but to furnish the means.  All reasonable argument he met with his rigid dogmatic formulas, his selected proverbs, his favorite texts of Scripture.  The following, preserved by various witnesses as samples of his sayings at other times, indicate his reasoning on this occasion:  “Give a slave a pike and you make him a man.  I would not give Sharps rifles to more than ten men in a hundred, and then only when they have learned to use them.  A ravine is better than a plain.  Woods and mountain-sides can be held by resolute men against ten times their force.  Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks; the same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State.”  “A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a king.  Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years.”  “If God be for us, who can be against us?  Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

  [Sidenote] Ibid., March, 1875, p. 329.

  [Sidenote] Sanborn, “Life and Letters of John Brown,” p. 439.

  [Sidenote] Sanborn, “Atlantic,” July, 1872, pp. 53-4.

One of the participants relates, that—­“When the agitated party broke up their council for the night, it was perfectly plain that Brown could not be held back from his purpose.”  The discussion of the friends on the second day (February 23) was therefore only whether they should aid him, or oppose him, or remain indifferent.  Against every admonition of reason, mere personal sympathy seems to have carried a decision in favor of the first of these alternatives.  “You see how it is,” said the chief counselor, Gerrit Smith; “our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course and cannot be turned from it.  We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him.”  Brown has left an exact statement of his own motive and expectation, in a letter to Sanborn on the following day.  “I have only had this one opportunity in a life of nearly sixty years ...  God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards ...  I expect nothing but to endure hardness, but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson.”

  [Sidenote] Realf, Testimony, Mason Report, p. 99.

Nine days later Brown went to Boston, where the conspiracy was enlarged and strengthened by the promises and encouragements of a little coterie of radical abolitionists.[3] Within the next two months the funds he desired were contributed and sent him.  Meanwhile Brown returned West, and moved his company of recruits from Iowa, by way of Chicago and Detroit, to the town of Chatham, in Canada West, arriving there about the 1st of May.  By written invitations, Brown here called together what is described as “a quiet convention of the friends of freedom,” to perfect his organization.  On the 8th of May, 1858, they held a meeting with