The Pottawatomie massacre occurred on the night of May 24–25, 1856, in the Kansas Territory. In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces on May 21, and the telegraphed news of the severe attack on May 22 on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, for speaking out against slavery in Kansas ("The Crime Against Kansas"), John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers—some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles—made a violent reply. Just north of Pottawatomie Creek, in Franklin County, they killed five pro-slavery settlers in front of their families. This soon became the most famous of the many violent episodes of the "Bleeding Kansas" period, during which a state-level civil war in the Kansas Territory was described as a "tragic prelude" to the American Civil War which soon followed. "Bleeding Kansas" involved conflicts between pro- and anti-slavery settlers over whether the Kansas Territory would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. It is also John Brown's most questionable act, both to his friends and his enemies. In the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, it was "a terrible remedy for a terrible malady." Background John Brown was particularly affected by the sacking of Lawrence, in which the Douglas County Sheriff Samuel Jones on May 21 led a posse that destroyed the presses and type of the Kansas Free State and the Herald of Freedom, Kansas's two abolitionist newspapers, the fortified Free State Hotel, and the house of Charles Robinson. He was the free-state militia commander-in-chief and leader of the "free state" government, established in opposition to the "bogus" pro-slavery territorial government, based in Lecompton. A Douglas County grand jury had ordered the attack because the hotel "had been used as a fortress" and an "arsenal" the previous winter, and the "seditious" newspapers were indicted because "they had urged the people to resist the enactments passed" by the territorial governor. The violence against abolitionists was accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Dr. John H Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose." Brown was outraged by both the