“These forts were to be so arranged as to connect one with the other, by secret passages, so that if one was carried another could easily be fallen back upon, and be the means of dealing death to the enemy at the very moment when he might think himself victorious. I was less interested in these drawings than my children were, but they showed that the old man had an eye to the means as to the end, and was giving his best thought to the work he was about to take in hand.”[18] * * * * * The month of May, 1859, John Brown spent in Boston collecting funds, and in New York consulting his Negro friends, with a trip to Connecticut to hurry the making of his thousand pikes. Sickness intervened, but at last on June 20, the advance guard of five--Brown and two of his sons, Jerry Anderson and Kagi--started southward. Many times during these months Frederick Douglass wondered whether or not John Brown did not have the only possible plan for freeing the black man. The antislavery fight had worn very thin. The North knew of the moral and physical horror of slavery. The South knew also, but cotton prices continued to rise. Logic would not separate cotton growers from their slaves. Many of the old, staunch Abolitionists were gone. Theodore Parker had burned himself out in the cause. Down with tuberculosis, he was on a ship bound for southern Italy where, in spite of the warm sunshine, he was to die. Daily the South grew more defiant. When the doctrine of popular sovereignty failed to make Kansas a slave state, Southern statesmen abandoned it for firmer ground. They had lost faith in the rights, powers and wisdom of the people and took refuge in the Constitution. Henceforth the favorite doctrine of the South was that the people of a territory had no voice in the matter of slavery. The Constitution of the United States, they claimed, of its own force and effect, carried slavery safely into any territory of the United States and protected the system there until it should cease to be a territory and became a state. In practical operation, this doctrine would make all future new states slaveholding states; for slavery, once planted and nursed for years, could easily strengthen itself against the evil day of eradication. In a rage, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution denouncing it as a “covenant with Satan.” Douglass went away heartsick. In the heart of the Alleghenies, halfway between Maine and Florida, opens a mighty gateway. From the south comes the Shenandoah, a restless silver thread gleaming in the sun; from the west the Potomac moves placidly between wide banks. But at their junction they are cramped. The two rivers rush together against the mountains, rend it asunder and tear a passage to the sea. And here is Harper’s Ferry. Why did John Brown choose this particular point for his attack upon American slavery? Was it the act of a madman? A visionary fool? What was his crime?