I was sitting in my quiet schoolroom, Sanborn wrote, on a Tuesday morning, when word reached me of the October 16th attack on Harpers Ferry. For half a day, Brown and his seventeen men, five being left as guards on the Maryland side of the Potomac, held the little town Harpers Ferry, with its important government arsenal, at his mercy, and had several captured hostages for prisoners. He and his band might then, possibly, have escaped, and, by virtue of the alarm they excited, might have retired in comparative safety. But for some reason never fully explained, Brown lingered till escape was impossible. It was the design and expectation of those who captured him in the little engine-house, to kill him on the bloody floor, to which a lieutenant of Marines struck him down, and continued to wound him after he fell.

Brown and his company battled the local militia for two days, throwing Harpers Ferry into bedlam until the Marines arrived, on horseback, under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Those of Brown and his seventeen men who were not shot dead were taken as prisoners. The result proves that the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or madman which could only end in failure, Colonel Lee reported to his Commanding Officer.

The first news reports said Brown was dead. The next round of reports gave notice he'd been wounded, taken into captivity, and was to be tried for treason.

Slaves did not rise up in revolution against their masters. The Harpers Ferry raid did, however, provoke immediate and profound tremors down South. Abraham Lincoln feared Southerners would blame the attack on the Republicans. He thought it possible that Brown was mad, but the more he read about him in the papers, the more he came to feel it possible that Brown could be, in fact, a man of tremendous courage. He now publicly contended it was, after all, inevitable that such an outbreak as this, at Harpers Ferry, should arise in a country that accepted the institution of slavery. Lincoln would not publicly approve Brown's raid, maintaining no reasonable man would condone violence and crime.

Brown is right, Thoreau responded immediately, and the government wrong.

We are all very well, Emerson wrote his son Eddy, in spite of the sad Harpers Ferry business, which interests us all who had Brown for our guest. He is a true hero, but he lost his head there.

This deed, Alcott wrote, so surprising, so mixed, so confounding to most persons, will give impulse to freedom and humanity, whatever comes of its victim and of the states that howl over it.

Brown refused to be rescued by force, Sanborn noted, since it might involve his jailer, John Avis, in death or reproach. An indefinite number of my letters, along with those of Gerrit Smith, Dr. Howe, and others, had also been captured. There were reports of the authorities finding bushels of letters. Nobody knew to what extent the records of our conspiracy were in the hands of the slaveholding authorities, headed by Senator Mason and Governor Wise.

Arrangements had been made for the annual chestnutting excursion of my pupils and others, Sanborn explained, to the Estabrook woods on the old Carlisle road, for the whole day of Thursday. I made sure the teachers were informed of the situation, and gave the most competent of them to understand they should take charge of the school in my absence. Time was now given me in which to decide what course immediately to take, and to consult with Mr. Stearns, Dr. Howe and Wendell Phillips. I therefore spent hours, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, searching my papers to destroy such as might compromise other persons. On Thursday morning, after sending the pupils under competent teachers to the picnic, I took a chaise and drove across the country to the villa of George Stearns, in Medford. With him in my company I drove into Boston to consult John A. Andrew, an eminent counsel, well known to Stearns, Phillips and myself, as to the proper course to be taken, if we were liable to arrest in Massachusetts, either as witnesses or conspirators. Threats of that sort began to be made in the pro-slavery newspapers of New York, particularly in the Herald, then commonly known as The Satanic Press. We put our case before our friend Andrew, without stating to him the full particulars of our complicity with Brown.

It being the opinion of Mr. Andrew that we might be suddenly and secretly arrested and hurried out of the protection of Massachusetts law, Sanborn reported, it seemed to me very important that the really small extent of our movement should be concealed, and its reach and character exaggerated. I went to Boston prepared to go that night on the route through Maine to Canada. After leaving Andrew's office, therefore, I took my slight luggage on board the steamboat for Portland, leaving letters and instructions with my sister Sarah, who was then my housekeeper at Concord, for her action in case I should find it expedient not to return home after a few days. The whole matter was so uncertain, and the action taken by the national authorities, and by the mass of the people, was so much in the dark, that it was impossible to say what might be the best course.

