“But won’t it take years to free the slaves this way?” his friend asked.
“Indeed not! Each month our line of fortresses will extend farther south.” His pencil moved across Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, to Mississippi. “To the delta itself! The slaves will free themselves.”
Pale dawn showed in the sky before they went upstairs.
“You must sleep now, John Brown.”
But before lying down, the old man looked hard into the broad, dark face. Douglass nodded his head.
“I’m with you, John Brown. Rest a little. Then we’ll talk,” Douglass said and tiptoed from the room.
When John Brown left the house in Alexander Street several days later, he was expected in many quarters. He went first to Boston, George L. Sterns, the Massachusetts antislavery leader, paying his expenses. Sterns, who had never met “Osawatomie Brown,” had written to Rochester offering to introduce him to friends of freedom in Boston. They met on the street outside the committee rooms in Nilis’ Block, with a Kansas man doing the honors; and Brown went along to Sterns’ home.
Coming into the parlor to greet the man who had become a household word during the summer of 1856, Mrs. Sterns heard her guest saying, “Gentlemen, I consider the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence one and inseparable.”
“I felt,” she said later, writing about the profound impression of moral magnetism Brown made on everybody who saw him in those days, “that some old Cromwellian hero had dropped down among us.”