Page:John Brown (1899).pdf/100

 manufacturer exacted pay for the work as he went along; and the pikes were a long time in preparing. When at last they were finished, they went to Harper's Ferry, not to Kansas. They were a likely weapon for negroes on Southern plantations, who knew little about firearms: for ranging frontiersmen on the Kansas plains they were the last sort of weapon that any one would think of. There seems little doubt that Brown's explanation to the Connecticut manufacturer was a subterfuge, and that he intended the pikes for a negro insurrection somewhere. The fact that he paid for them slowly, keeping them hanging, so to speak, a long time, does not indicate that he really intended them for use in Kansas. He found money to pay for them before he needed them in Virginia. He could not prevent the shipment of the two hundred Sharpe's rifies of the Kansas Aid committee as far west as Iowa, but there is fair ground