Sanborn caught the night boat on Friday, October 21st. He checked in at the Metropolitan Hotel, in Quebec, registering under the name Stanley.

George Stearns went today to see Emerson at Concord, John A. Andrews wrote to Sanborn.They have kept the school going, and it will go ahead for a fortnight or more, awaiting your return. Emerson seemed, from what Stearns told me, to think you had done wisely in leaving.

He should come back and stand his ground, Emerson was telling everyone, in fact. Sanborn's sister Sarah wrote to say Emerson thought it safe for him to come back. Emerson wrote Sanborn directly, advising him to return at once. Return at the first hour that wheels or steam will permit. I am assuring every one that you will be here Wednesday or Thursday.

Wendell Phillips also wrote, Sanborn noted, saying John Andrews now felt persons in Massachusetts who had given aid to a treasonable act consummated in Virginia would, if indicted, be tried in Massachusetts. This was different from the opinion he had given us before, on which I had based my decision to flee to Canada.

Is there no such thing as honor among confederates? Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked Sanborn upon his absconding to Canada. Can your clear moral sense justify our holding our tongues in order to save ourselves from the reprobation of society, even as that nobler man whom we did provoke to enter into danger becomes the scapegoat of that reprobation, going for us even to the gallows?

Theodore Parker was out of the country already, having left in pursuit of better climes for the restoration of his ailing health, presently arriving in Italy, where he would die. Upon learning of the raid on Harpers Ferry, Parker would immediately hail Brown as a veritable American saint. Parker would die in Florence the following May, Sanborn noted, and would be buried under a monument designed by Mr. Story, his sculptor friend.

George Luther Stearns, the conservative Boston manufacturer of lead pipe, had quickly made his way to the Canada side of Niagara Falls. He said he felt joy in the presence of the Niagara cataract, likewise pride in his having supplied John Brown with both arms and money. He said he was as devoted as ever to giving his life and his fortune to the good cause, the liberation of the slave.

Samuel Gridley Howe, internationally known as a pioneer in the education of the the deaf, mute, and blind, had also fled north to Canada, fearing his long and distinguished career would end in disgrace on a Virginia scaffold. Howe fled south now, putting further geographic and emotional distance between himself and his co-conspirators, taking an extended vacation at a South Carolina plantation, where he'd get to know Southern politics and manners from the inside, which only increased the ambivalence he felt about his involvement with John Brown.

In Peterboro, New York, Gerrit Smith wandered aimlessly through his manor, wringing his hands, crying out, I did not know! John Brown dead! So many dead! I did not do this. It is not my doing. It is not my fault!

So soon as Sanborn got back to Concord, Emerson insisted he get better legal assistance than he'd got thus far, especially such as would not necessitate his having to leave the state a second time.

Affairs took various courses, Sanborn said. It wasn't very many days upon my return to Concord that Colonel Charles Miller, Gerrit Smith's son-in-law, appeared at my door one afternoon, bringing me word of my friend Edward Morton's having left Gerrit Smith's New York estate, sailing for England where, to my entire satisfaction, he would renew his casual acquaintance with Thoreau's friend Thomas Cholmondeley. As for Mr. Smith, Colonel Miller informed me he was in the Utica Insane Asylum, or soon would be. He assured me my letters to my friend Morton were buried under a brick in the broad walk that led to Mr. Smith's hall-door. He then asked me what I had done in regard to Mr. Smith's letters. I told him they were destroyed, so far as I could find them. He had been on a similar errand to John Brown, Jr., in Ohio, and was much relieved at what I told him. In fact, however, several of Smith's letters concerning John Brown had lodged either with Wentworth Higginson or Theodore Parker, to whom I had sent them, and they did afterward come back into my possession or use.

