By going about your business quietly, you will get the job disposed of before the number that an uproar would bring together can collect; and you will have the advantage of those who come out against you, for they will be wholly unprepared with either equipments or matured plans; all with them will be confusion and terror.

Your enemies will be slow to attack you after you have done up the work nicely; and if they should, they will have to encounter your white friends as well as you; for you may safely calculate on a division of the whites, and may by that means get to an honorable parley." He gives here a distinct suggestion of the plans and methods which he later developed and extended.
When Kansas was opened for settlement, John Brown was fifty-four years old.

Early in the spring of 1855, five of his sons took up claims near Osawatomie.

They went, as did others, as peaceable settlers without arms.

After the election of March 30, 1855, at which armed Missourians overawed the Kansas settlers and thus secured a unanimous pro-slavery Legislature, the freestate men, under the leadership of Robinson, began to import Sharp's rifles and other weapons for defense.