I noted earlier that there was no evidence that such an attempt took place in the case of Brown. George Hoyt, at the behest of Le Barnes, approached Brown on Oct 28 and told him of a plot by Boston abolitionists; Brown shut him down and Hoyt shut the plot down*. However, a plot as described by Mr. Gilmore DID exist, and I was curious to see whether Mr. Gilmore had done any more research than the Kansas sources he notes, which are inaccurate on the rather important point of who exactly it was that was about to be rescued.
The Massachusetts plotters were not shy about their parts in this plot, "Yankee" historians notwithstanding. So here, as they say, is the rest of the story, in the words of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Massachusetts preacher who had led at least one abolitionist delegation to Kansas (in 1856) and was later a money-raiser for Brown:
"The only persons beside myself who were intimately acquainted with the project formed for rescuing Stevens and Hazlett** were Richard H. Hinton, already mentioned, and John W. LeBarnes, afterwards lieutenant of a German company in the Second Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War. It was decided that an attempt at rescue could best be made from a rendezvous at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and that Hinton should go to Kansas, supplied with money by LeBarnes and myself, to get the cooperation of Captain James Montgomery and eight or ten tried and trusty men. I was to meet these men at Harrisburg, while LeBarnes was to secure a reinforcement of German-Americans, among whom he had much influence, from New York. Only one man in Harrisburg, an active Abolitionist, knew of our purpose, and I met Montgomery at this man's house, after taking up my own residence, on February 17, 1860, at the United States Hotel, under the name of Charles P. Carter. I had met the guerrilla leader once before in Kansas, and we now consulted about the expedition, which presented no ordinary obstacles.
"The enterprise would involve traversing fifty miles of mountain country by night, at the rate of about ten miles each night, carrying arms, ammunition, blankets, and a week's rations, with the frequent necessity of camping without fire in February, and with the certainty of detection in case of snow. It would include crossing the Potomac, possibly at a point where there was neither a bridge nor a ford. It would culminate in an attack on a building with a wall fourteen feet high, with two sentinels outside and twenty-five inside; with a certainty of raising the town in the process, and then, if successful, with the need of retreating, perhaps with wounded men and probably by daylight. These were the difficulties that Montgomery, as our leader, had to face; and although, in Kansas, he had taken Fort Scott with twenty- two men against sixty-eight, yet this was quite a different affair. For myself, I had at that time such confidence in his guidance that the words of the Scotch ballad often rang in my ears: —
"I could ha'e ridden the border through
Had Christie Graeme been at my back."
"Lithe, quick, low-voiced, reticent, keen, he seemed the ideal of a partisan leader, and was, indeed, a curious compound of the moss-trooper and the detective. Among his men were Carpenter, Pike, Seamans, Rice, Gardner, Willis, and Silas Soule, — all well known in Kansas. The last three of these men had lately been among the rescuers of Dr. Doy from jail at St. Joseph, Missouri, — a town of eleven thousand inhabitants, — under circumstances of peculiar daring; one of them [im]personating a horse-thief and two others the officers who had arrested him, and thus getting admission to the jail.
"The first need was to make exploration of the localities, and, taking with him one of his companions, — a man, as it proved, of great resources, — Montgomery set out by night and was gone several days. While he examined the whole region, — his native Kentucky accent saving him from all suspicion, — his comrade penetrated into the very jail, in the guise of a jovial, half-drunken Irishman, and got speech with the prisoners, who were thus notified of the proposed rescue. They expressed great distrust of it, and this partly because, even if successful, it would endanger the life of the jailer, Avis, who had won their gratitude, as well as Brown's, by his great kindness. I have never known whether this opposition had any covert influence on the mind of Montgomery, but I know that he came back at last, and quenched all our hopes by deciding that a severe snowstorm which had just occurred rendered the enterprise absolutely hopeless. I was not at the time quite satisfied with this opinion, but it was impossible to overrule our leader; and on visiting that region and the jail itself, many years later, I was forced to believe him wholly right. At any rate, it was decided by vote of the party to abandon the expedition, and the men were sent back to Kansas, their arms being forwarded to Worcester, while I went to Antioch College, Ohio, to give a lecture to the college students, and then returned home. I now recognize how almost hopeless the whole enterprise had appeared in my own mind : the first entry in my notebook, after returning (March I, 1860), is headed with the words of that celebrated message in the First Book of Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities," — " Recalled to Life."
--Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Cheerful Yesterdays" (1898). pp. 231-234.
* That was not the end of Le Barnes' plotting, as there was a later idea on the part of Lysander Spooner and Le Barnes to develop a scheme for kidnapping Governor Wise to trade him for Brown, but it neither a) got off the ground, not b) included any of our Kansas notables.
** Stevens and Hazlett were two of Brown's men who were tried after Brown and were still in the Charlestown jail in Feb, 1860. John Brown himself had for two months, as they say, lay a-moulderin' in the grave.