[Sidenote] Mason Report, p. 55.

  [Sidenote] Blair, Testimony, Mason Report, pp. 121-5.

  [Sidenote] Sanborn, “Life and Letters of John Brown,” p. 438.

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.

  [Sidenote] Sanborn in “Atlantic,” March, 1875, p. 329.

  [Sidenote] Redpath, “Life of John Brown,” p. 206.

  [Sidenote] 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,