Immediately on his arrival there he wrote to a prominent Boston abolitionist, T.W.

Higginson: "I now want to get, for the perfecting of by far the most important undertaking of my whole life, from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days.

I have written Rev.Theodore Parker, George L.Stearns, and F.B.Sanborn, Esquires, on the subject." [Sidenote] Sanborn, "Life and Letters of John Brown," p.

438.
Correspondence and mutual requests for a conference ensued, and finally these Boston friends sent Sanborn to the house of Gerrit Smith, in Peterboro, New York, where a meeting had been arranged.
Sanborn was a young man of twenty-six, just graduated from college, who, as secretary of various Massachusetts committees, had been the active agent for sending contributions to Kansas.

He arrived on the evening of Washington's birthday, February 22, 1858, and took part in a council of conspiracy, of which John Brown was the moving will and chief actor.
[Sidenote] "Atlantic," July, 1872, p.52.Sanborn in "Atlantic," March, 1875, p.