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THE SECRET SIX TOP ROW:
Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Wentworth, Theodore Parker BOTTOM ROW:
Franklin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns
“Invested in Treason”
Concord and John Brown’s
SECRET SIX
O
On May 8, 1859, John Brown was back in Concord. The tall, humorless abolitionist had grown a flowing white beard, making him look like an Old Testament prophet. Like he did during his first visit in 1857, Brown spoke on his anti-slavery activities in Kansas to a large crowd at the Town Hall; he had come east in the hope of raising money for those activities. As in 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau were again in the audience, and they supported Brown; intellectually, philosophically, and monetarily. The man who brought John Brown to Concord was a 27-year-old schoolteacher 38
Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2021
BY RICHARD SMITH
named Franklin Sanborn. An 1855 graduate of Harvard College, young Sanborn moved to Concord, was befriended by Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, and was openly admitted into their select company for walks and Transcendental conversation. Sanborn was also a fanatical abolitionist. By 1856 he had become the secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee, an organization dedicated to helping antislavery emigrants settle in Kansas and make it a Free State. Bronson Alcott called Sanborn “something of a revolutionary” while Henry Thoreau wrote that the young man’s “quiet,
steadfast earnestness and ethical fortitude are of the type that calmly...ignites and then throws bomb after bomb.” By the late 1850s, it was evident to many abolitionists that slavery was not going away; the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the attack on Senator Charles Sumner in the United States Congress, and the Dred Scott decision showed many Americans that more drastic measures were needed to bring an end to slavery. When Sanborn met John Brown in 1857, he felt that Brown was just the man to do it. He would later write that Brown’s devotion to Abolition and the
