Brown’s men who spent the winter of 1858 there drilling for the Harper’s Ferry campaign.
A few days before they left in the spring each one placed his signature in pencil on the wall of the room most used by them. They were Owen Brown, John E. Cook, Aaron D. Stevens, John H. Kagi, Richard Realf, Charles P. Tidd, William H. Leeman, Charles W. Moffat, Luke F. Parsons, Richard Richardson and George B. Gill. Parsons, Realf, Moffat, Richardson and Gill failed to report at the Kennedy farm before the attack and were not in the battle.
Of the men who were most conspicuous on the other side of John Brown’s war, Lee, Stuart, Floyd and Wise attained high rank in the war which followed for the perpetuation of human slavery, while Mason, the author of the infamous Fugitive Slave Law, was the Confederate Ambassador to England; Jefferson Davis, the confederate President; Letcher, the confederate Governor. J. Wilkes Booth, one of Virginia’s militia officers, who escorted John Brown and Edwin Coppoc to the gallows, closed his career by assassinating the great emancipator.
On the 14th of December, 1859, after the invasion, the Senate of the United States appointed a committee to investigate and report all facts obtainable bearing upon the affair and especially to inquire whether such invasion was made under color of any organization intended to subvert the government of any of the States of the Union, and whether any citizens not present were implicated therein. The committee consisted of Senators James M. Mason of Virginia, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, G. M. Fitch of Indiana, Jacob Collamer of Vermont and J. R. Doolittle of Wisconsin. The committee had power to send for persons and papers. Its investigations were of the most rigid character, as a majority of its members sought to implicate prominent Republicans and Abolitionists of Northern States as instigators of the invasion. Among the witnesses called before that committee
