Part 3

In all the Kansas conflict, he threw federal troops and federal politicians against the Free State men. The South rejoiced at his stand, but the Free State men went on with their work. And John Brown and his sons took a leading position in the fight.

THE SACK OF LAWRENCE

“Yet we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” said a flamboyant editorial in the Squatter Sovereign, a pro-slavery paper published at Atchison, Kansas, a Border Ruffian stronghold.

The Slaveryites lived up to this promise. The Free State men at this time had not begun to arm, but doggedly and quietly went about organizing their own government at Topeka. Their actions infuriated the Southerners. Now began the long list of crimes that made the soil of Kansas reek with blood.

It would be impossible to give a full record here of all those crimes. The least that happened was the destruction of newspapers that protested against Southern injustice, such as the Parkville, Missouri, Luminary, which was burned down, the machinery thrown in the river, and the editors threatened with a similar fate if they indulged in further free speech.

There were hundreds of abolitionists murdered in Kansas; hundreds of their wives and children were gibed at and threatened and terrified; hundreds of their cabins were burnt down, and thousands of head of cattle stolen.

One of the murders was the killing of Samuel Collins, owner of a saw-mill near Atchison, by Patrick Laughlin, a pro-slavery man. No effort was made to punish him by the authorities. But something was done by them in another case. Charles Dow, a young Free State man from Ohio, was cruelly shot down from behind by Franklin Coleman, a pro-slavery settler from Virginia.

What the authorities did in this case was to arrest Jacob Branson, with whom the dead man had lived. A pro-slavery sheriff charged Branson with having made threats to revenge his friend. Branson was rescued by a group of his friends with rifles, and taken to Lawrence for protection, Lawrence being entirely settled by the Free State men.

The Sheriff called on the Governor, and the Governor called on the militia, and with the aid of Missouri citizens, about twelve hundred armed men marched on Lawrence, to “put down the rebellion.”

The men of Lawrence sent out a call to all Northerners; and John Brown and his men were among those who responded. There were five hundred settlers in Lawrence, and they feverishly fortified the town with embankments; but the whole affair ended by a compromise; there was no fighting; only two men were killed in a light skirmish.

The Southerners left, weak with all the whisky they had drunk on the expedition, according to reliable observers, and angered that they had not been given the chance to burn Lawrence down.

For Lawrence was a sore spot to the pro-slavery men. It was the largest Free State town in Kansas, and the center of all the political

## activities of that group. It published a newspaper, and its Free State

Hotel was the headquarters of the Northerner’s government.

There were other murders, despite the treaty signed at this time. And then in February, as Free State men were holding another of their elections, they were assaulted at Leavenworth, and many of them forced to flee to Lawrence.

One of the leaders of the Free State men, as he was returning from Leavenworth after the election, was captured by a company of Border Ruffian militia. Wounded and defenceless though he was, they literally hacked the unfortunate foe of slavery into pieces with their hatchets and knives. Not an effort was made to punish these murderers, though their names were known by everyone. Some of the slavery journals even praised the deed, and called for more. Said the Kansas Pioneer of Kickapoo:

“Sound the bugle of war over the length and breadth of the land, and leave not an Abolitionist in the Territory to relate their treacherous and contaminating deeds. Strike your piercing rifle balls and your glittering steel to their black and poisonous hearts.”

And in May of that year, after further alarms and disturbances, Sheriff Jones returned with an army of 750 “swearing, whisky-drinking ruffians,” armed with rifles, and even two pieces of artillery. This time the Free State men were unprepared. John Brown was not there, nor any other real leader. The Free State men still believed in peace, and legality. And they saw their Free State Hotel go up in flames, their newspaper plant destroyed, and an orgy of drunken destruction let loose among their homes.

“Let Yankees tremble, Abolitionists fall, Our Motto is, Give Southern Rights to All.”

This was the inscription on one of the banners of the invading army. Lawrence was the first city to receive these rights. Thereafter Free State men knew what to expect; they began forming companies of riflemen and guerrilla fighters to protect their communities against Southern rights.

THE LIBERTY GUARDS

One of these companies was the Liberty Guards, as commander of which John Brown first received his historic title of Captain. Besides four of Brown’s stalwart sons, there were fourteen other Free State settlers in the company, and they were present at the first attempted raid on Lawrence, which had resulted in a compromise and an abortive “treaty.”

