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 before his eyes with iron shovels or anything that came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children; for such children have neither fathers nor mothers to protect and provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question, Is God their father?"

John Brown, Jr., born in 1821, says that his own earliest recollection is of his father sheltering runaway slaves. While he was postmaster at Randolph, Pennsylvania, John Brown made his house a refuge for such runaways, and in a letter to his brother Frederick, in 1834, he unfolded a scheme for procuring the adoption in Northern families of "negro boys or youth," who were to be brought up as the children of these families were, and educated with them. "Christian slaveholders were to be prevailed upon, if possible, to release slave boys for this purpose." Failing such means, Brown