FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. 473 



father's call to keep their last pledge at Harper's Ferry, they issued from that doorway 

 between their weeping wives on the one side and that ancestral stone upon the other. 



"The farm is a wild place; cold and bleak. It is too cold to raise corn there ; they 

 can scarcely, in the most favorable seasons, obtain a few ears for roasting. I was there 

 on the first day of November; the ground was snowy, and winter had apparently begun 

 — and it would last till the middle of May. They never raise anything to sell off that 

 farm, except sometimes a few fleeces. It was well, they said, if they raised their own 

 provisions, and could spin tlieir own wool for clothing. 



"Ten years ago, Gerrit Smith gave to a number of colored men tracts of ground 

 in the Adirondack Mountains. The emigrants were grossly defrauded by a cheating 

 surveyor, who, being in advance of his age, practically anticipated Judge Taney's 

 opinion, that black men have no rights which white men are bound to respect. By his 

 villain)- the colony was almost ruined in advance; nor did it ever recover itself ; though 

 some of the best farms which I have seen in that region are still in the hands of colored ' 

 men. John Brown heard of this ; he himself was a surveyor, and lie would have gone 

 to the Adirondacks, or anywhere else, merely to right this wrong. But he had another 

 object: he thought that among these men he should find coadjutors in his cherished 

 plan. He was not wholly wrong, and yet he afterwards learned something more. 

 Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John 

 Brown did not merely look for men, therefore: he reared them in his sons. During 

 long years of waiting and postponement, he found others ; but his sons and their 

 friends (the Thompsons) formed the nucleus of his force in all his enterprises. What 

 services the females of his family may have rendered, it is not yet time to tell ; but it 

 is a satisfaction to think that he was repaid for his early friendship of these New York 

 colored men. by some valuable aid from freed slaves and fugitive slaves at Harper's 

 Ferry; especially from Dangerfield Newby, who, poor fellow! had a slave wife and 

 nine slave children to fight for, all within thirty miles of that town. 



"To appreciate the character of the family, it is necessary to know these things; 

 to understand that they have all been trained from childhood on this one principle, 

 and for this one special project ; taught to believe in it as they believed in their God 

 or their father. It has given them a wider perspective than the Adirondacks. Five 

 years before, when they first went to Kansas, the father and sons had a plan of going 

 to Louisiana, trying this same project, and then retreating into Texas with the liberated 

 slaves. Nurtured on it so long, for years sacrificing to it all the other objects of life, 

 the thought of its failure never crossed their minds ; and it is an extraordinary fact 

 that when the disastrous news first came to North Elba, the family utterly refused to 

 believe it, and were saved from suffering by that incredulity till the arrival of the next 

 weekly mail. 



