"Sorry the boys had to take you in, but you and your hosses are safe and we won't keep you long. The day of the Lord is at hand."
There was a grim murmur of approval from the other men. The Lord's day, as Sunday is sometimes called, was at hand, for it was then the evening of Saturday, October 15, 1859. But that was not what the speaker meant. He was not what his followers called him, Captain Smith. He was John Brown, of North Elba, New York, of Kansas ("bleeding Kansas" it was called then, when slaveholders from Missouri and freedom-lovers under John Brown had turned it into a battlefield), and he was soon to be John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, first martyr in the cause of Freedom on Virginian soil. To him "the day of the Lord" was the day when he was to attack slavery in its birthplace, the Old Dominion, and that attack had been set by him for Sunday, October 16. His plan was to seize Harper's Ferry, where there was a United States arsenal, arm the slaves he thought would come to his standard from all Virginia, and so compass the fall of the Slave Power. A wild plan, an impossible plan, the plan of an almost crazy fanatic, and a splendid dream, a dream for the sake of which he was glad to give his heroic life.
He had rented this Maryland farm in July, giving his name as Smith and saying he expected to breed horses. By twos and threes his followers had joined him in this solitary spot, until now there were twenty-one of them. The few folk scattered through the countryside had begun to be suspicious of this strange gathering of men. All sorts of wild stories circulated, though none was as wild as the truth. The men themselves were tense under the strain of the long wait. They feared discovery and attack. For the three days before "the day of the Lord" they had patrolled the one road, looking out for soldiers or for spies. Tom and his father had been their sole captives.
John Brown was one of Nature's noblemen and among his friends in Massachusetts and New York were some of the foremost men of their time, so he had learned to know a real man when he met one. He soon found out that Mr. Strong was a real man. He told him of his plans, and urged him to join in the projected foray on Harper's Ferry. But when Mr. Strong refused and tried to show him how mad his project was, the fires of the fanatic blazed within him.