hich he proposed to train them.
When once properly drilled and each had found the place for which he
was best suited, they would begin work in earnest; they would run off
the slaves in large numbers, retain the strong and brave ones in the
mountains, and send the weak and timid ones to the North by the
underground Rail-road; his operations would be enlarged with
increasing numbers and would not be confined to one locality.
Slave-holders should in some cases be approached at midnight and told
to give up their slaves and to let them have their best horses to ride
away upon. Slavery was a state of war, he said, to which the slaves
were unwilling parties and consequently they had a right to anything
necessary to their peace and freedom. He would shed no blood and would
avoid a fight except in self-defense, when he would of course do his
best. He believed this movement would weaken slavery in two
ways--first by making slave property insecure, it would become
undesirable; and secondly it would keep the anti-slavery agitation
alive and public attention fixed upon it, and thus lead to the
adoption of measures to abolish the evil altogether. He held that
there was need of something startling to prevent the agitation of the
question from dying out; that slavery had come near being abolished in
Virginia by the Nat. Turner insurrection, and he thought his method
would speedily put an end to it, both in Maryland and Virginia. The
trouble was to get the right men to start with and money enough to
equip them. He had adopted the simple and economical mode of living to
which I have referred with a view to save money for this purpose. This
was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already
too long and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial.

From 8 o'clock in the evening till 3 in the morning, Capt. Brown and I
sat face to face, he arguing in favor of his plan, and I finding all
the objections I could against it. Now mark! this meeting of ours was
full twelve years before the strike at Harper's Ferry. He had been
watching and waiting all that time for suitable heads to rise or "pop
up" as he said among the sable millions in whom he could confide;
hence forty years had passed between his thought and his act. Forty
years, though not a long time in the life of a nation, is a long time
in the life of a man; and here forty long years, this man was
struggling with this one idea; like Moses he was forty year