Nathaniel Hawthrone’s son Julian described his Concord schoolmaster, Sanborn, as a tall, wiry, long-limbed young scholar with brilliant dark eyes looking keenly beneath a great shock of black hair, a quick, kindly, humorous smile brightening over a thin, fresh-hues face, with finely moulded features, expressive at once of passion and self-control. He walked in long steps and with a slight bending of the shoulders, as if in modest deprecation of his own unusual stature. Julian recalled the schoolhouse, surrounded by the great, fresh outdoors. Nearby were such abodes of felicity as the Alcotts' house to play and dance in. There were picnics at Esterbrook farm, five miles north in the woods. There was bathing and skating at Walden Pond. There was a grand masquerade at the Town Hall. There was the regatta on the river below the old Red Bridge. We enjoyed a week's encampment on Monadnock Mountain -- boys and girls.

The life of Concord at the time was not its celebrated people so much as Mr. Frank B. Sanborn's school for youth of both sexes, wrote another of Sanborn's students, Frank Stearns. Mr. Sanborn was the most genial and good-humored of schoolmasters. He enjoyed teaching, and wished his scholars to enjoy learning..

Thoreau used to take Sanborn's pupils out on the river in his boat, recalled Moncure Conway, one of Sanborn’s Harvard classmates. He would put his hand into the water, and bring up a fish..

Mr. Sanborn's school is delightful! rejoiced a student at the time, Ellen Emerson. He is a joyful, handsome man, our headmaster, who holds the hearts of the school, and under whose wise eyes we sit. Boys and girls attend together, which I think is essential to a good school. They do not play together, but I don't think that could be done in this generation. It will be in the next. At least the girls have the pleasure of seeing the boys play..

My Concord School had, as its distinguishing feature, co-education, Sanborn himself agreed. It had been the custom in Concord for generations to educate boys and girls together in the public schools; and when eight of the large taxpayers, about 1820, clubbed together and built the Concord Academy, they opened it on equal terms. Such was my precedent for co-education. But my own education and my principles led me in the same direction. When my school was large enough to have a printed catalog, I indicated its bi-sexual character, noting: Pupils to the number of one hundred will be admitted, and an equal number of both sexes will be maintained as far as possible; as it is believed that the education of the two sexes together is the natural and best method.

The School would become a popular and prosperous Concord institution through the next eight years, despite occasional interruptions to the unusual routine of the schoolmaster, Sanborn, whose students came from the best families of Concord and elsewhere. The children of Emerson, Judge Rockwood Hoar, and the Loring and Barret families, mostly girls between ten and twelve years, were all pretty and intelligent, Moncure Conway remembered them in later years.

So fast did the school increase, Sanborn noted, by 1857 it had to be reorganized. Eventually, I had to enlarge my board of teachers. I went to Washington in March, 1857, to meet an Englishman born and bred in Spain, Joseph Wall, then an instructor at Jefferson's University of Virginia, to engage him as teacher of Drawing, French, and Spanish. My cousin, Miss Leavitt, was engaged to teach English, and early Latin. Miss Waterman of Worcester was hired to assist in Latin and French. Miss Pheobe Ripley, who had studied music in Germany, taught Music. Miss Mary Hammatt from Maine taught beginners in Drawing. I engaged lecturers: Dr. Solger, an exiled Prussian, in History; my brother, Dr. Charles Sanborn, to lecture on Physiology. My sister Sarah concentrated on the lower mathematics, while I took charge of Greek, Latin, German and the higher mathematics. I hired teachers of Dramatics, George Bartlett and the three sisters of Concord, of whom the youngest, May Alcott, was both a pupil and a teacher in Drawing. I engaged for a short time a Lieutenant from the French army to teach boxing and conversational French. Dr. Dio Lewis was, for a time, our teacher of light gymnastics. I made an effort to engage Henry Thoreau in Nature Studies, Sanborn later remembered -- to no avail.

In January, 1857 Sanborn’s pupil, Ellen Emerson, wrote her father, out on a lecture tour, of her sadness that Mr. Sanborn had declined to join her for tea. The fact was, Sanborn wasn’t even in town. He’d turned the school over to Mr. Abbott and his sister Sarah, also leaving it to her to negotiate a second two-year lease with their landlord, Ellery Channing. Sanborn took up temporary quarters in the musty Boston garret that was the State Kansas Committee's headquarters.

As it turned out, his Concord landlord, the poet Channing, also was also away. He was in New Bedford. After his sister-in-law Margaret Fuller had helped him get employment as editor of the New Bedford Mercury, Channing had gathered up his papers and pencils and, leaving his family in Dorchester, had followed this calling. I trust you will not leave the old house, or Concord, Channing wrote to Sanborn. I value you and Miss Sanborn so much that I hope you will remain in that village and in that house.

In Boston, as Secretary of the State Kansas Committee, Sanborn prepared reports for subscribers. He also spent considerable time on the road, traveling throughout Middlesex County trying to drum up contributions.

