Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown

Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown

by Edward J. Renehan, Jr.

Excerpt:

At Springfield, [John] Brown organized a branch of the United States League of Gileadites, a society of black fugitives banded together to resist the fugitive slave measure…

The black writer William Wells Brown visited Springfield in June of 1854 and found Brown’s group at arms, ready to fight a group of slavers who were rumored to be in the area. Sentries were posted throughout all the black neighborhoods. Women were organized into “boiling water brigades,” intent on scalding any slave-catcher who tried to accost them. “Returning to the depot,” wrote William Brown, “to take the train for Boston, we found there some ten or fifteen blacks all armed to the teeth and swearing vengeance upon the heads of any who should attempt to take them. True, the slave-catchers had been there. But the authorities, foreseeing a serious outbreak, advised them to leave, and feeling alarmed for their personal safety, these disturbers of the peace had left on the evening train for New York. No fugitive slave was ever afterwards disturbed at Springfield.


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