by H. W. Brands
A smaller number of free-state men had responded and prepared to resist. “A battle was hourly expected,” Brown said. He and his sons considered the matter, and five of them decided to go to the aid of the Lawrence defenders. “We then set about providing a little corn-bread and meat, blankets, and cooking utensils, running bullets and loading all our guns, pistols, etc. The five set off in the afternoon, and after a short rest in the night (which was quite dark), continued our march until after daylight next morning, when we got our breakfast, started again, and reached Lawrence in the forenoon, all of us more or less lamed by our tramp.”
They discovered that negotiations had begun between Governor Shannon, for the slavery side, and the principals among the free-state men. A standoff accompanied the parley, and the residents of Lawrence used the time to erect earthworks against an attack. Eventually Shannon concluded that the town wasn’t worth attacking. In exchange for receiving the witness, he called off the siege and sent the Missourians home.
“So ended this last Kansas invasion,” Brown told Mary, “the Missourians returning with flying colors, after incurring heavy expenses, suffering great exposure, hardships, and privations, not having fought any battles, burned or destroyed any infant towns or Abolition presses; leaving the Free-State men organized and armed, and in full possession of the Territory; not having fulfilled any of all their dreadful threatenings, except to murder one unarmed man, and to commit some robberies and waste of property upon defenseless families, unfortunately within their power. We learn by their papers that they boast of a great victory over the Abolitionists; and well they may.” But their boasts disguised the setback they had suffered. “Free-State men have only hereafter to retain the footing they have gained, and Kansas is free,” Brown wrote.
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RETAINING THE FREE-STATE footing was no easy task. The winter of 1855–56 tested the endurance and faith of everyone in Kansas. “The weather continues very severe, and it is now nearly six weeks that the snow has been almost constantly driven, like dry sand, by the fierce winds of Kansas,” Brown wrote in February. “Thermometer on Sunday and Monday at twenty-eight to twenty-nine degrees below zero. Ice in the river, in the timber, and under the snow, eighteen inches thick.” The slavery partisans regained their confidence and renewed their harassment of the free-staters. “We have just learned of some new and shocking outrages at Leavenworth, and that the Free-State people there have fled to Lawrence, which place is again threatened with an attack. Should that take place, we may soon again be called upon to ‘buckle on our armor,’ which by the help of God we will do.”
The slavery offensive escalated. “Camps were formed at different points along the highways and on the Kansas River, and peaceful travelers subjected to detention, robbery and insult,” a free-state man recounted. “Men were stopped in the streets and on the open prairie, and bidden to stand and deliver their purses at the peril of their lives. Cattle, provisions, arms and other property were taken whenever found, without consent of the owners. Men were choked from their horses, which were seized by the marauders, and houses were broken open and pillaged of their contents.”
The slavery men again invaded Lawrence. Their leader was David Atchison, who rode with a band calling itself the Kickapoo Rangers. “Boys, this day I am a Kickapoo Ranger, by God!” the now-former senator declared. “This day we have entered Lawrence with ‘Southern rights’ inscribed upon our banner, and not one damned abolitionist dared to fire a gun. Now, boys, this is the happiest day of my life. We have entered that damned town, and taught the damned abolitionists a lesson that they will remember until the day they die. And now, boys, we will go in again, with our highly honorable Jones”—the sheriff of the county, who provided respectable cover for the invasion—“and test the strength of that damned Free-State Hotel, and teach the Emigrant Aid Company that Kansas will be ours. Boys, ladies should, and I hope will, be respected by every gentleman. But when a woman takes upon herself the garb of a soldier, by carrying a Sharp’s rifle, then she is no longer worthy of respect. Trample her under your feet as you would a snake!” Atchison looked around the group, and his voice grew more determined. “If one man or woman dare stand before you, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead,” he demanded.
The slavery army responded with cheers. They rampaged through the town, scattering the residents, who ran for cover. They took hammers and axes to the presses and offices of the antislavery newspapers, smashing equipment, shattering furniture, ruining paper and other supplies. They positioned a small cannon, hauled to the town for the purpose, in front of the Free State Hotel and fired away. The first shot flew over the roof of the building. Subsequent shots penetrated the walls but left the structure standing. The invaders then decided to blow up the building. Piling kegs of gunpowder inside, they lit a fuse and ran. The powder went off, but still the building stood. Finally they applied torches to the wooden interior. Soon the building was a raging inferno. The mob cheered as the beams of the floors and roof crashed down.
As the fire burned itself out, leaving a smoking hulk, the ruffians helped themselves to personal effects the terrified residents had left in their flight. By evening the ruffians’ triumph was complete, and they rode off, satisfied at the blow they had struck for slavery.
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JOHN BROWN LEARNED of the sack of Lawrence at about the same time he heard of the bludgeoning of Charles Sumner. The two events dispelled any lingering illusions in Brown and other antislavery men that they were on the verge of victory. “We here have passed through an almost constant series of very trying events,” Brown wrote to Mary. “We were called to go to the relief of Lawrence, May 22, and every man (eight in all), except Orson, turned out; he staying with the women and children, and to take care of the cattle. John was captain of a company to which Jason belonged; the other six were a little company by ourselves. On our way to Lawrence we learned that it had been already destroyed, and we encamped with John’s company overnight. Next day our little company left, and during the day we stopped and searched three men.”