Captain John Brown had gathered his men, and was on the way to Lawrence for the second time when they were informed by a messenger that Lawrence had already been destroyed. The Border Ruffians had captured the town without meeting any resistance, and had razed it to the ground, the breathless courier reported. This startling news was received in a bitter silence by the little company. They pushed on, nevertheless, and encamped near Prairie City, hearing from passing stragglers further reports of burnings, killings and drunken threats of the Southern invaders.

It was a period of great excitement. The Kansans felt as if war had commenced in earnest on them, and that they were to be wiped out. Some of the men who lived on the Pottawatomie Creek, near Dutch’s Crossing, heard reports that their women had been threatened by a group of the toughest pro-slavery ruffians who lived there.

“We expect to be butchered, every Free State settler in our region,” one of these men told John Brown.

Here was a story John Brown heard a few days before from the lips of a pretty young girl named Mary Grant, a settler’s daughter in the region:

“Dutch Bill arrived at our house, horribly drunk, with a whisky bottle with a corncob stopper, and an immense butcher knife in his belt. Mr. Grant, my father, was sick in bed, but when they told him that Bill Sherman was coming, he had a shotgun put by his side. ‘Old woman,’ said the ruffian to my mother, ‘you and I are pretty good friends, but damn your daughter, I’ll drink her heart’s blood.’ My little brother Charley succeeded in cajoling the drunken man away.”

An old settler named Morse was hung and let down again by this same group of ruffians. Then they threatened to kill him with an axe, but his little boys set up a terrible wailing, and begged for his life. The ruffians spared him, but gave him until sundown to leave the community. He wandered in the brush for two or three days with his children, frightened to death, and finally died of the excitement.

There were other such tales, including one horrible story of a similar attack on a woman in childbirth. The ruffians had also put up a notice, advising every Free State settler to leave the community in thirty days or have his throat cut.

John Brown and his men discussed this matter, and grimly decided to “do something to show these barbarians we have some rights.” They moved down that night on the Pottawatomie, and calling out the five men who had done most of the killing, threatening, and burning down of houses in the region, executed them as a measure of self-defense.

It was a bloody, stern act, but it proceeded out of the same inflamed spirit with which the miners at Herrin recently shot down the armed strikebreakers who had been brought into their section. Many, including some sympathetic historians like Oswald Garrison Villard, have condemned this brutal deed, and have called it a stain on John Brown’s life. Murder is murder, and it cannot be defended on ethical or logical grounds. But when a thug assails one with a gun, or threatens one’s wife and children, is one to practice non-resistance on him? Is his life more valuable than one’s own? In such moments men do not think, they act as nature tells them to; even a Villard would refuse to yield up his life to a thug; he would forget logic and ethics, and defend himself. And that was what John Brown did; his act was a stern and immediate answer to the long-continued murders and threats against the Free State men of Kansas. It shook the Territory to its foundations, and it made of John Brown a hunted outlaw. Thereafter he grew no more corn and built no more cabins for his family; he was a guerrilla captain in the field.

AFTER POTTAWATOMIE

John Brown, Jr., and Jason Brown, two of the fighter’s sons, were captured by Missourians and suffered incredible tortures after the Pottawatomie affair. Both men were burning with fever, but they were dragged at the ends of ropes for two or three days, beaten, hung up and then let down, and then chained to oxcarts in the wind and rain. John Jr., always of a nervous temperament, went temporarily insane under this treatment, but his captors had no mercy. Though he shrieked wildly, and though his brother Jason begged that the Southerns have pity, their hearts were hard as flint.

The following scene is described by Jason:

“Captain Wood said to me: ‘Keep that man still.’ ‘I can’t keep an insane man still,’ said I. ‘He is no more insane than you are. If you don’t keep him still, we’ll do it for you.’ I tried my best, but John had not a glimmer of reason and could not understand anything. He went on yelling. Three troopers came in. One struck him a terrible blow on the jaw with his fist, throwing him on his side. A second knelt on him and pounded him with his fist. The third stood off and kicked him with all his force in the back of the neck. ‘Don’t kill a crazy man!’ cried I. ‘No more crazy than you are, but we’ll fetch it out of him.’ After that John lay unconscious for three or four hours. We camped about one and a half miles southeast of the Adairs. There we stayed about two weeks. Then we were ordered to move again. They drove us on foot, all the prisoners, chained two and two. At Ottawa ford young Kilbourne dropped of a sun-stroke.”

