In the year 1858, he held a secret meeting or convention of reckless fanatics like himself at Chatham, in Canada West, and devised a scheme for a provisional government of the United States, of which he was to be the head, with a cabinet appointed by himself, and he concocted a plan for putting his government in operation by raising a rebellion among the slaves and freeing them. All of these proceedings were kept from the public until the month of October, 1859, when John Brown, with a band of followers, made his appearance suddenly at Harper's Ferry, within the limits of Virginia, surprised and captured the United States arsenal at that place, which was without a guard; killed several citizens; captured and imprisoned others, and committed a number of depredations and robberies in the neighborhood. His pretended provisional government was proclaimed and the object of the movement declared, but failing to receive some expected re-inforcements, and not meeting with co-operation on the part of the slaves for whom he brought a supply of arms and expected to get others from the arsenal, he and his band of desperadoes were soon surrounded and the greater part captured or killed. John Brown himself was made a prisoner in a wounded condition and he and several of his followers were tried under the laws of Virginia, convicted and executed for treason and murder. His plan of operations contemplated a servile insurrection in all of the Southern states with all of the horrors of blood and rapine, and his acts amounted to treason, not only against the state of Virginia, but against the United States; yet there was reason to suspect that some of the leaders of the Republican or free-soil party, were cognizant of his designs if they did not secretly favor them. Certain it is that very great sympathy was openly expressed for him by many individuals and by public meetings at the North, and that the legislature of Massachusetts, by an almost unanimous vote, adjourned over so as not to be in session on the day of his execution, avowedly as a mark of respect for him, and of condemnation at his execution. When this desperate undertaking of John Brown to deluge the South with fire and sword, and the marked sympathy for him expressed at the North, were added to the failure of the Northern states to comply with their plighted faith in regard to the restoration of fugitive slaves--to their interference with the institutions of those states, the persistent libels upon the Southern people, the encouragement given to the slaves to revolt by incendiary publications, the attitude of hostility assumed by a great number of the Northern representatives to the South on every occasion in which anything had been proposed or done in regard to slavery, and to the rapid growth of the party now coming into the ascendency on the ground of enmity to the South and her institutions--it may be well conceived that a profound sensation was created in the latter section.