Meanwhile, his black lieutenant, Kagi, ragged, stooped, insignificant-looking, shrewd and cunning, was traveling over the Allegheny Mountains, surveying the land, marking sites and making useful contacts. Kagi had some schooling and, when he desired, could speak clearly and to the point. He knew in detail the vast extent of Brown’s plan. He lived and breathed it. He had been wounded with John Brown in Kansas, and unswerving he walked to his death with him. For Kagi believed that John Brown was making a mistake to attack Harper’s Ferry when he did, but the little black man held the bridge until his riddled body plunged into the icy waters below.
In the spring of 1858 Brown went to Canada to set up personal contacts with the nearly fifty thousand Negroes there. Chatham, chief town of Kent County, had a large Negro population with several churches, a newspaper and a private school. Here on May 10 the Captain addressed a convention called together on the pretext of organizing a Masonic lodge. And at this convention they drew up and adopted the constitution of forty-eight articles that stunned the authorities when they found it in the hide-away farmhouse near Harper’s Ferry.
Up to this time Frederick Douglass was fully cognizant of all John Brown’s plans. The Douglass home in Rochester was his headquarters. (He had insisted that he pay board, and Douglass charged him three dollars a week.)
“While here, he spent most of his time in correspondence,” Douglass wrote later. “When he was not writing letters, he was writing and revising a constitution which he meant to put in operation by means of the men who should go with him into the mountains. He said that, to avoid anarchy and confusion, there should be a regularly-constituted government, which each man who came with him should be sworn to honor and support. I have a copy of this constitution in Captain Brown’s own handwriting, as prepared by himself at my house.
“He called his friends from Chatham to come together, that he might lay his constitution before them for their approval and adoption. His whole time and thought were given to this subject. It was the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Once in a while he would say he could, with a few resolute men, capture Harper’s Ferry, and supply himself with arms belonging to the government at that place; but he never announced his intention to do so. It was, however ... in his mind as a thing he might do. I paid little attention to such remarks, though I never doubted that he thought just what he said. Soon after his coming to me, he asked me to get for him two smoothly planed boards, upon which he could illustrate, with a pair of dividers, by a drawing, the plan of fortification which he meant to adopt in the mountains.
“These forts were to be so arranged as to connect one with the other, by secret passages, so that if one was carried another could easily be fallen back upon, and be the means of dealing death to the enemy at the very moment when he might think himself victorious. I was less interested in these drawings than my children were, but they showed that the old man had an eye to the means as to the end, and was giving his best thought to the work he was about to take in hand.”[18]
The month of May, 1859, John Brown spent in Boston collecting funds, and in New York consulting his Negro friends, with a trip to Connecticut to hurry the making of his thousand pikes. Sickness intervened, but at last on June 20, the advance guard of five—Brown and two of his sons, Jerry Anderson and Kagi—started southward.
Many times during these months Frederick Douglass wondered whether or not John Brown did not have the only possible plan for freeing the black man. The antislavery fight had worn very thin. The North knew of the moral and physical horror of slavery. The South knew also, but cotton prices continued to rise. Logic would not separate cotton growers from their slaves. Many of the old, staunch Abolitionists were gone. Theodore Parker had burned himself out in the cause. Down with tuberculosis, he was on a ship bound for southern Italy where, in spite of the warm sunshine, he was to die.
Daily the South grew more defiant. When the doctrine of popular sovereignty failed to make Kansas a slave state, Southern statesmen abandoned it for firmer ground. They had lost faith in the rights, powers and wisdom of the people and took refuge in the Constitution. Henceforth the favorite doctrine of the South was that the people of a territory had no voice in the matter of slavery. The Constitution of the United States, they claimed, of its own force and effect, carried slavery safely into any territory of the United States and protected the system there until it should cease to be a territory and became a state. In practical operation, this doctrine would make all future new states slaveholding states; for slavery, once planted and nursed for years, could easily strengthen itself against the evil day of eradication.