Old Brown of Kansas is now in Boston, Sanborn wrote matter-of-factly to Reverend Higginson in Worcester. Out loud, he says he's here to raise and arm a company of men for the future protection of Kansas but, if I understand him rightly, he is just as ready to take what money he can raise to use as far as it will go.

Sanborn introduced Old Brown to Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Luther Stearns. Parker's face was said to be full of mischievous impishness, his eyes seemingly open at all times, glistening, him delighting in everything, whether rain on the roof, sunshine, cows mooing, or the sound of winter sleigh bells. A prudent, gentle, peaceful man Parker had lately gained the reputation of being at the forefront of a loud and furious company of abolitionists who'd come to the conclusion that only civil war, first in Kansas and then across the country, could bring an end to slavery. He surprised himself even, raising his voice to say it would be right, if it came in opposing Negro slavery, even to kill.

Impressed with Brown, Parker agreed to host a reception for him at once. Sam Howe went around the room cordially introducing Brown, who was not at ease, out of place in the plush parlor amid this highbrow, elegant company. He had showed up in his plainest corduroy suit, ripped at the lapel. His hands were calloused and there was dirt under his fingernails. His unkempt hair was particularly unruly that evening, shooting outward from his head.

Howe worked the room, making small talk, mentioning now and again his having fought shoulder to shoulder with the Greeks in their war for independence, or of his having participated in the July 1830 uprising in Paris, or of his having joined Polish nationalists in their struggles against the Prussian Czar, for which the Czar had put him in solitary confinement, or of his work lately as the head of Boston's Perkins Institute for the rehabilitation of the dumb, deaf, and blind.

Sanborn had already introduced Brown to the radical abolitionist George Luther Stearns, present that evening. Stearns, one of the chief financiers of the Emigrant Aid Company, served as Chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, and was on the Executive Board of the National Kansas Committee. Stearns had already given his full support to creating a Free-State Army in Kansas. He had raised some $48,000 for the cause, even as his wife Mary had raised nearly $30,000 through Women's Auxiliary benefits. Stearns told Brown to proceed in buying, from the Massachusetts Arms Company, at his own expense, some two hundred revolvers.

People later remembered how, at Parker’s, the at first stiff and uncomfortable Brown had loosened up when bald, bespectacled William Lloyd Garrison came in. Brown recited from the Old Testament, chapter and verse, contradicting Garrison, who appeared to be familiar with only the New Testament.

Wendell Phillips kept his distance from Brown. He was skeptical. This was no hero, he felt. This was a terrorist. Here was the perpetrator of a massacre, to which the antislavery movement should admit no sympathy or connection.

Bronson Alcott's daughter, Louisa, sat quietly in a corner. She was especially impressed by Mrs. Howe, a straw-colored supercillious lady with pale eyes and a green gown (in which she looked like faded lettuce), entirely given over to talking.

The Massachusetts State Kansas Committee appointed Brown their agent. They provided him with 200 Sharp's rifles, along with caps and cartridges, then in storage at Tabor, Iowa. Unfortunately, the 200 rifles had already been contributed by the Massachusetts Committee to the National Kansas Committee, known also as the Kansas Aid Society, based in Chicago, and now needed to be officially transferred over from the one committee to the other, for Brown's use, which Sanborn was assigned to see to in New York City at the meeting of the National Kansas Committee at the end of the month.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an amateur boxer with a solid left hook, had just returned from Kansas. He accepted an invitation from Sanborn to meet John Brown in Boston. Higginson met Captain Brown at the the United States Hotel, and was immediately drawn to him.

The untamable Gypsy element in me, Higginson admitted, gives me instant sympathy with every desperate adventure. Brown seemed to him to be just the man for inciting a fist fight, a scuffle, first in Kansas, then a revolution, a civil war.

At the end of the month, Sanborn went to New York City to attend the meeting of the National Kansas Committee at the Astor House Hotel. In the vote to ratify the transfer of 200 Sharp's rifles to John Brown's militia, Sanborn stood as proxy for Samuel Cabot and Samuel Howe. John Brown stood up and asked for additional military supplies and cash, much in excess of his original request. It seemed implausible that Brown could be wanting so much money and ammunition just for the purpose of aiding Kansas. The National Committee nevertheless approved the gift of the arms, the ammunition, and the money, much debate and acrimony notwithstanding.

From New York City Brown now went north to upper New York State, to Peterboro, to visit Gerrit Smith. Smith, known as a kindly, good-natured, elegant man, had caught a cold and was in a cranky, melancholy, even morose mood. He sat at his enormous desk, a thick woolen scarf around his neck, staring out a window at the falling snow, his stony silence broken only by an occasional cough, while Brown explained his plan for raising and arming a Free-State militia in Kansas.

All well and good, Smith told Brown at last. I'm sorry that I cannot help you.

In mid-February Brown was back in Boston, being formally introduced to the Massachusetts State legislature's Joint Committee on Federal Relations by Mr. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who said he was there not as an advocate, but as a witness for the case.

We have invited Captain Brown, eminently qualified to represent Massachusetts in Kansas, or Kansas in Massachusetts, Sanborn told the assembled. Ask this gray haired man, gentlemen, if you have the heart to do it, where lies the body of his murdered son? Where are the homes of his four other sons, who a year ago were quiet farmers in Kansas?

