But merely to conceive great enterprises is not to perform them, and every after-step of John Brown reveals his lamentable weakness and utter inadequacy for the heroic role to which he fancied himself called.  His first blunder was in divulging all his plans to Forbes, an utter stranger, while he was so careful in concealing them from others.  Forbes, as ambitious and reckless as himself, of course soon quarreled with him, and left him, and endeavored first to supplant and then betray him.

  [Sidenote] Realf, Testimony Mason Report, p. 91.  Ibid., pp. 91-4.

Meanwhile, little by little, Brown gathered one colored and six white confederates from among his former followers in Kansas, and assembled them for drill and training in Iowa; four others joined him there.  These, together with his son Owen, counted, all told, a band of twelve persons engaged for, and partly informed of, his purpose.  He left them there for instruction during the first three months of the year 1858, while he himself went East to procure means.

  [Sidenote] “Atlantic,” July, 1872, p. 51.

At the beginning of February, 1858, John Brown became, and remained for about a month, a guest at the house of Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, New York.  Immediately on his arrival there he wrote to a prominent Boston abolitionist, T.W.  Higginson:  “I now want to get, for the perfecting of by far the most important undertaking of my whole life, from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days.  I have written Rev. Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, and F.B.  Sanborn, Esquires, on the subject.”

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

Correspondence and mutual requests for a conference ensued, and finally these Boston friends sent Sanborn to the house of Gerrit Smith, in Peterboro, New York, where a meeting had been arranged.  Sanborn was a young man of twenty-six, just graduated from college, who, as secretary of various Massachusetts committees, had been the active agent for sending contributions to Kansas.  He arrived on the evening of Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1858, and took part in a council of conspiracy, of which John Brown was the moving will and chief actor.

  [Sidenote] “Atlantic,” July, 1872, p. 52.  Sanborn in “Atlantic,”
  March, 1875, p. 329; also, Mason Report, pp. 48-59.

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: