Don Gilmore wrote:

"Some of the men, often referred to in various histories as the "Conspiracy of Six" ... were among the conspirators in this plot also, one of them Thomas Wentworth Higginson, another F. B. Sanborn. ..Other men offering their aid, physically or in funds to finance the treasonous expedition, were J. C. Vaughn, J. W. Le Barnes, Edward Russell, John E. Stewart, W. W. Thayer (the publisher), James Redpath (the journalist), Dr. David Thayer, George Henry Hoyt..."

If there was an expedition from Kansas, it was probably completely independent of that from Massachusetts, in which Le Barnes, Sanborn, and Hoyt took part (and there was quite possibly another conspiracy in Ohio led by John Brown, Jr., which was unrelated to the Kansas group as well).

However, as to the above-mentioned gentlemen, you will recall that Harper's Ferry occurred beginning October 16th, and Brown's trial began the 25th with 2 attorneys appointed on the site. On the evening of October 27th, Hoyt arrived, direct from Boston. While he would later end up in Jennison's Seventh and Fifteenth, at that point he was acting solely at the behest of Le Barnes:

"On the day the news of the raid was received John W. Le Barnes of Boston engaged at his own expense a young lawyer of Athol Massachusetts, George H. Hoyt, and asked him to go to Harper's Ferry, ostensibly as counsel to John Brown but really as a spy to see if it would be possible to rescue the prisoners. Mr Hoyt's instructions were: first to watch and be able to report proceedings to see and talk with Brown and be able to communicate with his friends anything Brown might want to say and second to send me [Le Barnes] an accurate and detailed account of the military situation at Charles town the number and distribution of troops the location and defences of the jail and nature of the approaches to the town and jail the opportunities for a sudden attack and the means of retreat with the location and situation of the room in which Brown is confined and all other particulars that might enable friends to consult as to some plan of attempt at rescue... (Villard, "John Brown," 1909, p.484)

That Hoyt was a spy trying to arrange a breakout cannot be doubted, his hand-drawn layout of the jail at Charlestown still exists and is in the Kansas State Historical Society archives. However, after meeting with Brown the night of the 28th and telling him of the plot, he wrote back to Le Barnes immediately and told him "there is no chance of his ultimate escape. There is nothing but the most unmitigated failure and the saddest consequence which is possible to imagine..." (Hinton, "John Brown and his men," p.367). However, Hinton does relate on Page 520 many of the names above as "persons who would have risked everything to have saved John Brown or any of his men."

Hoyt later met John Brown Junior and went on a recruiting trip with him back to Ohio where they raised all the men who became Company K, Kansas Seventh, with Brown, Jr. as captain and Hoyt as Lieutenant. However, up until that time Hoyt had never been to Kansas, did not know Jennison, Anthony, and the rest. He knew Sanborn and Le Barnes, and his father was a good friend of Garrison. But it is very unlikely that Carpenter and Rice and Montgomery were part of his conspiracy.

Since these facts are from books that are in some cases 100 years old, I find the accusation that this has never been in print before to be an odd one. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?

There are a few facts, however, that ought to be cleared up. John Brown was not tried for "treason against the United States government' as Mr. Gilmore alleges, but treason against the state of Virginia. It is very clear from the trial that the whole of the defense against the treason charge was that since Brown did not live in Virginia, he owed it no allegiance.

This charge is very strange: "All the while the Harper's Ferry raid and the conspiracy to break Brown out of jail were occurring, the conspirators who had financed Brown's small army... had became highly agitated: Howe fled to Canada, Parker to Rome, and Sanborn had fought off Federal marshals"

The conspiracy was over the moment Hoyt called it over, the night of the 28th, for as Hinton himself says that the attempt was "thoroughly pushed right up to the point where an actual reconnaissance proved it could not be accomplished" (p. 520) yet the 'agitation' as it were did not occur until more than a month after Brown was dead. When it did so, it was for another reason. Senator Mason was attempting to call these gentlemen as witnesses in Washington, and they were concerned (see Hoyt to Sanborn, p. 203, "Recollections of Seventy Years") that as they traveled through either Maryland or Virginia to get to the capital, they would be spirited away to Virginia under a little-known and probably unconstitutional Virginia law that allowed a Virginia judge to order the arrest of anyone deemed a material witness in a federal case. Their concern was not being "found out" nor did it occur during the conspiracy; they were trying to avoid being judicially kidnapped afterward.