As results of their plotting, and planning, and scheming, they seem to have figured out to their entire satisfaction, how they could destroy the slave-holding population of the Southern States and confiscate their property; and then, with the aid of their negro allies, thus liberated from slavery, and with the assistance of the non-slave-holding whites in the South and the ambitious and daring in the North, who would be lured to join them, they could create an army; invade the South; take possession of the several State governments, and reorganize them under the jurisdiction of a Provisional Government. Brown was a disunionist,[273] and believed his revolution would result in a dissolution of the Union. His friends--Redpath, Sanborn, Higginson, Smith _et al._, were disunionists, and he lived in an atmosphere saturated with the toxin of disunion sentiment. Also, he was an optimist, and believed that while he ravaged the South with his bloody scourge, the disunion propaganda in the North would assert itself to his advantage, and create such a diversion in his favor, as would leave him and Forbes free to deal with the South and its problems in their own way. Only under such conditions could he hope to seize the property of slave-holders, "personal and real, wherever and whenever it may be found in either Free or Slave States." From their point of view, or as they hoped to make it appear, their revolution was to be an affair between the citizens of a block of sovereign States, in the result of which the Federal Government would not be especially concerned. They would act within the limits of the States involved for revolutionary purposes, and not in unnecessarily aggressive hostility toward the United States. At the same time, these adventurers well understood that no matter how successful they might be in starting their revolution, there would probably come a time when the Federal army would have to be reckoned with; that the General Government would attempt to intervene in behalf of local order, at least, and might seriously embarrass their operations or wholly defeat them. This visible menace they not only planned to overcome, or eliminate from the problem, but actually to turn it into a valuable asset, by transposing it bodily to their side of the military equation. They planned, in apparent sincerity of purpose, to accomplish what appears to be the most colossal of all imaginable absurdities: to have the men of the United States army abandon their colors and accept service in their army; or, as Brown expressed it, to make an "actual exchange of service from that of Satan to the service of God."