Lot 41

1860 Concord, Massachusetts Letter on the John Brown Association with Content on Franklin Sanborn's School

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Lot 41
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1860 Concord, Massachusetts Letter on the John Brown Association with Content on Franklin Sanborn's School
1860 Concord, Massachusetts Letter on the John Brown Association with Content on Franklin Sanborn's School
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1860 Concord, Massachusetts Letter on the John Brown Association with Content on Franklin Sanborn's School

Estimate: $400 - $800

Current Bid: $200

(1 Bid)
by Early American History Auctions
July 25, 2026 12:00 PM EDT
Live Auction
1520 Commerce St
#312
Winchester, VA, US 22601-4468

200
March 6, 1860-Dated, Autograph Letter Signed, "Lizzi Cheney" with Content on Franklin Sanborn's School, His Flights to Canada Amid the John Brown Investigation, while Two of John Brown's Daughters Anne and Sarah, were then in attendance at Franklin Sanborn's School located in Concord, Massachusetts, Choice Extremelu Fine.
Two of John Brown's daughters, Anne and Sarah attended Franklin Sanborn's School in Concord, Massachusetts. Sanborn was thoroughly absorbed into the "Concord Circle", becoming a close friend of Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson. This letter delivers a rare, contemporary, small-town eyewitness account of the federal manhunt surrounding John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, written just months after John Brown's execution, while the investigation was still very much alive. It reports directly on FRANKLIN B. SANBORN, one of the "Secret Six" financial backers of John Brown's raid while the Headmaster of a Concord, Mass. school. Then his actively while evading a U.S. Senate subpoenas compelling his testimony before the "Mason Committee". It reads, in part:
"Mr Sanborn's school continues flourishing, notwithstanding that he is not here more than half the time. His adventures in Canada, and the next hidden in town, only appearing after dark, and the next quietly in school... are the talk of the town."
This letter captures, in real time, Sanborn's actual pattern of evasion, slipping across the Canadian border, hiding within Concord itself, and periodically resuming his teaching duties, all while federal marshals sought his arrest. The letter goes further still, naming two of JOHN BROWN's own daughters as then attending Sanborn's school,stating:
"and are plain ordinary looking girls. One of them was with her father at Harper's Ferry all summer, living under a feigned name, and has been through all sorts of adventures." This is referring to almost certainly, a reference to Annie or Martha Brown, both of whom served as housekeepers and lookouts at the Kennedy Farm staging area under assumed identities in the months preceding the raid. This letter closes with lighter Concord social news and a note that its writer's knee is "so well I can walk two miles without crutches or cane."
It is written with excellent sharp handwriting in deep brown ink on very fresh clean white o=wove paper measuring 8" x 5" with light transmittal folds, together with its original postally stamped envelope sent to: "David Cunningham Esqr / For Mrs Cunningham. / Corpus Christi, Texas. (2 items)
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1831-1917) is one of the more fascinating secondary figures of the Abolitionist era, a young schoolmaster who ended up at the center of the John Brown conspiracy and then outlived nearly everyone involved, becoming the great memoirist of the Transcendentalist circle.
Sanborn was born December 15, 1831, in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and graduated from Harvard in 1855. That same year, at the invitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he opened a private academy in Concord, Massachusetts. The school became something of an institution among the town's intellectual elite: his pupils included children of Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Mann, Henry James Sr., and John Brown himself, Brown's daughters Anne and Sarah attended. Sanborn was thoroughly absorbed into the Concord circle, becoming a close friend of Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson.
Sanborn became secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee in 1856, channeling money and arms to free-state settlers during the "Bleeding Kansas" fighting. Through that work he met John Brown in early 1857 and became his most active New England advocate, arranging introductions, lecture appearances, and funding.
He was the youngest of the "Secret Six" who financed Brown's plans: the others were Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, and Gerrit Smith. The six knew, in varying degrees of detail, that Brown intended an armed strike against Slavery in Virginia; Sanborn knew more than most.
When the raid failed in October 1859 and Brown's captured papers implicated his backers, Sanborn burned correspondence and twice fled briefly to Canada. He refused to testify before the Senate's Mason Committee investigating the raid. The most dramatic episode of his life came on the night of April 3, 1860, when federal deputies arrived at his Concord home to arrest him and carry him to Washington.
Sanborn physically resisted, his sister raised the alarm, church bells rang, and a crowd of neighbors blocked the carriage while a judge issued a writ of habeas corpus. The next day the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court freed him on the grounds that the arrest was improperly executed. He was never punished for his role in the conspiracy.
Sanborn had a long and productive second act. He edited the Boston Commonwealth and was for decades a correspondent for the Springfield Republican. He became a pioneer of organized social reform, a founder of the American Social Science Association (1865), secretary of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, and an influential voice in prison reform and care for the insane and the poor.
As the Concord circle died off, he became its chronicler, producing biographies and editions of Thoreau (1882), John Brown (Life and Letters of John Brown, 1885), Alcott, Emerson, and Hawthorne, along with his own two-volume Recollections of Seventy Years (1909).
Historians treat his memoirs as invaluable but handle them carefully, he was known to edit documents and burnish the record, his own included. He died February 24, 1917, in Westfield, New Jersey.
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