Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/225

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THE GEEAT PLAN
217

him $600 for this work. He was then to join the leader and they would together go to the West and gather and drill a company. This large outlay left John Brown but little in his purse, for, after all, his efforts had been disappointing, and he departed from New England with a quaint half-sarcastic "Farewell to the Plymouth Bocks, Bunker Hill monuments, Charter Oaks and Uncle Tom's Cabins." He wrote:

"He has left for Kansas; has been trying since he came out of the Territory to secure an outfit, or, in other words, the means of arming and thoroughly equipping his regular minutemen, who are mixed up with the people of Kansas. And he leaves the states with the deepest sadness, that after exhausting his own small means, and with his family and with his brave men suffering hunger, cold, nakedness, and some of them sickness, wounds, imprisonment in irons with extreme cruel treatment, and others death; that, lying on the ground for months in the most sickly, unwholesome, and uncomfortable places, some of the time with the sick and wounded, destitute of shelter, hunted like wolves, and sustained in part by Indians; that after all this, in order to sustain a cause which every citizen of this 'glorious Republic' is under equal moral obligation to do, and for the neglect of which he will be held accountable by God,—a cause in which every man, woman, and child of the entire human family has a deep and awful interest,—that when no wages are asked or expected, he cannot secure, amid all