Brown blamed the slavery marauders for the sack of Lawrence, but he also blamed the men of Lawrence itself for acting “in a very cowardly manner.” He determined to put some spine into the free-staters. “On the second day and evening after we left John’s men, we encountered quite a number of proslavery men, and took quite a number prisoners,” he told Mary. “Our prisoners we let go; but we kept some four or five horses. We were immediately after this accused of murdering five men at Pottawatomie, and great efforts have since been made by the Missourians and their ruffian allies to capture us.”
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WHAT JOHN BROWN did not say in this letter, and what he likely never told Mary, was that the accusation of murder of the five men on Pottawatomie Creek was true. Brown had grown frustrated, then infuriated, by the impunity of the slavery forces in wreaking their violence, whether in Kansas or Washington. For the breakdown of law and order in Kansas he blamed the Franklin Pierce administration, which had given carte blanche to the slavery side. “A number of United States soldiers are quartered in this vicinity for the ostensible purpose of removing intruders from certain Indian lands,” Brown wrote to Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, whom he had met. “It is, however, believed that the administration has no thought of removing the Missourians from the Indian lands, but that the real object is to have these men in readiness to act in the enforcement of those Hellish enactments of the (so-called) Kansas Legislature, absolutely abominated by a great majority of the inhabitants of the Territory, and spurned by them up to this time.” Brown had lost hope in the federal government. “I confidently believe that the next movement on the part of the administration and its proslavery masters will be to drive the people here either to submit to those infernal enactments or to assume what will be termed treasonable grounds by shooting down the poor soldiers of the country with whom they have
no quarrel whatever.” Brown made his warning clearer in his plea for help: “I ask in the name of Almighty God; I ask in the name of our venerated forefathers; I ask in the name of all that good or true men ever held dear—will Congress suffer us to be driven to such ‘dire extremities’? Will anything be done?”
Giddings tried to calm Brown. “You need have no fear of the troops,” the congressman replied. “The President will never dare employ the troops of the United States to shoot the citizens of Kansas. The death of the first man by the troops will involve every free state in your own fate. It will light up the fire of civil wars throughout the North, and we shall stand or fall with you.”
Yet Brown wasn’t mollified, and neither were many of the other antislavery men in Kansas. A group of them gathered to protest the Pierce administration’s support of the slavery side and to register their determination to resist the acts of the bogus Kansas legislature. “We utterly repudiate the authority of that legislature as a body emanating not from the people of Kansas but elected and forced upon us by a foreign vote,” they declared. “We pledge to one another mutual support and aid in a forcible resistance to any attempt to compel us with obedience to those enactments.”
They soon had something to resist. A judge appointed by the territorial legislature set up court at Dutch Henry’s Crossing, where a pro-slavery settler named Henry Sherman—Dutch Henry, for his German (deutsch) origins—operated a ferry over Pottawatomie Creek. John Brown heard that the judge, Sterling Cato, had issued warrants for his arrest and the arrest of some of his sons. The charge was unclear, but the Browns were known to be antislavery men, and it involved one or more of the antislavery activities outlawed by the legislature. At the same time a large band of pro-slavery militia arrived in the area, presumably to enforce the warrants.
John Brown determined to investigate. “My father, in order to ascertain what their future purposes were, took his surveyors’ instruments and flag men and chain men and run a line right into their camp,” Brown’s son Salmon recalled later. “I carried one end of the chain. At this time all the administration’s surveyors were Southern sympathizers. That made us all hail fellows well met. They talked very freely. They said they came here to help the South first and themselves next, but there was one thing they would do—they would annihilate every one of those damned Browns, and they would stay with Judge Cato until every damned abolitionist was in hell.”
Salmon Brown recalled the reaction of Brown and his crew. “We went home well nerved up for future action. They”—the slavery men—“did not know at that time that they were talking to old Puritan stock.”
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JOHN BROWN DECIDED to strike preemptively. A man named Henry Williams arrived in a camp of antislavery men that included Brown and his sons. “Williams knew everybody on the Pottawatomie,” Salmon Brown recalled. “My father told him we were going back to Pottawatomie to break up Cato’s court and get away with some of his vile emissaries before they could get away with us. ‘I mean to steal a march on the slave hounds.’ ” Williams offered to provide names of Cato’s abettors. Salmon Brown observed closely. “I stood within two feet of him while he wrote down the names of all the men that were killed,” he said, referring to the Pottawatomie victims.
In the camp was a grindstone, which Brown and his sons put to use. “We ground up our broad swords on that grindstone,” Salmon Brown said, referring to some archaic but deadly weapons his father had brought to Kansas. All in the camp understood what the broadswords were for. “We started off with the cheers of quite a crowd with their hats in the air, they knowing the purport of our mission.”
