Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves. Visiting Europe afterward, he studied military strategy for this purpose, even making designs for a new style of forest fortifications, simple and ingenious, to be used by parties of fugitive slaves when brought to bay. He knew the ground, he knew his plans, he knew himself; but where should he find his men? Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore; he reared them in his sons. Mrs. Brown had been always the sharer of his plans. 'Her husband always believed,' she said, 'that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and she believed it too.' 'This plan had occupied his thoughts and prayers for twenty years.' 'Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.'" "He believed in human brotherhood, and in the God of Battles; he admired Nat Turner, the negro patriot, equally with George Washington, the white American deliverer." "He secretly despised even the ablest antislavery orators. He could see 'no use in this talking,' he said. 'Talk is a national institution; but it does no manner of good to the slave.'" The year before his attack, he uttered these sentences in conversation: "Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks. The same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State." "Give a slave a pike, and you make him a man. Deprive him of the means of resistance, and you keep him down." "The land belongs to the bondsman. He has enriched it, and been robbed of its fruits." "Any resistance, however bloody, is better than the system which makes every seventh woman a concubine." "A few men in the right, and knowing they are, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "When the bondsmen stand like men, the nation will respect them. It is necessary to teach them this." About the same time he said, in another conversation, "that it was nothing to die in a good cause, but an eternal disgrace to sit still in the presence of the barbarities of American slavery." "Providence," said he, "has made me an actor, and slavery an outlaw." "Duty is the voice of God, and a man is neither worthy of a good home here, or a heaven, that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause." He scouted the idea of rest while he held "a commission direct from God Almighty to act against slavery." After his capture, and while he lay in blood upon the floor of the guard-house, he was asked by a bystander upon what principle he justified his acts? "Upon the Golden Rule," he answered. "I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them. That is why I am here; it is not to gratify any personal animosity, or feeling of revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of God.