In April, 1857, Sanborn wrote John Brown to thank him for his Concord visit, praising him as the bravest and most earnest man it had been his fortune to meet.

The secretary of the National Kansas Committee, Henry Hurd, wrote to John Brown to say that general public apathy, proved by the scarcity of contributions, had left the Committee nearly penniless. Hurd could not send Brown a single cent from the $5,000 promised the previous January. The Massachusetts millionaire Amos Lawrence promised he'd increase the fund by a thousand dollars, but instead sent just $70, cash.

The United States Supreme Court was then enmeshed in one of its most difficult and important cases. A slave, Dredd Scott, had undertaken to sue his master for his freedom, claiming freedom as it was his master who had taken him to a free territory. The Supreme Court handed down the judgment that Dredd Scott was not free. Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, backing the majority opinion, declared against Scott. He ruled the plaintiff had no right to sue, as no black slave anywhere had any right to sue anyone in any Federal court anywhere. A black man was not a United States citizen.

On top of this, Taney gratuitously contributed his own awareness that white Americans had, since colonial times, known blacks to be inferior human beings. As such, they had never possessed any of the rights granted by the Constitution to a white man. Taney added his opinion that slavery could not be excluded from any territory anywhere. Slaves were property, it was explained. According to the Constitution's Fifth Amendment, no one could be deprived of any property, though it be another human being, without due process of law.

Even the most peace-loving of abolitionists was struck by this. The Supreme Court had, in this ruling, made it clear the Constitution could be interpreted as having provided for the permanent enslavement of black Americans for all time. a Slaves were property, animals, a financial asset, a commodity, merchandise, chattel, having no legal human rights whatsoever. Slaves could not marry, keep families, get schooling, learn trades, speak freely, assemble, make contracts, leave wills, trade gifts, or bear arms. It was discerned, by slavery's opponents, that the Constitution, so interpreted, no longer held any validity at all for self respecting persons. In the Dredd Scott decision, their worst fears were confirmed.

Please retain in your own hands the funds you speak of, John Brown wrote to Higginson in April. I expect to be in Worcester this week. Should you leave Worcester, please leave the money at the Emigrant Aid Office, at 3 Winter Street. My heart grows sad in the fear of a failure of the enterprise.

In mid-April, George Stearns wrote Brown to say the Massachusetts Kansas Committee would provide Kansas Free-Staters with $500 in cash, at John Brown's disposal, and a hundred Sharp's rifles, at a price of not less than fifteen dollars apiece. Stearns assured Brown the proceeds from the sales could be used by Brown at his discretion.

Pursued by U.S. Marshals, Ossawatomie Brown had gone temporarily into hiding in the home of Thomas Russell, an abolitionist judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court. Judge Russell's normally pleasant wife bristled when she met Captain Brown who, grinnning from ear to ear, pulled out a long, sharp knife and assorted revolvers, announcing he would hate to have to soil her carpets, but she should know, come what may, he would not be taken alive.

Ensconced in his third-floor bedroom, Brown ventured downstairs only at mealtime. He seemed to take perverse delight in tormenting us, Mrs. Russell reported, years later. She noticed with indignance his airs, how he mocked them, their life together, and all respectable human society. For all his talk of plainness and poverty, his was the worst possible vanity, Mrs. Russell reported. He lorded it over us. At every meal he would bring up the twin evils of starvation and poverty, always gravely mentioning the diverse unspeakables which he had been forced to eat in order to survive, joints and toes of creatures which certainly no human being ever really tasted.

Sanborn saw Brown often during the nearly four months he toured New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. I was with him not only in Concord and Boston, but at New York, in a meeting of the National Kansas Committee, and in other places. This gave me the opportunity to see him under many circumstances, and to form my opinion of his extraordinary character, an opinion I never in later years found occasion to change. I appreciated Brown's having formed a strong alliance with the very prosperous Massachusetts industrialist Amos Lawrence, after whom Lawrence, Kansas had been named, who seemed to feel the same degree of friendship and admiration for John Brown as I myself felt.

