Peterboro', June 4, 1859.
Captain John Brown.
My Dear Friend,
— I wrote you a week ago, directing my letter to the care of Mr. Stearns. He
replied, informing me that he had forwarded it to Westport; but as Mr. Morton
received last evening a letter from Mr. Sanborn, saying your address would be
your son's home, — namely, West Andover, — I therefore write you without delay,
and direct your letter to your sou. I have done what I could thus far for
Kansas, and what I could to keep you at your Kansas work. Losses by indorsement
and otherwise have brought me under heavy embarrassment the last two years, but
I must, nevertheless, continue to do, in order to keep you at your Kansas work.
I send you herewith my draft for two hundred dollars. Let me hear from you on
the receipt of this letter. You live in our hearts, and our prayer to God is
that you may have strength to continue in your Kansas work. My wife joins me in
affectionate regard to you, dear John, whom we both hold in very high esteem. I
suppose you put the Whitman note into Mr. Stearns's hands. It will be a great
shame if Mr. Whitman does not pay it. What a noble man is Mr. Stearns!1
How liberally he has contributed to keep you in your Kansas work!
Your friend,
Gerrit Smith.
________________
1 To those who could read between the lines, this
letter disclosed the whole method of the secret committee. No one of them might
know at any given time where Brown was, but some other was sure to know, — and
in this one note four persons are named who might be at any time in
coromnnication with Brown wherever he was, — George L. Stearns, Edwin Morton,
F. B. Sanborn, and Mr. Smith himself. The phrase “Kansas work” misled none of
these persons, who all knew that Brown had finally left Kansas and was to
operate henceforth in the slave States. The hundred dollars given by Mr. Smith
April 14, added to the two hundred mimed in this letter, and the note of E. B.
Whitman, of Kansas, which Brown received from Mr. Smith, make up five hundred
and eighty-five dollars, or more than one-fifth of the two thousand dollars
which he told Brown he would help his "Eastern friends" raise. Those
friends were Stearns, Howe, Higginson, and Sanborn, — for Parker was then in
Europe, and unable to contribute.
SOURCE: Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of
John Brown, p. 524
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