John Brown stood and read from a prepared statement detailing the travails of the Brown family and others in Kansas, followed by a plea for compensation. As for the body of his son, the one of his seven sons who had been murdered, yes murdered, John Brown Jr. had died for his convictions. He'd been called a maniac.

Yes! A maniac! Brown cried out, wiping tears from his eyes. You may go to my hotel room, in this city, and there see the very trace-chain my shackled son was forced to wear under the hot summer sun of Kansas.

Brown proposed receiving $100,000 from the Committee, for the purpose of protecting former Massachusetts citizens now living in Kansas, suffering for the Free-State cause. Such an appropriation had been approved in Vermont, but was now voted down in Massachusetts. Some said passage of the bill would be tantamount to appropriating a private endowment for the Brown family. The bill's failure came as a terrible blow to Brown, who had given up many hours into cooking up the scheme. Sanborn had sensed Brown was asking too much, but had kept quiet. He could provide no solace to poor Brown, now further embittered by this latest setback in New England.

Sanborn, twenty-five, invited Brown, fifty-six, to Concord in March, to meet Thoreau, thirty-nine and, of course, to appeal to Concordians for money. It was felt by some to be a ticklish business, having this wild frontier abolitionist known to sleep with a knife at his side and a pistol under his pillow, come speak in Concord. People half expected United States Marshalls with warrants would show up, arresting innocent Concord citizens as well as Captain Brown.

It was on a Friday night that Brown came up from Boston, Sanborn remembered. I gave Brown the spare chamber in our home which Mr. Channing, when at home, reserved for his own visitors. I took him with me at noon, across the street, to dine at Mrs. Thoreau's table, where I was then dining daily, and where some of my pupils were boarding. All Concord had heard of Brown and his fights and escapes in Kansas the summer before, and Henry Thoreau, who had his own bone to pick with the government,was desirous of meeting him. At two o'clock I left Brown and Thoreau discussing Kansas affairs in Mrs. Thoreau's dining room.

As I had engagements after dinner, I left Brown with Thoreau, who saw what manner of man he was. While they sat thus conversing in the early afternoon of a short winter day, Emerson, who had returned from his Western lecture-tour, came up, as he often did, to call on Thoreau, and was introduced by him to Brown. He invited Brown to his own house, where Brown spent the second night of this two-days' visit. Or rather, the Emerson house being full, he took Brown to lodge at the ancient farmhouse of the late Deacon Brown.

After his afternoon of holding Thoreau in thrall over his battles amid his glorious Free-State colleagues, John Brown had ambled over to the Concord Town Hall to make his appeal to Concord's citizens. A hundred or more people had crammed into the hall to see and hear him. As official host to the occasion, Sanborn went up to the podium, lit by oil lanterns in the otherwise dark room, and delivered a long, grave account of the victories and sacrifices Brown had made for abolitionism. Then Old Brown himself went up to the podium to recounted, from his own firsthand experience, the crimes of Missouri, the U.S. Government, and the Pro-slavery forces in Kansas. Brown got enthusiastic applause when he said he abhorred violence, but accepted it as God's will.

The folly of the peace party in Kansas, Brown declared, is believing their strength lies in the greatness of their wrongs. All honest lovers of liberty and human rights will back my cause. Holding up a large metal chain, he shook it. By this chain, Brown said fiercely, my son John was bound, in Kansas, dragged to prison by mounted dragoons for no other crime than resisting slavery. I tell you this: the two most sacred documents known to man are the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. It is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death than that a word of either should be violated in this country.

At Emerson's home the next day, it seemed hardly possible that this plain, soft-spoken man was the wild-eyed orator of the previous evening. Emerson noted Brown's unadorned statement, One good, believing, strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay twenty thousand, men without character.

Gentle Captain Brown took Emerson's twelve year old son Eddie aside, telling him of his very close friends, the animals. Eddie was spellbound. The children always come to me, the good Captain whispered to the boy’s pleased, approving father.

Brown emerged from Concord with renewed energy and some new support, but came away with nothing like what he'd been hoping for in the way of financial contributions. Having spoken at dozens of towns across Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts, Brown had come up with just a few hundred dollars in pledges, and some pocket change. They were hard financial times across the growing nation and, while people were eager to help the many and assorted causes and ideologies, only nickels and dimes got tossed into the collection box.

In Concord, after considerable deliberation, Emerson had pitched in what he thought was a reasonable contribution. Penniless Thoreau had dipped into the profits of his family's pencil business, contributing an amount he termed a trifle.

From the conversation at Thoreau's, Sanborn wrote, and from the longer intercourse of Saturday night, when Brown was Emerson's guest, came to Emerson and Thoreau that intimate knowledge of Brown's character and general purpose which qualified them to be the first among American scholars to attest to the heroism of the man.

In fact, though it was true that Thoreau had recognized the hero's powerful righteousness, he had not been entirely confident Brown would do only what was right, even as he noticed how ably Brown had circumvented explaining just what the money would be used for.