August 11th, there was a panic on the bourse of the Provisional Government. Kagi reported the arrival of fifteen boxes of arms with freight charges amounting to $85.00, which caused Brown to ask his son John to solicit for him "a little more assistance, say two or three hundred dollars." Continuing he said:
It is terribly humiliating to me to begin soliciting of friends again; but as the harvest opens before me with increasing encouragements, I may not allow a feeling of delicacy to deter me from asking the little further I expect to need.[362]
In due time his requisition for funds was honored from the never-failing purse of Gerrit Smith. Brown's means of transportation consisted of a horse and a wagon, but a contract for moving the arms from Chambersburg to the Kennedy farm was awarded to a "Pennsylvania Dutchman" who had a large freight wagon.[363]
Meanwhile the movement progressed in a systematic and orderly manner. There was grave danger, however, that the secret of the contemplated insurrection would transpire through the loquacity of the many persons, estimated by Mr. Villard at possibly, eighty, who had more or less knowledge of the enterprise. Brown seems to have feared that Cook, especially, might give up information that would work disaster. It was not that he held his loyalty in doubt, but he had been reported to the commander-in-chief on a previous occasion, by the honorable secretary of state, Mr. Realf, for "cacoethes loquendi," and Brown feared a recrudescence of the malady. In a letter to Kagi at Chambersburg, August 11th, he severely reproved those who had made their business in Maryland a subject for general correspondence. But his expressions of displeasure, did not prevent Leeman from writing to his mother, a month and a half later, as follows:[364]
I am now in a Southern _Slave State_ and before I leave it it will be a free State, Mother.... Yes, mother I am waring with Slavery the greatest Curse that ever infested America; In Explanation of my Absence from you for so long a time I would tell you that for three years I have been Engaged in a Secret Association of as gallant fellows as ever puled a trigger with the sole purpose of the _Extermination of Slavery_.