Sanborn was today at Emerson's house, Alcott wrote in his diary on October 26th, home from looking into Captain Brown's affairs. Ellery Channing was at Emerson's also. We discussed the matter at length. I defended the deed, under the circumstances, and the Man. His rescue would be difficult, even if he would consent to be taken. And the spectacle of a martyrdom such as his must needs be, will be of greater service to the country, and to the coming in of a righteous rule, than years of agitation by the Press, or the voices of partisans, North and South. 'Twas a bold stroke, this of his, for justice universal, and it damages all political parties beyond repair. Even the Republicans must in some sense claim him as theirs in self-defense, and to justify Republicanism in the people's eyes as Freedom's defender.

Gerrit Smith’s wife wrote to Sanborn in 1874, confirming that her husband had destroyed every one of his letters having anything to do with John Brown. Sanborn likewise was combing through his own papers and letters, weeding out anything implicating himself or his cronies in Brown’s raid. Only some letters to Theodore Parker, which came back to Sanborn a year and more after his death, were not destroyed at this time.

In Late October, 1859, Sanborn wrote, Brown's Drillmaster, Hugh Forbes, disappeared from New York without disgorging anything that was not by that time pretty well known from other sources. His passage to Europe may have been paid from the money earned by disclosures he made in The New York Herald, which was then struggling hard to connect Republicans Seward and Sumner with the plans of Brown.

Henry Thoreau was reading every newspaper account he could lay his hands on. For weeks he filled his Journal with quotes, reactions to Harpers Ferry. Nowhere could he find an expression of sympathy for Brown and his men. Even Garrison's Liberator termed the attempt ill-considered, and foolhardy. His indignation soared. He is not mistaken, an indignant Thoreau insisted, who succeeds quickest in the liberation of the slaves.

Thoreau sent a messenger house to house, notifying his neighbors he would speak to them that night, at the Unitarian Church, about John Brown. He rang the bell at Town hall himself, calling on his townsmen to come hear him out. Thorea was handed a note Emerson had written hurriedly, wanting Thoreau to think twice before acting too rashly. Thoreau quickly scribbled his own note in reply. -- You misunderstood. I did not ask advice.

Thoreau's impassioned Plea for Captain Brown, made prior to Brown's own stirring defense of himself before Virginia's Governor Wise in a Charlestown courtroom, was delivered that evening, Sunday, October 30, 1859. On November 1st, Thoreau delivered the lecture in Boston and, on November 3rd, he delivered it in Worcester.

The New York Daily Tribune quoted Emerson on November 8th: The Saint's fate yet hangs in suspense, but his martyrdom, if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows as glorious as the cross. This, Emerson's first public statement on Brown's raid, was attacked as a blasphemous comparison, stirring up heated further controversy above and beyond the Harper's Ferry furor itself.

Alcott hoped Thoreau or Emerson would send a testimonial concerning Brown's character and motives to Governor Wise in Virginia -- something that might influence him in Brown’s favor. On second thought, Alcott saw no hope of pleas for mercy. Slavery must have its way and Governor Wise must do its bidding. Alcott strode over to Emerson’s to say he was ready and willing to go to Virginia himself, if need be, to free John Brown. But Emerson knew Alcott was not the right man. I've been talking with a few people, Emerson wrote Sanborn in confidence, on the possibility of finding some gentleman here who might have private influence with Governor Wise of Virginia, advocating clemency for Captain Brown, and I'll be seeing others in the morning.

At the American House in Boston, Emerson met with varied men of influence to discuss intercession with Virginia's Governor Wise on behalf of Brown, but concluded by saying what Sanborn had already rightly recognized: Brown himself did not wish to escape. End of meeting.

In Worcester, Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson was busy organizing a secret expeditionary force, intending to storm the Charlestown jail where Brown was being held. It was clear to passionate Colonel Higginson that Brown should and could be rescued.

In Boston, the prominent attorney Lysander Spooner, who’d called off his own plans for invading the South once Brown had done so, tried to muster support for his plan to go to Virginia to kidnap Governor Wise at gun point. He’d be taken to a tugboat, held hostage and, should John Brown be executed, himself be shot dead.

I have been much absorbed in Captain Brown's fate lately, Thoreau said, wrestling with his conscience. It surprises me whenever I detect the same old routine still, and general indifference, people going about their business as usual.