In April, Sanborn remembered, Thoreau sang and danced at Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Ricketson’s New Bedford estate, Brooklawn, to the accompaniment of Mrs. Ricketson's piano. The couple had invited Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing, then living in New Bedford, as well as Bronson Alcott, then formally engaged in New Bedford with providing Conversations. Thoreau had arrived on April 2nd. He would return to Concord on April 15th, having made assorted short excursions from New Bedford to Plymouth and elsewhere.

Channing had lately become accustomed to taking tea or dining at the Ricketson's several times a week, Sanborn noted. On this particular evening Mr. Ricketson and Channing had retreated to Ricketson's shanty, where the two smoked and talked while Alcott and Thoreau remained with Mrs. Ricketson. Thoreau had sung his two favorite pieces, Row, Brothers, Row, and Tom Bowling. Both, no doubt, reminded him of his brother John. Then Mrs. Ricketson struck up a lively Scotch air, The Campbells are A' Comin.' Thoreau felt moved to try a dance, keeping time to the music perfectly, but executing some steps more like Indian dances than the usual ballroom figures. Alcott sat on the sofa, watching the dance, devoid of any perceivable emotion. Thoreau continued his performance, which was wonderfully earnest and spontaneous but not particularly graceful, for some five or ten minutes.

Earlier in the year, in February, Thoreau had sent his English friend Cholmondeley a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Now, in May, Cholmondeley wrote back, Walt Whitman's poems have only been heard of in England to be laughed at and voted offensive. I find reality and beauty mixed with not a little violence and coarseness, both of which are to me effeminate. I am amused at his views of sexual energy, which, however, are absurdly false. The man appears to me to not know how to behave himself. I find the gentleman altogether left out of the book.

Only think, Cholmondely said of himself, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of warm trash. If I had held to cold drinks, they would have lasted me out. But the effeminacy of tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine and beer. Hence, God, to punish them for their feeble hearts. Thoreau, if ever I live again, I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. Give me ale for breakfast, and claret or port and ale again for dinner. I should then have a better conscience, and not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue. Success to you, and the bounty of the gods attend you.

John Brown had, around this same time, brought an Englishman into his organization, apparently without telling any of his Massachusetts supporters. Brown hired Colonel Hugh Forbes, an Englishman who had been a silk merchant in Sienna before the Garibaldian campaigns of 1848 and 1849, Sanborn noted, during which he had commanded Italian volunteers under that brilliant general. Upon his failure and escape from Italy, or soon after, Forbes seems to have left Italy, too, and for a time resided in Paris, but afterward came over to New York, where he led a shifty life, apart from his family, who remained in Paris. With plenty of courage, and some other good qualities, he was vainglorious, headstrong, and, in brief, what the French term, Impossible. It wasn’t very long before Forbes, pressed into service by John Brown, fell into a slough of despond. He decried his abject circumstances, his past, his want of money. Brown, who felt he was paying the man more than generously for what work Forbes did, was exasperated.

In June, Brown called for an immediate, and secret, meeting with the Massachusetts Kansas Committee, in Chicago. He proposed organizing a well-armed secret force under control of himself, for the purpose of repelling Border-Ruffian outrages, defending the Free-State men from all alleged impositions. The secret force was to be a strictly defensive one.

Gerrit Smith was present, seemingly his old self, open, courteous, and upbeat. More important to Brown, Smith seemed to be his same old radical self, telling Brown he was convinced recent events, the Dred Scott Decision in particular, had radicalized all antislavery men, and put the whole nation on its guard. Smith handed over $350, cash, promising more soon, to be used by Brown in support of the Free-State soldiers in Kansas, or for any other purpose.

In New York in early August, 1857, Smith got a surprise visit from Brown's drillmaster. Hugh Forbes showed up at the abolitionist's manor in upper New York state, pleading for money. He had a family to support in Paris, and he needed cash to pay for a daughter’s passage from the U.S. back to France. Forbes didn’t mention that Brown had paid him over $600. Smith gave him $150 on the spot.

