To the men from the Pottawatomie, a massacre was simply a means to an end. Brown and his sons harbored no feelings of animosity toward the Doyles, the Shermans, and Wilkinson; but they knew that these men would not give up to them, peaceably, the property which they coveted, therefore they murdered them and took their horses. They knew that the owners of slaves and lands in the Southern States would not, peaceably, relinquish their ownership of this property; therefore they planned to incite the slaves to kill their masters while they slept--and having _thus emancipated_ the slaves, confiscate the estates of the slave-holders, and put the assassins and themselves in possession of them. This massacre, the most horrible that was ever seriously contemplated in the brain of man, was to be executed under the pretense that it was an humanitarian measure. In the name of humanity, they proposed to undertake the midnight assassination of millions of men, women, and children, and to contend for justification for their actions. The word, with Brown, was a convenience, or an interchangeable term. A definition of it, in the sense in which he used the word, is found in his personal understanding, or interpretation rather, of its co-relation, "The Golden Rule." He is quoted by Sanborn and others as having stated "more than once": "I believe in the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing; and it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth--men, women and children--by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail _in this country_. I mean exactly _so_, sir."[420] The possibility that the blacks in the South might attempt to gain their freedom by a general massacre of the whites, was a condition co-existent with their enslavement. After 1831 that possibility became a fixed impending probability; and the question of means to prevent the inevitable cataclysm of blood, was a matter of constant concern in the economy of the Southern States; with the result that various preventive measures were adopted to discourage the possibility of attempts, by the slaves, to organize for such undertakings, or to fit themselves, by education or otherwise, to promote such organizations. In the philosophy of John Brown, what Nat Turner had done in a section of Southampton County, Virginia, could, if properly promoted, be done in any other section or locality; and, if in any locality, then in every locality, or throughout the whole South. Therefore, an insurrection by the slaves, having for its object the overthrow of the existing State governments of the South, was a venture, from his point of view, which might be undertaken with reasonable prospects for success; the ultimate result depending largely upon his ability to organize the slaves effectively for revolt; to equip them for the initial uprising, and thereafter to capably direct the movement.