It is impossible to trace exactly how and when the Harper's Ferry invasion first took practical shape in John Brown's mind, but the indications are that it grew little by little out of his Kansas experience. His earliest collisions with the Border Ruffians occurred the spring and summer of 1856. In the autumn of that year the United States troops dispersed his band, and generally suppressed the civil war. In January, 1857, we find him in the Eastern States, appealing for arms and supplies to various committees and in various places, alleging that he desired to organize and equip a company of one hundred minute-men, who were "mixed up with the people of Kansas," but who should be ready on call to rush to the defense of freedom. This appeal only partly succeeded. From one committee he obtained authority as agent over certain arms stored in Iowa, the custody and control of which had been in dispute. From another committee he obtained a portion of the clothing he desired. From still other sources he received certain moneys, but not sufficient for his requirements. Two circumstances, however, indicate that he was practicing a deception upon the committees and public. He entered into a contract with a blacksmith, in Collinsville, Connecticut, to manufacture him 1000 pikes of a certain pattern,[2] ] to be completed in 90 days, and paid $550 on the contract. There is no record that he mentioned this matter to any committee. His proposed Kansas minute-men were only to be one hundred in number, and the pikes could not be for them; his explanation to the blacksmith, that they would be a good weapon of defense for Kansas settlers, was clearly a subterfuge. These pikes, ordered about March 23, 1857, were without doubt intended for his Virginia invasion; and in fact the identical lot, finished after long delay, under the same contract, were shipped to him in September, 1859, and were actually used in his Harper's Ferry attempt. The other circumstance is that, about the time of his contract for the pikes, he also, without the knowledge of committees or friends, engaged an adventurer, named Forbes, to go West and give military instruction to his company—a measure neither useful nor practicable for Kansas defense. These two acts may be taken as the first preparation for Harper's Ferry.
But merely to conceive great enterprises is not to perform them, and every after-step of John Brown reveals his lamentable weakness and utter inadequacy for the heroic role to which he fancied himself called. His first blunder was in divulging all his plans to Forbes, an utter stranger, while he was so careful in concealing them from others. Forbes, as ambitious and reckless as himself, of course soon quarreled with him, and left him, and endeavored first to supplant and then betray him.
Realf, Testimony Mason Report, p. 91. Ibid., pp. 91-4.
Meanwhile, little by little, Brown gathered one colored and six white confederates 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.
"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."
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.
"Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 52. Sanborn in "Atlantic," March, 1875, p. 329; also, Mason Report, pp. 48-59.