Let all the nations know
To earth's remotest bound.
The year of Jubilee is come,
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

In strains to which a soul on fire gave enchantment and a
tunefulness of their own he sang that song of Moses and the Lamb,
telling of the Jewish charter of Liberty to which Christ in His
turn gave larger meaning; and the little eyes in the room beheld
a transfigured face which they remembered when he had ceased
blowing the trumpet of Jubilee, and when they sang the same hymn
as they laid him beneath the sod outside that cabin door.

But not long could he stay at home. The year of Jubilee for all
these bondmen was his one thought, and he found friends who
regarded him as a tried man and were prepared to trust him
implicitly. Such men as Beecher and Theodore Parker gave him
help spiritual; men like the wealthy Stearns gave him help
financial to the extent of many thousand dollars, and were
content to know that John Brown, however he spent it (and
concerning his plans he was always reticent), would have but one
object--liberty to the captive.

One way in which it was spent was in the working of what was then
known as the underground railway. The opportunist statesman--
Henry Clay--had led many Northern voters to tolerate the passing
of the Fugitive Slave Law, under which the Federal Government
facilitated the enforced return of fugitive slaves found in free
states to the plantations of the South. And the Abolitionists in
the North, as a set-off against this detested legislation, gave