Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/210

202 to retreat when that was advisable. Kagi, however, expected to retreat southward, not in the contrary direction. The slaves were to be armed with pikes, scythes, muskets, shotguns, and other simple instruments of defense; the officers, white or black, and such of the men as were skilled and trustworthy, to have the use of the Sharps rifles and revolvers. They anticipated procuring provisions enough for subsistence by forage, as also arms, horses, and ammunition. Kagi said one of the reasons that induced him to go into the enterprise was a full conviction that at no very distant day forcible efforts for freedom would break out among the slaves, and that slavery might be more speedily abolished by such efforts, than by any other means. He knew by observation in the South, that in no point was the system so vulnerable as in its fear of slave-rising. Believing that such a blow would soon be struck, he wanted to organize it so as to make it more effectual, and also, by directing and controlling the Negroes, to prevent some of the atrocities that would necessarily arise from the sudden upheaval of such a mass as the Southern slaves."

The knowledge of the country was obtained by personal inspection. Kagi and others of Brown's lieutenants went out on trips; the old man him-self had been in western, northern and southern Virginia, and his Negro friends especially knew these places and routes. One of Brown's men writes: