John Brown's Provisional Constitution

John Brown's Provisional Constitution was a governing charter the abolitionist John Brown drafted in February 1858 at the Rochester, New York home of Frederick Douglass, intended to organize a new anti-slavery state in the Appalachian Mountains for freedom fighters and escaped enslaved people. Brown formally presented the document for adoption at a convention he organized in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, held May 8 to 10, 1858, where it described itself as a constitution for the people of the United States and provided for a unicameral legislature of five to ten members elected at large, deliberately omitting a Senate. Brown intended the document as the legal and administrative framework for the armed raid he was then planning, under which liberated territory would be governed as an alternative government opposed to slavery. Hundreds of printed copies were later found among Brown's papers after his October 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and prosecutors introduced the constitution at his trial as evidence of seditious intent toward the United States government. The document itself was never distributed to the enslaved population it was meant to govern, and Brown was convicted of treason and executed in December 1859, leaving the constitution as a historical record of his revolutionary planning rather than a charter that ever took effect.