The death squad consisted of John Brown; his sons Owen, Frederick, Salmon and Oliver; his son-in-law Henry Thompson; and a man named Theodore Weiner. For transport John Brown approached James Townsley, a free-state man who owned a lumber wagon. Townsley consented to help, though he later reconsidered. An observer of the preparations asked Brown himself to reconsider and exercise caution. Brown retorted vehemently, “Caution! Caution, sir! I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”
The party set out. En route to the Pottawatomie settlement, they encountered riders coming the other way. One of the riders asked Brown’s party what they were about. “They gave us no answer except that they were going to attend to very urgent business,” the rider recalled. A second rider remembered John Brown voicing his indignation at the trespasses of the slavery men. “His manner was wild and frenzied, and the whole party watched with excited eagerness every word or motion of the old man,” the second rider said. He added, “As I left them, he requested me not to mention the fact that I had met them.”
Brown’s party traveled through the night to a spot about a mile from the Pottawatomie settlement. At the edge of a wood they rested during the following day; the men were weary, and Brown insisted on waiting until night. “The reason for taking the night for our work was that it was impossible to take the men in the daytime,” Salmon Brown explained.
Night fell. Brown waited a while longer. Finally, after ten o’clock, when the men on the killing list could be expected to be in bed, he led the group into the Pottawatomie hamlet. The first cabin they approached belonged to a pro-slavery man named James Doyle. Some dogs began barking loudly. “Old man Townsley went after the dogs with a broad sword, and he and my brother Fred soon had them all laid out,” Salmon Brown said.
Mahala Doyle, the wife of James, remembered the terrifying moment. “We were all in bed, when we heard some persons come into the yard and rap at the door and call for Mr. Doyle, my husband,” she told investigators. “This was about 11 o’clock on Saturday night of the 24th of May.” James Doyle got up and went to the door. Without opening it, he asked what was wanted. One of Brown’s men said they were looking for a man named Wilkinson. Would Doyle tell them where he lived? “My husband opened the door, and several came into the house, and said that they were from the army. My husband was a pro-slavery man. They told my husband that he and the boys must surrender, they were their prisoners. These men were armed with pistols and large knives. They first took my husband out of the house, then they took two of my sons—the two oldest ones, William and Drury—out, and then took my husband and these two boys, William and Drury, away. My son John was spared, because I asked them in tears to spare him. In a short time afterwards I heard the report of pistols. I heard two reports, after which I heard moaning, as if a person was dying; then I heard a wild whoop.” And then silence. “My husband and two boys, my sons, did not come back any more,” Mrs. Doyle ended her account.
Salmon Brown described the killings from the side of the killers. “The three Doyles were taken out of the house and a half mile or so away, and were slain with the broad swords,” he said. “Owen Brown cut down one of them and another son”—likely Salmon himself, though he declined to admit it directly—“cut down the other and the old man Doyle.”
Who fired the shots Mahala Doyle said she heard is unclear. Salmon Brown said no one besides his father fired a gun, but he also said, “Father never raised his hand in slaying these men.” Conceivably John Brown shot one or more of the men after they were already dead. Or Salmon Brown was mistaken or lying. John Brown himself later said he did not kill anyone that night.
John Doyle, the son saved by his mother’s tears, had nothing to offer about who did the killing, but he described the grisly result. “The next morning was Sunday, the 25th of May, 1856,” he told investigators. “I went in search of my father and two brothers. I found my father and one brother, William, lying dead in the road, about two hundred yards from the house; I saw my other brother lying dead on the ground, about one hundred and fifty yards from the house, in the grass, near a ravine; his fingers were cut off; and his arms were cut off; his head was cut open; there was a hole in his breast. William’s head was cut open, and a hole was in his jaw, as though it wa
s made by a knife, and a hole was also in his side. My father was shot in the forehead and stabbed in the breast.”
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AFTER DISPATCHING the Doyles, the killers moved on. “We were disturbed by the barking of the dog,” said Louisa Jane Wilkinson, the wife of Allen Wilkinson. “I was sick with the measles, and woke up Mr. Wilkinson, and asked if he heard the noise, and what it meant? He said it was only someone passing about, and soon after was again asleep.”
But the dog resumed its barking. Louisa Wilkinson saw a shadow pass by the window and heard a knock at the door. “Who is it?” she asked. No one answered. She woke her husband. “Who is it?” he said.
This time came a reply: “I want you to tell me the way to Dutch Henry’s.”
Wilkinson started to answer through the door.
“Come out and show us.”
Louisa grasped her husband and whispered to him not to go. He told the men outside that he couldn’t find his clothes in the dark. He could give them directions from inside the house.
One of Brown’s party, likely Brown himself, demanded that Wilkinson open the door. “If you don’t open it, we will open it for you.”
Wilkinson acceded, though his wife told him not to. “Four men came in, and my husband was told to put on his clothes,” Louisa recalled. “They asked him if there were not more men about; they searched for arms, and took a gun and powder flask; all the weapon that was about the house. I begged them to let Mr. Wilkinson stay with me, saying that I was sick and helpless, and could not stay by myself. My husband also asked them to let him stay with me until he could get someone to wait on me; told them that he would not run off, but would be there the next day, or whenever called for.”