by Tony Horwitz
But the notion of going to Kansas clearly tempted Brown. “If I were not so committed,” he wrote John junior that August, “I would be on my way this fall.” In the autumn of 1854, his commitment wavered. By this point, five of his sons had decided to head west, and they wanted their father to join them. Brown acknowledged in a letter that going to Kansas seemed “more likely to benefit the colored people on the whole.” But he still felt obliged to work with the black settlers in North Elba, having “volunteered in their service.”
That winter, his older sons trekked west with their families and livestock. In the spring of 1855, they staked claims near the Kansas hamlet of Osawatomie, where Brown’s half sister, Florella, had settled with her missionary husband a few months before. The Brown sons plowed, planted, and wrote long letters to their father about the dire political situation in the territory.
“Every Slaveholding State,” John junior wrote in May, “is furnishing men and money to fasten Slavery upon this glorious land, by means no matter how foul.” The worst threat came from “Border Ruffians” based in neighboring Missouri who moved in and out of Kansas, harassing anyone who showed free-soil leanings. The Border Ruffians were particularly adept at voter fraud and intimidation. A territorial census in early 1855 found 2,905 eligible voters in Kansas. Yet proslavery forces “won” an early election that March with 5,427 votes.
By late spring, a proslavery army was rumored to be massing in Missouri for a full-scale invasion. Yet free-state settlers in Kansas “exhibit the most abject and cowardly spirit, whenever their dearest rights are invaded and trampled down,” John junior wrote. He and his brothers were prepared to take the lead in forming free-state militias to fight back, if only they had arms. “We need them more than we do bread.” In another letter that May, John junior echoed his father’s biblical language. “Every day strengthens my belief that the sword, that final arbiter of all the great questions that have stirred mankind, will soon be called on to give its verdict.”
If Brown needed any final prompt to head for Kansas, this was it. His family was in peril and so was the cause of freedom. Yet no one was standing up to the Slave Power’s bullying. In June 1855, after finally settling Mary and four children in an unfinished farmhouse in North Elba, he carried John junior’s letter to a convention of radical abolitionists in Syracuse. Brown spoke of the crisis in Kansas and raised money to buy guns. In August, he left New York State for Kansas; on the way, he stopped in Ohio, where he collected more money and weapons.
He also went to see his father, who was eighty-four years old and in failing health. Owen Brown’s mind, however, remained sharp. In a letter to his daughter in Osawatomie, Owen expressed parental concern about John’s state of mind on the eve of his departure for Kansas. “He has something of a warlike spiret,” Owen wrote. “I think as much as necessary for defence I will hope nothing more.”
A few days later, Owen gave John $40 and said goodbye to his eldest son. He would never see him again.
CHAPTER 4
First Blood
Brown’s family members in Kansas had written home not only about politics, but also of the land and its promise. Like emigrants everywhere, eager to lure friends and family to join them, they painted their new surrounds as a pioneer paradise.
“I certainly never saw any region to compare in beauty and in richness of soil,” wrote Wealthy Brown, John junior’s wife. Timber and water abounded, and there was “any quantity of nice prairie where there is not a stone or a stump to prevent ploughing.” Grapes grew wild and large; steady breezes cooled the June air.
“The prairies are covered with grass which begins to wave in the wind most beautifully,” John junior added. A town site had been laid out, on a gentle slope with open country all around. “The view from this ground is beautiful beyond measure.”
All this may have been true in the early summer of 1855. But in October, when John Brown arrived, eastern Kansas appeared far less pleasant. He found his sons and their families still living in tents and wagons, “shivering over their little fires all exposed to the dreadfuly cutting Winds Morning and Evening, & stormy days,” he wrote. Almost everyone was sick, too feverish and feeble to bring in crops. Nor were cold and wind the only blight. “We were all out a good part of the night last,” John reported to Mary soon after his arrival, “helping to keep the Prairie fires from destroying every thing.”
Brown had reached Kansas in poor shape himself. He’d traveled with his teenaged son Oliver, his son-in-law, Henry Thompson, and a horse and wagon purchased in Chicago. The men walked much of the way because the horse was sick and the wagon’s load heavy. Its contents included the weapons Brown had collected in New York and Ohio, and the corpse of his four-year-old grandson, who had died en route to Kansas with his family the previous spring and been hastily buried. Brown stopped to disinter the child and bring his remains to Kansas, “thinking it would afford some relief to the broken hearted Father & Mother,” he wrote.
By the time Brown reached Kansas, he and his companions were down to sixty cents. Brown, who had turned fifty-five in May, was so exhausted that he camped for the night just a mile or two short of his family’s settlement, letting Oliver and Henry go ahead without him.
In the course of this difficult journey, Brown had reflected on his pilgrimage in a letter to Mary, writing from a tent near the Mississippi as he cooked prairie chickens over a fire: “I think, could I hope in any other way to answer the end of my being; I would be quite content to be at North Elba.”
Answering “the end of my being” was critical to Calvinists like Brown, who believed in predestination. What path had God charted for me, and was I among his Elect? Though Brown had qualms about leaving his wife and young children in a harsh land with little money, he’d come to believe that battling slavery in Kansas was his God-given destiny. And he was impatient to meet it by the time he reached the territory.
“You are all very dear to me & I humbly trust we may be kept & spared; to meet again on Earth,” he wrote Mary and their children in his first letter home after arriving at the Browns’ settlement, “but if not let us all endeavor earnestly to secure admission to that Eternal Home where will be no more bitter seperations, ‘where the wicked shall cease from troubling; & the weary be at rest.’”
BROWN DIDN’T WAIT LONG to take up arms in the battle he’d come to join. A few weeks before his arrival, the territory’s proslavery legislature—“elected” amid rampant fraud—put into force some of the most extreme laws in antebellum America. Anyone who expressed antislavery views was guilty of a felony, punishable by two years’ hard labor. Aiding a fugitive slave brought ten years’ imprisonment; inciting blacks to rebel brought death. As if this weren’t draconian enough, a proslavery editor warned: “We will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil.”
Free-state settlers refused to recognize the territory’s legislature and scheduled an election of their own for October 9, 1855, just two days after Brown’s arrival. Border Ruffians from Missouri had disrupted previous votes with fists and bowie knives; it was feared they would do so again. This gave Brown an opportunity to unpack the special freight—“Guns, Revolvers, Swords, Powder, Caps”—he’d brought west.
“Hearing that trouble was expected we turned out powerfully armed,” he wrote his father, a few days after the vote. All the Brown men took part in this show of force, except one who was too sick to carry a gun. “No enemy appeared,” Brown added, with evident regret.
Two months later, after helping his sons bring in crops and build log “shanties,” Brown leaped at another chance to confront the enemy. Pro-slavery Missourians had laid siege to the free-state stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas, and the Browns hurried forty miles to join the town’s defense. Brown’s zeal earned him a commission as captain of the Liberty Guards, a company of twenty men, four of them his sons.
The unit, however, never fired a shot. Following a last-minute tre
aty, the Missourians pulled back. The newly anointed Captain Brown nonetheless returned home exultant. Free-staters, he believed, had finally faced down their thuggish foes, and his own family had shown its mettle. He also made sure that the world learned of the Liberty Guards, writing at length about the short campaign not only to his family but in a letter to an Ohio newspaper. He took particular pride in telling how he and his men, pistols stuck conspicuously in their belts, had marched onto a bridge guarded by Missourians, who “silently suffered us to pass.” Free-state men, he concluded, had acted with coolness and determination, “sustaining the high character of the Revolutionary Fathers.”
These and other actions quickly earned the Browns and their Kansas settlement, Brown’s Station, a reputation for militancy. Most free-state settlers were antislavery but also antiblack; they wanted Kansas to be a free state for whites only. Also, most free-state leaders discouraged armed resistance, believing that nonviolence would elevate their cause in the eyes of the nation.
