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838 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

dissolution of the Union. The delegates reassembled that evening and elected Brown
military commander of the provisional government. When no one would accept the
office of the president, the meeting chose a committee of fitteen headed by John
Brown to perform the duties of that position. Redpath, Public Life of Capt. John
Brown, 234-36; Villard, John Brown, 331-36.

247.25 Colonel Forbes] Hugh Forbes (1808-92), a British-born soldier and mer-
cenary, graduated from Oxford University in 1823. He was commissioned in the
Coldstream Guards in 1826. By 1848 Forbes was serving the Venetian Republic in the
Lombard War, and later he served in Palermo, Sicily, as part of the resistance there.
Sometime after the winter of 1849 he retired to the United States, and by 1857 he was
allied with John Brown's abolitionist agenda. In March of that year Forbes and Brown
met in New York City, and the latter hired Forbes as a drill instructor. Forbes, how-
ever, became disgruntled with Brown's leadership and financial compensation, and
proposed to take command, an offer Brown was impelled to decline. Forbes then left
Missouri for the East, where he sought out Douglass and others with the intention of
receiving compensation for his work with Brown, threatening to reveal their plans for
the Harpers Ferry raid if he was not paid. Forbes did in fact reveal plans to
Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson. Panicked, Brown's abolitionist supporters got
him to return to Kansas to draw attention away from the long-planned attack on
Virginia. With Brown acting as a decoy, the Forbes danger abated. However, Forbes's
threats of blackmail delayed Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry by a year. Forbes eventu-
ally returned to Europe, where he served with Italian rebels led by Giuseppe Garibaldi.
W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York, 1909), 218-19, 225; George Macaulay
Trevelyan, Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9 (London, 1907),
52-58, 243-44; Louis Ruchames, ed., A John Brown Reader (New York, 1959), 27;
W. A. Phillips, "Three Interviews with Old John Brown," in ibid., 210; Rossbach,
Ambivalent Conspiraton, 132-35, 160-80.

248.5-6 Forbes had told. . .officials at Washington] Angry at not receiving funds
promised him for assisting John Brown in training his raiders, Hugh Forbes threat-
ened to expose the plot. In spring 1858 Forbes went to Washington, D.C., and pro-
vided some details of Brown's intentions to Republican politicians, including William
H. Seward and Henry Wilson. To divert suspicion Brown returned to Kansas rather
than launch preparations for his assault on Harpers Ferry. Oates, To Purge This Land,
248-50; Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspiraton, 160-64.

248.5-6 Horace Greeley] Horace Greeley (1811-72), journalist, reformer, and
Republican politician, was the founder and lifelong editor of the New York Tribune.
Born in Amherst, New Hampshire, Greeley moved to New York City in 1831 and
became coeditor of a small literary periodical in 1834. With the sponsorship of
William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, Greeley soon entered the field of political
journalism, editing Whig campaign weeklies in 1838 and again in 1840. The next year
he launched the Tribune, which quickly outstripped its local competitors and attained
a large circulation throughout the North. In addition to promoting a panoply of social

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