The news came to John Brown at Samuel Adair’s: a proslavery man killed an antislavery man. The victim’s friend and landlord Jacob Branson got together a meeting to look into the death. The murderer ran for the hills. Sheriff Samuel Jones got a posse together and went after Branson. Some antislavery men got their own posse together and took Branson from Jones. Now both sides looked on the edge of pitched battle at Lawrence, with Missourians rushing in to kill abolitionists and free state men converging to defend the town. Brown got home in a rush and sent John, Junior, to confirm the news.
Junior came galloping back in short order. He met someone on the road who said two thousand armed men massed on the Wakarusa aiming to burn Lawrence to the ground. Henry, Jason, and Oliver didn’t have it in them to go, still laid up with ague. The able-bodied men loaded up a wagon with weaponry and started out on December 6, 1855. Brown drove it while Junior, Frederick, Owen, and Salmon walked alongside. They started at five in the evening and traveled through the night. At a bridge, they kept on in the face of the enemy, not slowing and daring the proslavery men to stop them. The Missourians declined.
When the Wakarusa war was pending the old man and four sons arrived in Lawrence, the balance he reported sick. As they drove up in front of the Free State Hotel they were all standing in a small lumber wagon. To each of their persons was strapped a short heavy broad sword. Each was supplied with a goodly number of fire arms, and navy revolvers, and poles were standing endwise around the wagon box with fixed bayonets pointing upwards. They looked really formidable and were received with great eclat.
commenced fomenting difficulties in camp, disregarding the commands of superior officers, and trying to induce the men to go down to Franklin and make an attack upon the Pro-slavery forces encamped there.
The Committee of Public Safety had to step in several times to put a stop to that “wild project”. G.W. Brown’s version, like Redpath’s, has John Brown leave Lawrence in disgust when peace breaks out.
We left off with a retrospective on how the proslavery border ruffians had pushed indifferent and even sympathetic Kansans into the free state camp by their heavy-handed, sometimes deadly, actions to force slavery upon the territory. George Brown, or rather his associate editor J.H. Greene as Brown had left Kansas on business, published it in the Herald of Freedom as part of a general appeal for help from the East. He and his fellow free state men expected a new invasion in short order and feared that this time, Wilson Shannon would send the 1st Cavalry out of Fort Leavenworth after them as well. They came to those dire straits courtesy of proslavery sheriff Samuel Jones, who came to Lawrence to arrest Samuel Wood. Wood had rescued his fellow free state militia leader, Jacob Branson, from Jones’ custody back in December. As soon as Wood got back to Kansas, Jones went to take him in. Wood refused to oblige, leading to Jones coming back with some of the cavalry as bodyguards. Wood and his accomplices fled Lawrence in advance of that, but someone shot Jones in the back while he camped in town.
Almost simultaneously, proslavery judge Samuel Lecompte got a grand jury to summon the entire free state leadership on suspicion of treason, usurpation of office, and other charges. The jury also declared Brown’s paper a public menace which deserved suppression. Free state governor Charles Robinson left on the 9th. The free state’s senator-elect/delegate to Congress, Andrew Reeder took off shortly thereafter on learning that the previous plan for him to serve as a test case would likely end in his death.
Unlike Brown’s story of highway robbery, this has a sound ring of truth to it. Mace did testify before the Committee and by naming him Brown invites people to check his facts. Mace suffered for “several hours” before he could get back indoors. Brown called the wound “severe” but not life-threatening, so in theory anybody nearby could go see for themselves.
We left George Brown’s Herald of Freedom worried about the state of things in Kansas. He painted a nightmarish picture of women in arms and traumatized children who would want revenge against the Slave Power for what it had done or might soon do to their fathers. Brown’s piece drips with nineteenth century domestic sentimentality, but that doesn’t make the feelings behind it less real. He may have exaggerated the number of women and children learning to shoot and keeping guns on hand, but men of the time really did believe that to drive their dependent loved ones to war represented an invasion of the home and a breach of the natural order. We might not express it in such gendered terms, but how many of us want our loved ones to live in a war zone?
One year ago the majority of the people of Kansas were decidedly friendly to slaveholders, or indifferent to their claims. Not one in twenty could be found here, who was reputed an abolitionist in the place from which he came. The people were nearly unanimous in condemning a man who was reputed as an abolitionist. The general aim seemed to be to make Kansas a free, white, American State, and no sentiment was expressed against slave holders, slave States, or slave holding where it was legal. Now behold the change!
Brown wants to have it both ways. He tells us here by implication, and explicitly in context, that the enslavers drove Kansans into the antislavery ranks. Few historians would disagree, but one can quarrel with his version of early Kansas. Most Kansans hailed from Missouri. While some moved probably moved west to be quit of slavery, they had experience living with it and more likely harbored indifferent to positive attitudes toward the peculiar institution. H. Miles Moore, who became the free state Attorney General, stood firm on that point. Joseph Potter told of a similar transformation. In both cases, proslavery men who had some sympathy with the border ruffians changed their colors on seeing just how little respect they had for even the self-determination of their friends.