The Browns believed in full equality for blacks and were determined to fight for it. John junior became active in free-state politics, while his father maintained a consistently bellicose presence. “Our men have so much war and elections to attend to,” wrote Wealthy Brown in January 1856, “that it seems as though we were a great while getting into a house.”
In fact, Wealthy, her husband, and their young son were still sleeping in a tent and three-sided shed with a fire at the open end—hardly shelter enough against the heavy snows, severe winds, and thirty-below temperatures during the exceptionally harsh winter of 1855–56. Several of the Browns were laid up with frostbitten feet and the family was forced “to live rather slim,” wrote sixteen-year-old Oliver, “having nothing but beans + Johny cake + Johny cake + beans with a very little milk.”
Brown had to ask his father in Ohio for more money, as did his destitute wife, who wrote her husband that “we got on our last loaf & I did not know what to do.” Brown also trekked back and forth to Missouri through heavy snow to get provisions for his Kansas clan. “Father seems to be as rugged as I ever saw him,” Wealthy wrote of Brown. “I guess ‘roughing it’ agrees with him.”
All the while, Brown remained alert for rumblings of war. Hearing a rumor of another planned attack on Lawrence, he wrote Mary: “Should that take place we may soon again be called uppon to ‘buckle on our armor,’ which by the help of God we will do.”
While the weather muffled major conflict, the winter was marked by sporadic violence and constant sniping between Kansas’s proslavery and free-state legislatures, which sought statehood for the territory on opposed platforms. The antislavery camp appeared to be gaining ground, since most of the settlers pouring into Kansas were Northerners. But their foes found a powerful ally in President Franklin Pierce, whose half-southern cabinet was dominated by a Mississippian: Jefferson Davis, secretary of war and future head of the Confederacy.
Early in 1856, news reached Kansas that Pierce had endorsed the territory’s proslavery legislature as “legitimate,” declared resistance to it “treasonable,” and threatened to use federal troops against free-state agitators. Pierce also blamed the nation’s deepening divide on “wild and chimerical schemes of social change” and “a fanatical devotion to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States.” Rarely had the U.S. government’s acquiescence to the Slave Power been so plainly expressed—and done so by a dough-faced Yankee from New Hampshire.
Brown was incensed. In a letter to an abolitionist congressman in Ohio, he decried the notion that federal troops might enforce the “Hellish enactments” of Kansas’s proslavery legislature, and demanded to know “Will anything be done?” Privately, however, he welcomed the outrages committed by Pierce and his southern allies.
“I have no desire,” he wrote Mary, “to have the Slave power cease from its acts of aggression. ‘Their foot shall slide in due time.’” Brown was quoting a passage from Deuteronomy about the Lord’s punishment of the wicked and unsuspecting: “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time; for the day of their calamity is at hand.”
APRIL 1856 BROUGHT SHOOTS of grass and fresh portents of conflict. A territorial judge arrived to hold court at Dutch Henry’s Crossing, a proslavery outpost on Pottawatomie Creek, near Brown’s Station. Rumors flew that arrest warrants would be issued for the Browns, who had flagrantly defied proslavery statutes. But the family wasn’t about to cower before “bogus” Kansas law. Instead, several of the Brown men sat in on the court session and then stepped outside, loudly calling together a newly formed local militia, the Pottawatomie Rifles. They pledged to resist by force any attempt to enforce proslavery laws and presented this determination in writing to the judge. He adjourned the court the next day without arresting any of them.
Whether or not the judge had been intimidated by the Browns’ display, it greatly enhanced their notoriety and deepened the enmity of their proslavery neighbors, a number of whom served as court officers or jurors. The day after the court standoff, Brown wrote a relative: “Matters are a fair way of comeing to a head.”
