NEW BEDFORD, c. h., p. t., seat of justice together with Taunton of Bristol co., Mass., 58 ms. S. of Boston; from W.  434 ms. The town is built on a bold elevation, contains many fine buildings, and appears with advantage from the harbor. A bridge across the Acushnet leads to Fairhaven, on the opposite side. No other place in the country is engaged so exclusively and extensively in the whaling business as this. About $5,000,000 of capital, and two hundred vessels are employed.

Paranoid rumors of more insurrections raced through the South. Gun sellers made fortunes: in the four weeks after the raid, Baltimore dealers were reported to have sold ten thousand pistols to terrified Virginians. Northern schoolteachers, peddlers, and preachers were subjected to all manners of indignities. Real and apocryphal stories of persecution fed Northern rage. A planter was said to have forced his slaves to execute a Yankee evangelist who was found preaching to them.

On May 8, [1858,] at a secret convention in Chatham, in Canada West, Brown proclaimed the establishment of his provisional government, based on the constitution that he had written at the Douglass home. Of the forty-six men present, the only whites were thirteen of Brown’s followers from Kansas. Among the more prominent blacks were Mary Ann Shadd’s brother Isaac, publisher of the Provincial Freeman, and two leaders of the Detroit underground, William Lambert and Reverend William Monroe, who chaired the convention.

On May 8 Brown convened his Chatham Convention, without Tubman or Fredrick Douglass, or any member of his Secret Six supporters. He explained his vision for a slave insurrection and invasion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and laid out his plan to wage war against southern slaveholders. He believed that once the attack began, blacks throughout the North, Canada, and the South (both slave and free) would come rallying to the cause. He presented his newly printed Provisional Constitution for the new free state, and the convention delegates voted unanimously to approve the constitution.