That Brown dates the shift in Kansan opinion to less than a year ago also tells an interesting story. As of May, 1855, he tacitly admits that most white Kansans did not consider themselves part of his movement. It seems that the fraud and violence at the territorial elections in March didn’t change the minds of as many as one might think. Taking that as given, the much smaller scale trouble in the May special elections to remedy some of that likely didn’t prompt realignments either. But we know by the time of the delegate elections in October that a majority of voting Kansans chose to attend the free state polls and ignore the territorial government’s canvass. The change must have happened over the summer and early fall. If Brown has the right of it, then the purge of antislavery men from the legislature, the ouster of Andrew Reeder, and the passage of the Kansas slave code drove most Kansans into the antislavery camp.
Gentle Reeders, I’ve gone a while examining the details of Andrew Reeder’s flight and Charles Robinson’s capture. Then I turned to George Brown’s account of a possible armed robbery foiled near Lawrence. These extended sojourns always risk of losing the forest in the examination of trees, so let’s zoom out a little and look at Kansas’ brief history and current state, as recounted by Brown. Here, unlike in yesterday’s piece, he clearly intends we read him as reporting facts rather than evoking them through a the satirist’s art.
Our men are arming themselves and training for war. Our women are formed into military companies, and are practising in the pistol-gallery. Our boys are making it a part of their necessary learning to shoot with the rifle and revolver.
When Macbeth murdered the king, Shakespeare had the earth shake and horses in stables devour one another to show us that nature itself rebelled at a regicide. Myths about the wild frontier aside, Brown managed the same without invention. Some boys would have learned shooting regardless, particularly if their families hailed from the slave states, but nineteenth century Americans don’t appear to have gone around armed to the teeth by custom. That Brown puts the training of children for war next to the involvement of women, who nineteenth century mores firmly insisted belonged nowhere near it, speaks volumes. If the world had not turned upside-down, then it had gone still gone wrong indeed to drive the women and children to arms.
Are our future statesmen to grow up under this influence? Have slaveholders no fear of consequences, when mothers sleep with pistols or knives under their pillows to protect themselves and their offspring from slaveholding violence or death? What effect must it have on the rising generation to see all this? To see their fathers dragged from their homes to a prison, or exiled to distant and unknown parts, cut off from all communication wit them. Or, listening to these tales as they fall from a mother’s lips, in their lonely and humble homes, who knows what resolves of future revenge may then and there be formed?
Brown ended with a threat: if the slaveholders proceeded on as they had, the sons of their victims would remember and hold them accountable in time. But anger and empathy run together here. The Slave Power had created a situation in Kansas where children might see their mothers hiding weapons under the pillow and their fathers slain or dragged away. If it would drive those children to revenge, then it would also traumatize them. Seeing your loved ones, the source of your security, violently seized or even murdered before your own eyes, could not fail to make a profound impression.
Andrew Reeder, Kansas’ first governor and presently delegate to Congress for the free state government, remained in hiding in a hotel in Kansas City. He got scattered news of events in the territory, both of free state men suffering arrest and proslavery men crossing the border with an eye to destroying the movement to keep Kansas clear of slavery and black Americans. That news got more dire in the evening of May 15, but we will come back to events around Lawrence in time. For now, let’s stay with the delegate.
the ladies had great difficulty in waiting on me. Mrs. E—- and Mrs. W—-, and a new-comer, all seemed as though their suspicions were excited, and they were on watch. Mrs. Coates and Mrs. Monroe Eldridge were in my room, and it was a long time before they could leave it. Mrs. Eldridge was probably seen to come out.
Reeder has changed rooms a few times now. It sounds like he presently occupied one officially vacant. With that story compromised, they moved him to another with the plan to let the room remain visibly open long enough for everyone to decide nothing unusual went on there. But either the unnamed newcomer or “Mrs. S.”, spotted Reeder during the move. She may not have known him as Andrew Reeder of Kansas fame, and rumors current put him captured at Leavenworth, but she had to know some odd man skulked about.
Boat after boat passes down before my window, and my confinement begins to be more and more galling and chafing. I must leave here soon, at all risks. My wife, to whom I dare not write, and could give no consolation if I did, must be alarmed at the newspaper accounts and Lowrey’s report, and I must get away from here.
Kansas first governor pleaded with Mrs. Coates “to have her husband get me off as quick as possible.” Coates obliged, promising that he would try to get Reeder on the Amazon when it arrived on the night of the eighteenth.
That Sunday brought M.F. Conway and P.C Schuyler, both free state men headed into Kansas. Conway resigned his seat in the Kansas legislature rather than wait for the proslavery men to expel him. Neither knew that they had their delegate to Congress just across the hall, but they talked loudly enough of their plans for him to overhear. Sunday did not bring the Amazon, which did not arrive until Monday at noon. It went off without Andrew Reeder, as he could hardly risk boarding it on broad daylight. Even ample moonlight had him worried. Nor would he risk going to hide in a private house as his accomplices asked of him.
The fates seem to be against us.