“Convictions are the final end we seek,” he said. “But even you dare not pit your convictions against the slaveholder’s property. Slaveholders are not concerned or bothered about cheering crowds north of the Ohio river. They can laugh at them! But they will not laugh long if the cheering crowds go marching to the ballot box. Convictions need votes to back them up!” The shadows in the room deepened. For a long time there was only silence. “There’s a man in Springfield you ought to know,” Gerrit Smith spoke quietly. “His name is John Brown.” And so Douglass first heard of John Brown, in whose plans he would be involved for many years to come. Upon the establishment of Oberlin College in 1839, Gerrit Smith had given the school a large tract of land in Virginia. The small group in Ohio hardly knew what to do with his gift until, in 1840, young John Brown, son of one of the Oberlin trustees, wrote proposing to survey the lands for a nominal price if he could buy some of it himself and establish his family there. “He said,” continued Smith, “that he planned to set up there a school for both the Negroes and poor whites of the region.” Titles to the Virginia lands were not clear because squatters were in possession, and the Oberlin trustees welcomed Brown’s plan. Thus John Brown first saw Virginia and looked over the rich and heavy lands which roll westward to the misty Blue Ridge. The Oberlin lands lay about two hundred miles west of Harper’s Ferry in the foothills and along the valley of the Ohio. “He wrote that he liked the country as well as he had expected and its inhabitants even better,” Smith chuckled. By the summer of 1840 the job was done, and Brown had picked out his ground. It was good hill land on the right branch of a valuable spring, with a growth of good timber and a sugar orchard. In August the Oberlin trustees voted “that the Prudential Committee be authorized to perfect negotiations and convey by deed to Brother John Brown of Hudson, one thousand acres of our Virginia land on the conditions suggested in the correspondence which has already transpired between him and the Committee.”[11] “But then”--Gerrit Smith’s voice took on new urgency--“all negotiations stopped. The panic overthrew everybody’s calculations. Brown’s wool business collapsed, and two years later he was bankrupt. He had endorsed notes for a friend, and they sent him to jail. Then he entered into partnership with a man named Perkins, with a view to carrying on the sheep business extensively. Perkins was to furnish all the feed and shelter for wintering, and Brown was to take care of the flock.” Smith was silent for a few minutes, puffing on his pipe. “I think he loved being a shepherd. Anyway, during those long, solitary days and nights he developed a plan for furnishing cheap wool direct to consumers.