The name "Secret Six" was invented by writers long after Brown's death. The term never appears in the testimony at Brown's trial, in James Redpath's "The public life of Capt. John Brown" (1859), or in the "Memoirs of John Brown" of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1878). The men involved helped Brown as individuals and did not work together or correspond with each other. They were never in the same room at the same time, and in some cases barely knew each other.