closed doors, there being present the original company of ten or eleven white members and one colored, whom Brown had brought with him, and a somewhat miscellaneous gathering of negro residents of Canada.  Some sort of promise of secrecy was mutually made; then John Brown, in a speech, laid his plan before the meeting.  One Delany, a colored doctor, in a response, promised the assistance of all the colored people in Canada.  The provisional constitution drafted by Brown at Rochester was read and adopted by articles, and about forty-five persons signed their names to the “Constitution,” for the “proscribed and oppressed races of the United States.”  Two days afterwards, the meeting again convened for the election of officers; John Brown was elected commander-in-chief by acclamation; other members were by the same summary method appointed secretary of war, secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and two of them members of congress.  The election of a president was prudently postponed.

This Chatham Convention cannot claim consideration as a serious deliberative proceeding.  John Brown was its sole life and voice.  The colored Canadians were nothing but spectators.  The ten white recruits were mere Kansas adventurers, mostly boys in years and waifs in society, perhaps depending largely for livelihood on the employment or bounty, precarious as it was, of their leader.  Upon this reckless, drifting material the strong despotic will, emotional enthusiasm, and mysterious rhapsodical talk of John Brown exercised an irresistible fascination; he drew them by easy gradations into his confidence and conspiracy.  The remaining element, John Brown’s son in the Chatham meeting, and other sons and relatives in the Harper’s Ferry attack, are of course but the long educated instruments of the father’s thought and purpose.

  [Sidenote] Stearns to Brown, May 14, 1858:  Howe, Testimony, Mason
  Report, p. 177.

With funds provided, with his plan of government accepted, and himself formally appointed commander-in-chief, Brown doubtless thought his campaign about to begin; it was however destined to an unexpected interruption.  The discarded and disappointed adventurer Forbes had informed several prominent Republicans in Washington City that Brown was meditating an unlawful enterprise; and the Boston committee, warned that certain arms in Brown’s custody, which had been contributed for Kansas defense, were about to be flagrantly misused, dared not incur the public odium of complicity in such a deception and breach of faith.  The Chatham organization was scarcely completed when Brown received word from the Boston committee that he must not use the arms (the 200 Sharps rifles and 200 revolvers) which had been intrusted to him for any other purpose than for the defense of Kansas.  Brown hurried to Boston; but oral consultation with his friends confirmed the necessity for postponement; and it was arranged that, to lull suspicion, he should return