the one mistake they made. They said that Brown had placed a spy at the Armory in Maryland. This was the only thing in the letter that wasn't true, and it's just the small detail that the Armory was not in Maryland. It was in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, placing it just on the other side of the river that separated the two states. John Floyd read the letter and he knew that there was no Armory in Maryland, so he thought it was a hoax and he took no action. In a testimony he gave after the fact, he also blamed his decision to ignore the letter on the fact that in his mind, quote, a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizen of the United States, end quote. So the small geographic error on the part of the Quakers was enough to save Brown from being exposed nearly two years before the attack actually took place. In addition to getting men, Brown also started to stockpile weapons. He had a supply of arms and gunpowder funded by the Secret Six, but he wanted something else for the slaves he would liberate, since he knew they would have never have held a gun before. In March of 1857 he met a blacksmith named Charles Blair, and like he did, to many of his admirers, John Brown showed off the Bowie knife he had acquired in Kansas and he asked about the feasibility of a fixing a similar blade to a long pole to make a pipe. Blair said he could make it, and Brown contracted with Blair to make thousands of them to arm the swarms of fugitive slaves he anticipated. He made an initial payment of $550, and Blair gave Brown an initial supply as samples of the work, but not long after Brown was strapped for cash and he couldn't make any more payments, so Blair stopped working on the pikes. And it wasn't until June of 1859 after Brown had finished another round of fundraising that he met with Blair again and gave him the rest of the money to fulfill the contract, thus securing a huge supply of pikes that would almost entirely go unused after the anticipated swarm of slaves failed to appear. Brown also took on the side mission in late 1858 which may have helped reignite support for his cause from his backers who were starting to wonder if Brown would ever actually do anything. Brown had returned to Kansas now operating under the name Schuble Morgan and sporting the giant white beard that many of you have probably seen in one of the more famous photos of him. While in Kansas, Brown's plan was at a low point. He was cash strapped with his supporters losing faith and Hugh Forbes causing problems while the few men he had recruited were getting bored. But in December, a Missouri slave named Jim Daniels came into Kansas pretending to be there on business selling brooms. But instead, he was there to give Brown a message. He and several other slaves were about to be sold and they needed Brown's help. This was just the sort of thing Brown needed not only for his own sense of purpose but to show his financiers that he was still a man of action. So Brown led 18 men from Kansas into Missouri the night after he spoke to Daniels. One of his men took into the house of Daniels' master and freed slaves at the point of his gun. Then they moved to a neighboring property and freed five more slaves. Some of the men, including Stevens, raided yet another neighboring home and freed one more slave and this is where Stevens shot and killed the owner. In addition to liberating 11 slaves, the guerrillas stole livestock, food, clothing, and two white hostages and then fled back to Kansas. The hostages would be released once the raiders were in safer territories. For the Missourians, this was another of Osawatomi Brown's terrorist attacks and the newspapers reported exactly that. For John Brown, this was the good press he desperately needed to remind the Secret Six why they were giving him so much money. This event would be called the Battle of the Spurs and Brown helped smuggle all 11 of the slaves into Iowa to take refuge with the Quakers. During the trip on a ferry boat, one of the slaves gave birth and the child was named John Brown in honor of their liberator. Brown took full advantage of the event for the purposes of his own propaganda. He wrote a draft of an article comparing the Battle of the Spurs to a massacre with a French name that I'm not going to try to pronounce and in the massacre he referenced 11 free statemen were shot and left for dead by a Georgian named Charles Hamilton. Brown pointed out that the territorial government never bothered to investigate the murders. By contrast wrote Brown, quote, 11 persons are forcibly restored to their natural and inalienable rights with but one man killed and all hell is stirred from beneath, end quote. After this event, all of Brown's focus was on the planet Harper's Ferry and as if a sign from above he got one last minute recruit, Francis Jackson Mariam. Mariam was hardly fit to fight. He was scrawny, he had a glass eye and he clearly had syphilis. For these reasons he would be one of the three left behind to guard the weapons cache but he was valuable for what he brought with him, $600 in gold coins, his inheritance that he was donating to Brown's cause. This money would come in handy as they took the war further south, at least that's what they thought at the time. Finally at the beginning of October 1859, the men made their final preparations for the attack that would commence on the 16th of that month. John Cook defying Brown's orders warned his wife and mother-in-law about the plan so they could find safety elsewhere. Charles Tidd, another of Brown's volunteers, wrote his parents to let them know where they could find his belongings since this was, as he put it, possibly the last letter they would ever receive from him. Another recruit, William Lehman, used his final letter to reveal to his family why they had gone so long without seeing him. He was part of a secret group on a mission to exterminate slavery. John's son Oliver, whose wife Martha was pregnant, encouraged her to enjoy life. His brother Watson gave a darker goodbye to his wife Belle shortly after she gave birth to his son. In his last letter to Belle, Watson wrote, I sometimes think perhaps we shall not meet again. If we should not, you have an object to live for, to be a mother to our little Fred. He is not quite a reality to me yet. End quote. When he'd left North Elba a few months prior, just after Fred was born, Belle couldn't understand why he was crying. She didn't know about the conspiracy. Stevens also wrote a letter to a sweetheart, which he signed with his pseudonym, Colonel Whipple, which almost gives a comical ending to what was a pretty heartfelt letter. Finally, with all the preparations in place, John Brown gave the final orders. The three men who were least fit for combat were to be left behind to guard the weapons. This would be Francis Merriam, Owen Brown, who had a useless arm, and Barclay Coppock, an Iowa Quaker, who probably had asthma, but they only saw him as having bad lungs and low stamina. His brother Edwin would join Brown and the others in the raid. So on Sunday evening, October 16th, Brown gave a final piece of instruction to his 18 volunteer soldiers, quote, you all know how dear life is to you and how dear your life is to your friends. Do not, therefore, take the life of anyone if you can possibly avoid it. But if it is necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make sure work of it, end quote. With that, at eight o'clock, Brown took a seat in the horse-drawn wagon carrying weapons and gunpowder and said, come on, boys. And he led the way to Harper's Ferry. The attack that would follow will be the topic of the next episode. For more content like this, visit mesis.org.