John Brown's Provisional Constitution

Hundreds of copies of a provisional constitution were found among John Brown's papers after his 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

It called for a new state in the Appalachian Mountains, a sort of West Virginia, populated by volunteer freedom fighters and escaped slaves from plantations, which were at lower altitudes.

[1]: 162–163 The Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States was written by Brown while a guest in Frederick Douglass's house in Rochester, New York, in February, 1858.

[4][5]: 258–261 Although this document was dismissed by contemporaries as evidence of Brown's madness, David Reynolds points out that at the time, the U.S. Constitution itself was "a highly contested text".

Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who called it "a covenant with death and an agreement from hell" because it indirectly sanctioned slavery,[6]: 249–250  as the Dred Scott decision had just confirmed.

[9] In the pockets of William H. Leeman, one of the rebels killed at Harpers Ferry, was found a commission as captain "in the army established under the provisional constitution".