Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/235

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE GREAT PLAN
227

so that if one was carried, another could easily be fallen back upon, and be the means of dealing death to the enemy at the very moment when he might think himself victorious. I was less interested in these drawings than my children were; but they showed that the old man had an eye to the means as well as to the end, and was giving his best thought to the work he was about to take in hand."[1]

From Rochester went letters sounding his friends, as he was uncertain of the real devotion of the many types of Abolitionists. He wrote Theodore Parker:

"I am again out of Kansas and at this time concealing my whereabouts; but for very different reasons, however, from those I had for doing so at Boston last spring. I have nearly perfected arrangements for carrying out an important measure in which the world has a deep interest, as well as Kansas; and only lack from five to eight hundred dollars to do so,—the same object for which I asked for the secret-service money last fall. It is my only errand here; and I have written to some of my mutual friends in regard to it, but they none of them understand my views so well as you do, and I cannot explain without their first committing themselves more than I know of their doing. I have heard that Parker Pillsbury, and some others in your quarters hold out ideas similar to those on which I act; but I have no personal acquaintance with them, and know nothing of their influence or

  1. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, pp. 385–386.