In November, Forbes came to me in Rochester with a letter from John Brown, Frederick Douglass wrote. He asked me for assistance in his cause. I was not favorably impressed with Forbes at first, but I set aside my prejudices, and listened. He spoke of his family in Europe as in destitute circumstances, and of his desire to send them some money. I gave him a little, as did my German friends in New York. But he soon wore them out by his endless begging. When he could make no more money by professing to advance the project, he threatened to expose it and all connected with it. I was the first to be informed of his tactics, and I promptly communicated them to Captain Brown. Forbes had told Brown's designs to Horace Greeley, and to officials in Washington, of which I informed Brown. This led to the postponement of the enterprise another year. It was hoped that by this delay the story of Forbes would be discredited. This was correct, for nobody believed the scoundrel, though he told the truth.

Back in Concord, in September, the Alcotts had bought, with Emerson's help, the place they'd dub the Orchard House. They would live there twenty years. Louisa May Alcott, a regular visitor at the Sanborn School, where her sisters were students, started up a theater troupe, the Concord Dramatic Union, producing plays in church vestries and the Town Hall. Declaring herself The First Old Woman in the company, Louisa worked closely with Sanborn, orchestrating the dramatics.

Mr. Alcott’s daughters have great love and talent for theatricals, Ellen Emerson praised them. Last winter Mr. Sanborn and others put their heads together, and the result is that a stage has been erected in the Vestry of the Unitarian Church, which is to remain there all winter. There we are to have a Series of Dramatic Entertainments.

The receipts from the plays total twenty-five dollars, the troupe’s treasurer, Mrs. Alcott, reported in December. This leaves a net total of six dollars for the poor.

Our plays are all succeeding finely, Anna Alcott informed her father. Mr. Emerson complimented us highly in all manner of precious words. We shall appear again on Christmas night in Scenes from Dickens. Sanborn will speak a fine prologue in the character of Yule, Old Christmas. Edith Emerson will play Young Christmas.

Frank Stearns later commented, Louisa and her sister Annie were excellent actresses. They were always in demand when private theatricals were afoot. To see her perform with her sister, and F.B. Sanborn, that was a treat.

Delighted with it all, Louisa May Acott rejoiced, Sanborn does keep things lively!

Sanborn distinguished himself further that month, giving a speech at the December Antislavery Society meeting in Concord, at which William Lloyd Garrison was present. Sanborn is very tall, Garrison reported afterwards, but when he made that speech, he towered to the roof.

In Western Iowa through the winter of 1857, while Brown prepared his company of men to fight in either Kansas or Missouri, or even so far away as Virginia, his drillmaster, Forbes, was sending out abusive, weirdly revelatory letters to Charles Sumner, Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Frank Sanborn.-- anyone who might listen. Brown's friends were stunned and perplexed. One thing had become clear: Brown had, beyond his desire to liberate the Kansas territory, a plan of some kind to incite a rebellion in the south, which would trigger a revolution he expected would lead to emancipation, ending slavery. Brown's plan now needed to be postponed a year, due to Forbes' assorted rantings and disclosures. Dr Samuel Gridley Howe was against postponing. He continued to assert the immediate need for supporting Brown's expedition, whatever it was.

The year 1858 started with yet another shock from Kansas. In defiance of the territory's Free-State majority, Proslavery forces had met in Lecompton and there had drafted a Proslavery Constitution. They then applied for statehood. President Buchanon and his Cabinet gave their blessings to the new document, calling on Congress to admit Kansas as the sixteenth slave state. Stephen A. Douglas broke with the administration over this swindle, as he called it, and joined with the Republicans in their battle against it. Douglas, fighting for his political future, having already begun debating with the Republican party's Abraham Lincoln, claimed he didn't care at all that the new Constitution was a Proslavery document, but cared greatly that the Lecompton Convention had been held illegally, and that the constutution formed there had not been set before the the people of Kansas for their consideration and for ratification, as the law required. Southern leaders in the Buchanan administration mounted vicious attacks against him, stripping him of his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Territories, Buchanan's closest supporters vowing vowing to drum Douglas out of the Democratic party.

The Senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln noted his discomfort with all the talk going around about the expansion of slavery. He just was not taking to the idea that slavery ought to be extended not only into the territories but also into the Free states, this being perfectly right and acceptable under the terms of the Constitution. He saw a marked pattern emerging in the South's defense of slavery. Meanwhile, Republicans in the north were now shaking hands with Douglas, encouraging him, despite his known support for the nationalizing of slavery. In the Senatorial debates with Douglas, Lincoln knew it was up to him to make at least one thing clear: Douglas, a Democrat, was no Republican.

The New England backers of John Brown as much hoped Stephen A. Douglas would be disgraced as would be Buchanan. Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, and Samuel Gridley Howe were all successful men, accustomed to getting what they wanted. What they wanted at the time was that Kansas should be a Free state. Not all of them were necessarily abolitionists. They no more had the same reasons for despising slavery, or for being opposed to its extension into the Territories, than did their colleagues Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, or Frank Sanborn. They did, however, all share the view that things had come to a head, and that the country was no more going to be a country that tolerated slavery.

Brown has only given me a rough outline, Sanborn revealed, without any particulars regarding his intended course of action. No one but Brown himself knows what it is that he is up to, but there is something. He is equally open to alternatives. At least that's what he's saying.

You do not seem to understand Brown's present circumstances, Sanborn wrote Higginson, itching to get on with the thing. He is as ready for a revolution as any other man, and is now on the borders of Kansas safe from arrest but prepared for action, but he needs money for his present expenses, and support. I believe he is the best Disunion champion you can find. John Brown is going to do more to split the Union than any 50,000 you can gather at your conventions.

Early in February, under the name Nelson Hawkins, John Brown took refuge in the Rochester, New York home of Frederick Douglass. From there Brown wrote to Theodore Parker, I am again out of Kansas, and am at this time concealing my whereabouts. Do you not know of some parties whom you could induce to give their abolition theories a thoroughly practical shape? I hope this will prove to be the last time I shall be driven to harass a friend in such a way. Do you think any of my Garrisonian friends, either at Boston, Worcester, or any other place, can be induced to supply a little straw, if I will absolutely make bricks? I have written George Stearns of Medford, and Mr. Sanborn of Concord. But I am not informed as to how deeply-dyed Abolitionists those friends are, and must beg you to consider this communication strictly confidential, unless you know of parties who will feel and act, and hold their peace. I want to bring the thing about during the next sixty days.

Parker showed Sanborn this letter. He had himself already received one like it, as had Higginson and Stearns. At the same time, Sanborn noted, one of our Kansas correspondents wrote to me that Brown had disappeared from Kansas and Iowa, and that some thought him insane. This, combined with the intimations of Forbes, led me to imagine that Brown indeed had a scheme for an uprising of the slaves. In February, my former classmate, Morton, wrote to me from Gerrit Smith's New York manor, quoting the substance of a letter Brown had written to Smith.

He thinks he can do with the money more than has yet been done, Edwin Morton wrote Sanborn. He wishes to avoid publicity, and so does not come here, and will not see his family. This is news. He expects to overthrow slavery in a large part of the country.

Brown speaks of a plan, Sanborn wrote Higginson in February, but does not say just what it is. Still I have confidence enough in him to trust him with the moderate sum he asks for, if I had it, without knowing his plan. Brown hopes to do more than has yet been done. He wishes to raise enough money, in just two months, for whatever it is he has in mind. As to the talk you say you hear of his being insane, this just is not so. If you can aid Brown in any substantial way please do so, for I do not well see how I can, though I will try. I would not wonder if his plan contemplated an uprising of slaves, though he has not said so to me.

I have a measure afoot, Brown confided in Higginson, that I feel sure would awaken in you something more than a common interest if you could understand it.