The men were later released, for they had done nothing that could be prosecuted in the court where the pro-slavery government “troops” had driven them. This was the sort of thing John Brown was fighting; it was life and death, and no mercy could be expected from the Southerners. Mr. Villard and other timorous friends of John Brown do not seem to understand the nature of the battle; and they do not understand what giant faith and courage it must have taken for an old farmer of fifty-five to continue fighting in such an atmosphere.

John Brown did not flinch. Another son, Frederick, was shot down in cold blood on the steps of the family home at Osawatomie, but the old fighter, shedding a silent tear for the loss, for he deeply loved his children, went on his stern path.

The spuriously-elected slavery governor offered a reward of $3,000 for John Brown, and the President of the United States a reward of $250. Federal troops scoured the territory for him. For months he and his men slept out in the fields, flitting from place to place, and fighting in many battles.

With only nine men he fought off a troop of twenty-three Southerners at the “battle of Black Jack,” and forced them to surrender. In August, 250 men moved on Osawatomie, to destroy it as they had destroyed Lawrence. John Brown gathered about forty men to resist the Southerners, and a hot battle was fought, in which, of course, Brown had to retreat. The town was thoroughly wiped out, and also granted “Southern rights.”

There were many other skirmishes; the name of Captain John Brown, old Brown of Osawatomie, became a legend in Kansas. He became a sort of Pancho Villa figure to the South; a hundred times he was reported dead or captured; a hundred times he was blamed for wild deeds he had never done.

Here are two contemporary pictures of John Brown in the field. The first is written by August Bondi, a brave and able young Austrian Jew, who put himself under Brown’s leadership after the Pottawatomie affair:

“We stayed here up to the morning of Sunday, June 1st, and during those few days I fully succeeded in understanding the exalted character of my old friend, John Brown. He exhibited at all times the most affectionate care for each of us. He also attended to the cooking. We had two meals daily, consisting of bread, baked in skillets; this was washed down with creek water, mixed with a little ginger and a spoon of molasses to each pint. Nevertheless, we kept in excellent spirits; we considered ourselves as one family, allied to one another by the consciousness that it was our duty to undergo all these privations for the good cause. We were determined to share any danger with one another, that victory or death might find us together; and we were united, as a band of brothers, by the love and affection toward the man who with tender words and wise counsel, in the depth of the wilderness of Ottawa creek, prepared a handful of young men for the work of laying the foundation of a free commonwealth.

“His words have ever remained firmly engraved in my mind. Many and various were the instructions he gave during the days of our compulsory leisure in this camp. He expressed himself to us that we should never allow ourselves to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws and institutions to exist if our conscience and reason condemned them.

“He admonished us not to care whether a majority, no matter how large, opposed our principles and opinions. The largest majorities were sometimes only organized mobs, whose howlings never changed black to white or night into day. A minority convinced of its rights, based on moral principles, would, under a republican government, sooner or later become the majority.”

The other description is that of William A. Phillips, then a correspondent of the New York Tribune, and later a Colonel in the Civil War. Brown, still an outlaw, was on his way to Topeka, to be on hand at whatever crisis might arise at the opening of the legislature elected by the Free State settlers. Phillips met him on the way.

His account is important, for it shows that John Brown saw much farther than his own times. He knew that there were many other things wrong with the social system in America besides slavery. There are plain indications here, as in other accounts, that John Brown was one of those early American Socialists, such as Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, father of Arthur Brisbane, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, who felt that the abolition of slavery was only the first step toward a free America. Wendell Phillips, for instance, one of this abolitionist band, became after the Civil War one of the leading champions of the rights of workingmen in their battle against the capitalists.

But here is Colonel Phillips giving his charming picture, in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1879, of that night ride and the conversation he had with Brown as they lay bivouacking in the open beneath the stars:

“He seemed as little disposed to sleep as I was, and we talked; or rather, he did, for I said little. I found that he was a thorough astronomer; he pointed out the different constellations and their movements. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is midnight,’ as he pointed to the finger marks of his great clock in the sky. The whispering of the wind in the prairies was full of voices to him, and the stars as they shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him. ‘How admirable is the symmetry of the heavens; how grand and beautiful! Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor creatures. If one star is more brilliant than others, it is continually shooting in some erratic way into space.’

“He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he said that slavery besotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse; nor did the Free State men escape his sharp censure. He said we had many true and noble men, but too many broken down politicians from the older states, who would rather pass resolutions than act, and who criticized all who did real work.

“A professional politician, he went on, you could never trust; for even if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage.

