On August 24, 1859 the Chambersburg Valley Spirit published the following report:
In its zeal to indict Douglass and his abolitionist cause, the Spirit neglected to mention the real reason that Douglass had come to town in the first place: to meet with John Brown. Brown had written Douglass, requesting money and asking him to meet himself and John Kagi at an abandoned stone quarry near Chambersburg. Douglass did so, bringing along an associate, "Emporer" Shields Green, a former slave from South Carolina, with whom Brown was acquainted.
Brown and Kagi tried desperately to convince Douglass to help them, and he tried equally as hard to dissuade them from carrying out their plan. Douglass insisted that the attack was suicidal, that Brown would never escape alive. Green, however, disagreed with Douglass, and when asked what he planned to do, replied "I b'leve I'll go wid de old man."
Douglass, the only survivor of the meeting, described this incident in detail in his 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
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