The politics of Concord were then in a transitional state, Sanborn would write years afterwards. The great native American upheaval had taken place in Massachusetts, as in several of the other states, in the summer and autumn of 1854, and so-called Know-Nothings were in control. The pro-slavery Democrats rallied, and the Republican party took the place of the old Whig party, which had given the country the two military presidents, General Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848.

Sanborn was now a voting citizen of Massachusetts -- and one who had a mind of his own. He was perversely grateful for the conflict in Kansas, as it provided him the right opportunity, as he saw it, for immersing himself in political activity. While Federal Authorities maintain negro slavery as an institution in the Kansas territory, Sanborn railed angrily, Mr. Emerson and Thoreau counteract that effort as best they can. John Brown's men also do the best they can, protecting harassed Kansas pioneers.

Alcott had publicly praised Sanborn as being sensible, manly, and respectable. In his private diary however, Alcott now modified this, adding, It might be that Sanborn is something of a revolutionary, in a quiet way. He is brave, I think, likely to do good service for freedom if necessary.

In the 1855 Presidential campaign the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, would support the Kansas-Nebraska and Fugitive Slave Acts. The abolitionist Republican candidate, John C. Fremont, opposed the effort to make Kansas a Slave state, calling for its immediate admission as a Free state.

Theodore Parker hoped Fremont would be elected and the Kansas problem settled peacefully. If he’s not elected, Parker said, then the Union goes to pieces in five years -- not without blood.

By May of 1856, Sanborn was closely allied with the most ardent abolitionists he could find: Dr. Howe and Parker in Boston, George Stearns in Medford, Gerrit Smith of New York, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then a clergyman in Worcester. Sanborn volunteered to raise money for buying arms for the oppressed Free-Staters of Kansas. Between June and September, immigrants and rifles poured into the Kansas Territory, Sanborn reported, through the agency of the Emigrant Aid Company of Boston. The work was done less by the National Kansas Committee and the Massachusetts State Committee than by Gerritt Smith, who contributed over a thousand dollars a month to the cause. As Chairman of the State Kansas Committee, George Stearns was another important firebrand. Higginson was another. The Kansas Committee chairman in Hampden County, Massachusetts was none other than Sanborn’s friend and brother-in-law, George Walker.

As the Secretary of Concord’s Kansas Committee, and of the Middlesex County Kansas Committee, and eventually of the Kansas State Committee, Sanborn took numerous breaks from his job as a schoolteacher, traveling to raise funds for the Free-State cause. He later remembered spending the first half of his 1856 summer vacation driving over half of Middlesex County in a one-horse shay, organizing town Kansas committees and raising money for emigrants, arms, and supplies. In August he set forth on a tour of inspection and consultation that took me across the prairie States of Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, and over the Missouri River into what was then the Territory of Nebraska: It was my first journey west of the Hudson River, and allowed me to see Niagara Falls for the first time.

Sanborn went on to Chicago, then Iowa City, where he made inquiries of the adjutant-General of the State about some missing muskets that had been lent by Iowa officials to settlers in Kansas for their protection against invaders from Missouri. In Burlington he spoke with the Governor of Iowa, formerly of New Hampshire, who had studied Jurisprudence with his father-in-law.

Sanborn traversed the 400 miles between Mount Pleasant and Council Bluffs in hot August weather, riding in filthy coaches with all sorts of companions, lodging at all kinds of taverns, and arriving at all hours of the night. His job was to inspect the assorted routes through Iowa by which the various Kansas committees were sending emigrants and arms to Kansas.

Sanborn wrote to his mother from Nebraska City on a hot Saturday night in mid-August, 1856, telling her he’d seen, just the day before, some three-hundred women and children, on foot or in ox-teams, heading for the new colony of Deseret, Utah. He’d enjoyed talking with them and had bought, perhaps from the prophet Joe Smith himself, a treatise on The Plurality of Wives.

We killed a rattlesnake! Sanborn wrote from Nebraska City, teasing his care-worn mother: It was killed with a foot, by one of us, without any trouble. I am carrying a revolver in my valise. My general rule is not to go armed, except with a good stick.

Upon his return to Massachusetts, Sanborn went to Worcester to meet with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, lately going by the moniker Colonel Higginson, who’d signed on to lead a party of emigrants, come September, from Nebraska City to Kansas.

Sanborn’s school re-opened in September. It fourished, but Sanborn was preoccupied. Calling on his special assistant Francis Abbott, still a student at Harvard, to take on increasing responsibility, Sanborn himself again took on other work, employed now as a newspaperman for Samuel Bowles III as the Boston Correspondent for the Springfield Republican. His brother-in-law George Walker, having an influential circle of friends in Springfield, had played no small role in that.

Sanborn praised George for his general courtesy and kindness toward everyone, but especially for his tender and helpful sympathy for those related to him. Here was a scholarly man, Sanborn said, born in New Hampshire in 1824, who’d lived in Boston and Springfield, where he’d married into wealth and luxury, surrounded by his books, his children, his friends, and his guests. Though George said he detested slavery, he could see no way to get rid of it. George being an active Whig, Sanborn noted, his party had been overrun by the Know-Nothings in 1854, after Anna's marriage to me. Having become bolder in his opposition to slavery, he joined the Republican party in 1856, the year he provided John Brown of Kansas with a letter of introduction, advising him to seek me out.

