John Brown had been the chief leader of the Free State men in the warlike operations in Kansas. He was a man of extraordinary fanaticism, limitless daring, large capacity, and relentless determination. His hostility to slavery knew absolutely no bounds. With a courage which had no balance wheel of discretion to regulate it, he had no hesitation in undertaking great enterprises with ridiculously inadequate means, and in the end he showed that he had no flinching from the personal consequences of his acts. In June, 1859, he went secretly to the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, with a band so small that even after its reinforcement it was manifestly inadequate to be trusted by any but a madman to accomplish the work that Brown had laid out for it to do. He was both morally and materially supported by men of wealth and influence at the North who blindly entrusted him with arms, ammunition, and money, not knowing or inquiring whither he was going or what his purposes might be. By the end of June, 1859, he had established himself near Harper's Ferry with a band of devoted followers about him. One by one the men who had enlisted in his service joined him until the company numbered twenty-two. Still his purpose was wholly unsuspected by his Virginian neighbors. In the meanwhile the two hundred rifles contributed by George L. Stearns of Medford, Mass., in aid of the Kansas controversy, were delivered to John Brown who had, besides, a war chest of five hundred dollars in gold given to him by Boston enthusiasts in aid of an enterprise concerning which they had no definite information whatsoever. His purpose was to establish in the mountain fastnesses near Harper's Ferry a fugitive slave camp which a few men could easily defend while the rest of those coming into it could be run off to Canada and freedom with ease and certainty. In effect he contemplated a general insurrection of the slaves, their concentration in easily defensible mountain camps and their removal to Canada from these military posts as rapidly as that end could be accomplished. This program if successful could have resulted in nothing less than a slave insurrection and a bloody servile war. But John Brown's program failed of its accomplishment for two reasons. There was far less of active discontent among the negroes of northern Virginia than John Brown had supposed. Most of those negroes in fact were entirely satisfied with their condition and treatment and so they refused to flee to him for rescue from an oppression which they did not feel.