“One of the most interesting things in Captain Brown’s conversation that night, and one that marked him as a thinker, was his treatment of our forms of social and political life. He thought society ought to be reorganized on a less selfish basis; for while material interests gained by competition for bread, men and women lost much by it. He condemned the sale of land as a chattel, and thought there was an infinite number of wrongs to right before society would be what it should be, but that in our country slavery was the sum of all villainies, and its abolition the first essential work.”

THE GREAT PLAN EVOLVES

Much more can be written of this Kansas period in John Brown’s life; a large bibliography of Robin Hood literature has gathered about it. John Brown, and other men like him, hastened the solution of the slavery question by their firm stand in Kansas. If the South had been allowed to add Kansas to the roster of slave states, it would have crept further north, until perhaps there would have been slavery up to Canada. It is easy for any institution to become permanent; man is a creature of conventions. Slavery, like cannibalism among savages, would have in time become a matter-of-fact doctrine with all America, had not the Kansas abolitionists challenged it.

John Brown left Kansas in 1857, and made a trip through New England, gathering friends, money, arms and recruits for a new great plan that was working in his mind.

He saw that the abolitionists would be successful in making Kansas a free state. The job was already half done; but when it was completed, what next? There would still be the vast groaning empire of slavery in the South; there would still be five million black folk bought and sold like cattle; beaten, raped, murdered as if they were lower than cattle. The South would still be in the saddle at the White House; the fugitive slave law would still be enforced; and churches, business men, newspapers, mobs, and United States troops, all would join in upholding the devil’s doctrine that slavery was respectable, the law of the land.

The Abolitionists, with their few journals, were ever agitating against this infamy that was being protected by the United States flag. But John Brown knew that only a bold deed could shake the union; could make men see clearly what slavery was.

Slavery had become so firmly settled into the national life that the few thousand abolitionists only seemed like gadflies biting at the hide of a rhinoceros. John Brown saw that a pick-axe was needed to draw the blood. The pocket-books of the slave-holders must be attacked. Slavery must be sabotaged, and made unprofitable. It was such a safe and sane business now; it must be made dangerous. John Brown planned to go boldly into Virginia, with a band of men, and start there a large movement of runaway slaves. When slaves were no longer meek and submissive, when every slave became a potential runaway and rebel, slavery would cease to be a paying business. Thus reasoned John Brown.

In December, 1858, with things at last peaceful in Kansas Territory, and a Free State almost assured, John Brown made a last stirring raid into Missouri. A Negro slave named Jim Daniels had come to one of Brown’s men with a pathetic tale. He and his wife and babies were to be sold at auction in a few weeks, and perhaps separated forever. He was a fine-looking, intelligent mulatto, and he wept as he told the story. John Brown and ten of his men rescued Daniels’ little family and carried off to freedom eleven other slaves of the vicinity. At dawn the next day the caravan of freedom set forth on its long journey to the Northern Star--to Canada, where slaves were free. It was a perilous and arduous undertaking. The party had to sleep by stealth in barns and icy fields, with armed sentinels posted all night. The Governor of Missouri wired to Washington; money rewards were offered for Brown, armed posses were sent searching for him, the Federal troops combed the state. There were prairie snowstorms, and there were little provisions. But the old lion brought his charges through to Canada.

One incident of the trip is worth repeating. It shows what a terror the mere name of John Brown had become in Kansas.

At one place, the ford of a river, Brown’s party learned there was a posse of 80 armed slavery ruffians waiting to capture him. The old man did not turn back, though he had only 22 men, black and white. He marched down on the ruffians. “They had as good a position as 80 men could wish,” wrote one of Brown’s men, “they could have defeated a thousand opponents, but the closer we got to the ford, the farther they got from it. We found some of their horses, for they were in such haste to fly that some of them mounted two on a saddle, and we gave chase and took three or four prisoners, whom we later released. The marshal who led them went so fast one would think he feared the fate of Lot’s wife.”

“Old Captain Brown is not to be taken by boys,” said the Leavenworth Times, now Free State, “and he invites cordially all pro-slavery men to try their hands at arresting him.”

On March 12th the slaves were safe in Canada, rejoicing in their happy fortune, after having been brought in the dead of winter, through hostile country, some 1,100 miles in 82 days. One of the slave women had had six masters, and four of the party had served sixteen owners in all. Now they were free. And their little children were free, and would never be whipped by a Southern gentleman, or stood on the auction block like a horse or cow. The outlaw John Brown had done what was forbidden by the Supreme Court and the President of the United States; and now he was planning greater deeds.

THE EVE OF THE TRAGEDY