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attention on slavery, as had happened after Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831. The two men debated the scheme until three in themorning. Brown sought the black abolitionist’s support; Douglass doubted the plan’s feasibility. But he came away deeply impressed by the wool merchant’s sincerity and commitment.
    Douglass had begun his own abolitionist career as a protégé of Garrison’s. But by the late 1840s, he’d come to question whether pacifism and moral suasion were sufficient tools for slaves’ liberation. He also bristled at the prejudice and condescension displayed by many white abolitionists. Brown seemed remarkably free of this.
    “Though a white gentleman,” Douglass wrote in his abolitionist weekly, the North Star, soon after his Springfield visit, Brown “is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
     
     
    BROWN GAVE FURTHER EVIDENCE of this sympathy in 1848, when he sought the support of Gerrit Smith, one of the most exceptional, eccentric, and philanthropic men of his day. Born into the landed gentry of upstate New York, Smith profitably managed his family’s estates while cycling through the many reform movements of the early 1800s, including temperance, women’s rights, vegetarianism, and sexual “purity” (a creed advocated by Sylvester Graham, who claimed his coarse-grained crackers curbed lust and masturbation).
    But Smith’s abiding passion was abolitionism. He helped found the antislavery Liberty Party and ran as its presidential candidate in 1848 (receiving 0.1 percent of the vote). The small town his family founded in New York was so strongly abolitionist that a black visitor wrote Frederick Douglass, “There are yet two places where slaveholders cannot come, Heaven and Peterboro.”
    Smith also had a prior tie to Brown’s family. Years before, the New Yorker had donated twenty thousand acres of his holdings in western Virginia to Oberlin, the radical new college in Ohio of which Owen Brown was a trustee. Owen arranged for his then destitute son to survey the land, and it was during this trip that Brown first visited the Allegheny Mountains.
    Smith had since undertaken a utopian project: he granted free blacks thousands of acres in upstate New York, so they could farm and ownenough property to qualify for the vote. But the land was poor and remote; the few blacks who settled in an Adirondacks colony called Timbucto struggled from the first.
    Gerrit Smith
    Brown had a solution, which he proposed to Smith upon visiting the magnate’s Peterboro mansion in 1848. He would move to upstate New York himself and help black pioneers survey, farm, and raise stock. “I can think of no place where I think I would sooner go,” he wrote his father, “than to live with those poor despised Africans to try, & encourage them; & show them a little as far as I am capable.”
    Smith was impressed by the idealistic wool merchant and deeded him 244 acres at $1 an acre. In the spring of 1849, Brown settled near Lake Placid, in the village of North Elba. That June, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, was hiking in the Adirondacks when he stumbled on “a log-house and half-cleared farm”—the Browns’ temporary home. Dana joined the family of nine for dinner. Two black neighbors were also at the table. Brown “called the negroes by theirsurnames, with the prefixes of Mr. and Mrs.,” Dana observed. “It was plain they had not been so treated or spoken to often before.”
    The 1850 census listed a twenty-three-year-old black laborer from Florida, a fugitive slave, living with the Browns. Many black farm families dwelled close by. Brown’s oldest daughter, Ruth—“a bonny, buxom young woman,” Dana wrote, “with fair skin and red hair”—married a white neighbor, Henry Thompson, who would later join his father-in-law’s abolitionist crusade, as would two of his brothers.
    But Brown