Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/207

Rh conceived the idea of central depots for running off slaves in the inaccessible portions of the South, and he began studying Southern geography with this in view. He noted the rivers, swamps and mountains, and more especially, the great struggling heights of the Alleghanies, which swept from his Pennsylvania home down to the swamps of Virginia, Carolina and Georgia. His Kansas experiences suggested for a time the southwest pathway to Louisiana by the swamps of the Red and Arkansas Rivers, but this was but a passing thought; he soon reverted to the great spur of the Alleghanies.

"I never shall forget," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "the quiet way in which he once told me that 'God had established the Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.' I did not know then that his own home was among the Adirondacks."

More and more, as he thought and worked, did his great plan present itself to him clearly and definitely until finally it stood in 1858 as Kagi told it to Hinton:

"The mountains of Virginia were named as the place of refuge, and as a country admirably adapted in which to carry on guerrilla warfare. In the course of the conversation, Harper's Ferry was mentioned as a point to be seized, but not held,—on account of the arsenal. The white members of