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:
Mason Report, p. 55.
Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 438.
Blair, Testimony, Mason Report, pp. 121-5.
Somewhere in the Virginia mountains he would raise the standard of revolt and liberation. Enthusiasts would join him from the free States, and escaped blacks come to his help from Canada. From Virginia and the neighboring slave-States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, fugitive slaves, with their families, would flock to his camps. He would take his supplies, provisions, and horses by force from the neighboring plantations. Money, plate, watches, and jewelry would "constitute a liberal safety or intelligence fund." For arms, he had 200 Sharps rifles, and 200 revolvers, with which he would arm his best marksmen. His ruder followers, and even the women and children, he would arm with pikes to defend the fortifications. He would construct defenses of palisades and earth-works. He would use natural strongholds; find secret mountain-passes to connect one with another; retreat from and evade attacks he could not overcome. He would maintain and indefinitely prolong a guerrilla war, of which the Seminole Indians in Florida and the negroes in Hayti afforded examples. With success, he would enlarge the area of his occupation so as to include arable valleys and low-lands bordering the Alleghany range in the slave-States; and here he would colonize, govern, and educate the blacks he had freed, and maintain their liberty. He would make captures and reprisals, confiscate property, take, hold, and exchange prisoners and especially white hostages and exchange them for slaves to liberate. He would recognize neutrals, make treaties, exercise humanity, prevent crime, repress immorality, and observe all established laws of war. Success would render his revolt permanent, and in the end, through "amendment and repeal," abolish slavery. If, at the worst, he were driven from the mountains he would retreat with his followers through the free States to Canada. He had 12 recruits drilling in Iowa, and a half-executed contract for 1000 pikes in Connecticut; furnish him $800 in money and he would begin operations in May.
Sanborn in "Atlantic," March, 1875, p. 329.
Redpath, "Life of John Brown," p. 206.
Sanborn in "Atlantic," July, 1872, p. 52.
This, if we supply continuity and arrangement to his vagaries, must have been approximately what he felt or dreamily saw, and outlined in vigorous words to his auditors. His listening friends were dumfounded at the audacity as well as heart-sick at the hopelessness of such an attempt. They pointed out the almost certainty of failure and destruction, and attempted to dissuade him from the mad scheme; but to no purpose. They saw they were dealing with a foregone conclusion; he had convoked them, not to advise as to methods, but to furnish the means. All reasonable argument he met with his rigid dogmatic formulas, his selected proverbs, his favorite texts of Scripture. The following, preserved by various witnesses as samples of his sayings at other times, indicate his reasoning on this occasion: "Give a slave a pike and you make him a man. I would not give Sharps rifles to more than ten men in a hundred, and then only when they have learned to use them. A ravine is better than a plain. Woods and mountain-sides can be held by resolute men against ten times their force. Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks; the same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State." "A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "If God be for us, who can be against us? Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
Ibid., March, 1875, p. 329.
Sanborn, "Atlantic," July, 1872, pp. 53-4.
Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p. 439.
One of the participants relates, that—"When the agitated party broke up their council for the night, it was perfectly plain that Brown could not be held back from his purpose." The discussion of the friends on the second day (February 23) was therefore only whether they should aid him, or oppose him, or remain indifferent. Against every admonition of reason, mere personal sympathy seems to have carried a decision in favor of the first of these alternatives. "You see how it is," said the chief counselor, Gerrit Smith; "our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him." Brown has left an exact statement of his own motive and expectation, in a letter to Sanborn on the following day. "I have only had this one opportunity in a life of nearly sixty years ... God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards ... I expect nothing but to endure hardness, but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson."