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 travel under an assumed name; and his favorite "alias" was "Nelson Hawkins." He made a speech under his own name—for in Massachusetts he could safely be John Brown—before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature and a large audience, urging a State appropriation in support of the Kansas committee's work. It was refused; but his appeal certainly helped him in his work, and his reception by the legislative committee gave him standing.

Brown visited his family at North Elba in the early spring of 1857, went to Connecticut, made speeches and collected money, got the granite tombstone of his grandfather, Captain John Brown, there and sent it to North Elba to be set up and inscribed with his son Frederick's name, and, eventually, with his own. At Collinsville, in Connecticut, he contracted for the manufacture of a thousand pikes or spears, saying that they were intended for use in Kansas. The