malice). When the thing is well started, who cares what he says?"[1]
Further efforts were made to conciliate Forbes but he wrote wildly: "I have been grossly defrauded in the name of humanity and anti-slavery. . . . I have for years labored in the anti-slavery cause, without wanting or thinking of a recompense. Though I have made the least possible parade of my work, it has nevertheless not been entirely without fruit. . . . Patience and mild measures having failed, I reluctantly have recourse to harshness. Let them not flatter themselves that I shall eventually become weary and shall drop the subject; it is as yet quite at its beginning."[2]
"To go on in face of this is madness," wrote Sanborn, and John Brown was urged to come to New York to meet Stearns and Howe. Brown had already been delayed nearly a month at Chatham by this trouble, but he obeyed the summons. Sanborn says: "When, about May 20th, Mr. Steams met Brown in New York, it was arranged that hereafter the custody of the Kansas rifles should be in Brown's hands as the agent, not of this committee, but of Mr. Steams alone. It so happened that Gerrit Smith, who seldom visited Boston, was coming there late in May. . . . He arrived and took rooms at the Revere House, where, on the 24th of May, 1858, the secret committee (organized in
