![]() ![]() He further added to the mystery by asking for the pikes to be shipped to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. ![]() Brown dodged the question by simply replying that the pikes might be useful to him if they were finished. ![]() What would the pikes be used for, he queried Brown. Blair’s level of suspicion was increased, however, as the Kansas crisis had been settled. Flush with cash from his wealthy benefactors, Brown, in 1859, unexpectedly appeared in Blair’s shop to pay for the pikes. He turned to private sources of funding: his famed “Secret Six,” the wealthy abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns. Charles Blair would later testify that some of the money Brown used to pay for the pikes came from a check from Smith.īrown, however, was nothing if not determined. Could 1,000 pikes in the hands of anti-slavery forces in Kansas end the aristocracy of the slaveholding South? Well acquainted with military history, Brown knew that pikes were the weapon that was associated with the overthrow of the aristocracy. Brown explained that the weapon would allow anti-slavery Kansas to protect themselves and their property from their pro-slavery neighbors. Brown showed Blair a Bowie knife captured from a pro-slavery leader at the Battle of Black Jack, and asked what it would cost to replicate the knife, produce 1,000, and attach them to six-foot poles. While speaking in Collinsville, Connecticut, in 1857 Brown met Charles Blair, a forgemaster at that town’s Collins and Company, a manufacturer of iron products. In 1857, Brown used his new-found fame to launch a speaking tour of New England states, raising money to fund his abolitionist crusade in Kansas. ![]() The station is now the Crown & Hammer Restaurant & Pub, the crown and hammer being the symbols of the Collins Axe Company. The Collinsville train station in an old postcard. As a minister, Cotton Mather Smith was certainly familiar with the Reverend Joseph Bellamy, the influential theologian who was known as the “Pope of Litchfield County.” Bellamy was such a power that his approval was needed for Sunday travel. It tells us not only of the hazards that awaited winter travelers in the 18th century (it is interesting to note that it is 8 miles from the Bellamy-Ferriday house in Bethlehem to the center of Washington, 9 miles from Washington to Warren, and 14 miles from Warren to Sharon) but also of the strong hold that religion had on people’s daily lives. This account is from “A Biographical History of the County of Litchfield, Connecticut,” written by Payne Kilbourne in 1851. Bellamy’s sanction, on Sunday afternoon, on snow-shoes, reached Washington that night, Warren the next, and home on the third. By that time the roads were impassable to horses, and, fearing that they might be wholly blocked up, they set out, with Dr. On their return to New Haven from Sharon:Ī great snow storm came on, and they were compelled to leave their sleigh in Woodbury, and travel to Bethlehem on horseback. While a sophomore at Yale in 1780, his father traveled to bring John Cotton home for winter vacation. ![]()
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