They would do so in May, a month that opened with a menacing arrival. Four hundred Southerners rode into eastern Kansas, led by an Alabama major, Jefferson Buford, who had recruited “men capable of bearing arms” to colonize the territory and defend it from “the free-soil hordes.” The legion’s banner proclaimed “The Supremacy of the White Race.” On entering Kansas, Buford’s men camped near Dutch Henry’s Crossing, within easy striking distance of the Browns and other free-state settlers who lived in scattered cabins and hamlets between the Osage River and Pottawatomie Creek.
“We are constantly exposed and have almost no protection,” Florella Adair wrote on May 16. The vulnerable free-state enclave, she added, “is known and called an ‘abolitionist nest.’”
In the event, the proslavery forces struck first at a much bigger nest: the abolitionist bastion of Lawrence. When free-state leaders in the town resisted arrest on charges of treason, a U.S. marshal called on “law-abiding citizens” in Kansas to form a posse “for the proper execution of the law.” His call was promptly answered—by Border Ruffians from Missouri, Buford’s band of Alabamans, and others who relished a chance to invade the free-state Gomorrah at Lawrence.
“Draw your revolvers & bowie knives, & cool them in the heart’s blood of all those damned dogs, that dare defend that damned breathing hole of hell,” David Atchison, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, told cheering Southerners encamped outside Lawrence on May 21, “never to slacken or stop until every spark of free-state, free-speech, free-niggers, or free in any shape is quenched out of Kansas!”
When news of the threat to Lawrence reached Brown’s Station the next day, John junior, who was head of the Pottawatomie Rifles, quickly mobilized his thirty-four men and set off for the besieged town. His father and four of his brothers formed a separate squad; two other militias joined en route. The free-state men marched through the night and part of the next day before learning they were too late. A rider from Lawrence reported that Border Ruffians had taken the town without resistance and were proceeding to loot and burn it. The free-state men marched on, until they heard from a second rider that federal troops had taken control of the ruined town from its southern pillagers.
Brown was enraged. Had no one put up a fight? As the free-state men made camp and deliberated over what to do, Jason Brown overheard his father talking to two men about their proslavery neighbors back at Dutch Henry’s Crossing, on Pottawatomie Creek. “Now something must be done,” Brown said. “Something is going to be done now.”
He spoke to others in camp, seeking men for a secret mission under his command. John junior argued against dividing the free-state force and cautioned his father to “commit no rash act.” But four other sons—Owen, Frederick, Salmon, and Oliver—joined their father, as did their brother-in-law, Henry Thompson. Brown also recruited the two men he’d spoken to over breakfast.
Theodore Weiner, a Polish Jew, ran a store near Dutch Henry’s and had been harassed by its inhabitants. James Townsley, a painter, knew the proslavery settlement well and offered to carry Brown’s band to the Pottawatomie in his two-horse wagon.
The eight men were well armed with rifles and revolvers. But before heading off to the enemy encampment, they used a grindstone to sharpen the short, heavy broadswords that Brown had acquired in Ohio. “There was a signal understood,” his son Owen later said. “When my father was to raise a sword—then we were to begin.”
THOUGH BROWN NEEDED NO further spur to carry out his Gideon-like mission, the pillaging of Lawrence coincided with another shocking assault by the proslavery camp. Earlier that week, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered a five-hour diatribe about Kansas, accusing the “Slave Power” of perpetrating “the rape of a Virgin Territory” by “hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” Sumner also heaped invective on Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, whom he mocked for making great claims to chivalry while taking as his mistress “the harlot, Slavery.”
Butler was ill and absent from the chamber. But a kinsman from South Carolina, Congressman Preston Brooks, accosted Sumner on the floor of the Senate on May 22, as Lawrence smoldered. Brooks told Sumner his speech was “a libel on South Carolina and against my relative Senator Butler.” Then he beat the Massachusetts senator hard enough to splinter the gold-headed cane he used to do it. Sumner fell to the floor, bloodied and unconscious, so badly hurt that he did not return to the Senate for three years. Brooks, meanwhile, became an instant southern celebrity, hailed for having “lashed into submission” the Senate’s most vocal abolitionist.