George had known Brown years before, Sanborn knew, as a neighbor, and as a borrower of bank loans while carrying on a large business in Springfield as a wool-dealer. Indeed, George may well have been legal counsel for one of the banks which Brown used in his loans and payments Sanborn reported. As Brown had sons who'd moved to Kansas, when the trouble arose there he felt compelled to go help, to take his strong stand against slavery in the territories.

I was then entirely ignorant of Brown's actual deeds in Kansas, Sanborn insisted. When in later life I would visit that state, I'd find men who knew well of Brown's having commandeered the so-called Pottawatomie Executions. The best authorities in Kansas history agree those men who were slain by Brown had a sufficient, though irregular trial. That they had well earned their violent death, under their own code of violence, is clear. Perhaps the wild justice of lynch law was the best code to be had in those semi-barbarous communities.

In Boston, Concord, Hartford, and elsewhere in the Northeast, Captain Brown, a living legend, was well received. His was an informed audience of people who'd followed with intense scrutiny the Free State struggle, had formed committees, and had contributed considerable funding. They were exhilerated to meet a man from Kansas who had actually been in Kansas, fighting along the river banks and in the in the prairies of Kansas for the cause.

To New Englanders, Brown was clearly the genuine article, a real frontiersman, an authentic pioneer. He was a wanted outlaw, to boot, a Federal warrant out for his arrest. To evade the Marshalls, he'd need shelter, hiding places. Northerners found this thrilling. Six of them were so impressed, they there and then threw their lot in with his: Gerrit Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Stearns, and Frank Sanborn. They promised Brown they'd do anything they could to help him.

Much of my youthful life, Sanborn wrote, had been put behind me at the beginning of this friendship with John Brown. It had been marked by singular and providential incidents. I was prepared for the faith which I soon learned that Brown entertained in a Power which directs or leads men beyond their own expectations, hopes, or wishes.

When Old Brown first met Franklin Sanborn, the Concord schoolmaster was already something of a celebrity, much talked about in Cambridge and Boston. Handsome, long-legged, glum young Sanborn. Wasn't he the one at Harvard who'd wed a girl who then died within just days of their marraige? People noticed you could go most any day to the graveyard where Anna Walker Sanborn was buried, and there find the elegant, towering young man, wearing a stovepipe hat with a black band, grieving. Throughout Cambridge and Boston, Sanborn was much talked about, not only as this young man in most grievous imaginable mourning, but also as a force, it was said, that would rise in the world. It was said that Sanborn was going to be someone to reckon with.

Emigrant Aid Societies had sprung up all over New England, established to sign up settlers going west to be Free-Soilers in the Kansas territory. Sanborn had been appointed Voluntary Secretary of the Executive Committee at its permanent office in Boston, the heart of the movement.

I was sitting alone, wearing a greatcoat and gloves and writing by the light of a solitary candle in my little office on School Street, Boston, when John Brown entered, Sanborn wrote. I looked up form my papers. Brown handed me the letter of introduction which my brother-in-law George Walker had given him. I just stared at him.

Brown had passed by the expansive, green Boston Common before going up to the cold and tiny garret room, the cramped office of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee. There were rickety wooden chairs around a weatherbeaten table piled high with old and new copies of the Commonwealth, and the Liberator, and past due statements from various vendors of guns and other war supplies. Brown had a huge nose, almost a beak, like an eagle's, bristling hair that was black overall but silver at the temples, steely blue-gray eyes, and a vast forehead etched with three deep lines of wrinkles. He casually took off his heavy woolen military overcoat and a coonskin cap. He looked disappointed.

In the flickering glow of the candlelight, Brown spent hours telling Sanborn tales from the battlefront, all recalling to the younger man the justness, the rightness, the dramatic inevitability of Concord's militiamen having stood up to the British in 1775. John Brown did not mention his having slaughtered quite a number of innocent people on the banks of Kansas' Pottawatomie Creek. When Sanborn asked Brown to clear up confusion over what had actually happened at Pottawatomie, Brown assured Sanborn there had been only a confrontation, not a massacre. You couldn't always believe, Brown insisted, what you read in the papers.

Brown insisted the fighting in Kansas was needed Sanborn wrote. It was the only sure way, he thought, to keep that region free from the curse of slavery. His errand was to levy war on it, and for that to raise a company of 100 well-armed men who should resist aggresssion in Kansas, and occasionally carry the war into Missouri. Behind that purpose, but not yet disclosed, was the intention to use the men thus put into the field for similar incursions into Virginia and other Southern States.' But to get the whole enterprise off the ground he needed two hundred Sharp's rifles and $30,000 cash.

Sanborn felt sure he could get the $30,000. After all, here John Brown, the very agent of Providence, singlemindedly doing God's will in these divided, tempestuously troubled times. Who could not see this? The man was not idly perpetuating the old, accustomed talk about doing something, all that longwinded and too familiar rhetoric. Here was a man of courage, a radical abolitionist, a man of action, a man doing something and doing it now. Sanborn could get behind this, and knew he could enlist his friends and colleagues to support it, too.

I am convinced we need to act, Sanborn wrote, to make a difference. Further submission in the coming four years is out of the question.

I want to involve every state, Colonel Higginson declared, in the war that will be.