USA > Iowa > Jackson County > History of Jackson County, Iowa; Volume I > Part 62
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The state of affairs being discussed with these two gentlemen, it was said to have been recommended by Judge Wilson that a warrant be issued for the arrest of W. W. Brown and twenty-three others in order that they could not testify in each other's behalf. James L. Crawford was instructed to draw up the war- rants. Anson Harrington swore to the embodiment of the warrant, charging the Brown clique with conspiring together to commit crime, and given to Sheriff Warren (who with Harrington was two of the committee) to serve. The pop- ular version tells us that on account of the hostile demonstrations of the "ban-
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ditti" it became necessary for Sheriff Warren to summon the citizens of the county, hoping that an array of armed and determined citizens would lead Brown and his outlaws to surrender. In this they were mistaken and a bloody battle was fought after Brown and his party had been "given every opportunity to surrender to the majesty of the law which they had spurned."
Brown and several more on both sides were killed and several more wounded. The "outlaws" were routed, a part of them captured, whipped and driven out of the country.
The popular version states that it became necessary to hold a mob court to dispose of these men, because the county had no jail, and that they had many desperate friends west and east who would rise up and liberate them ; so sentence was passed by the "citizen's court" after a vote giving a majority of three for whipping instead of hanging. This is the shortest possible outline of the popu- lar version of "justice" by mob violence, and does not explain why it was not known when the warrant was issued that there was no jail and these men might have to be summarily disposed of. The unpopular version of what is known to have been an unlawful procedure (in its final, at least, and so admitted by many friends of the mob) is altogether differently colored and comes from what is usually called the "common people," those outside the official and political rings and following the ordinary industrial vocations of man, though it is well attested to by such men in public life as Colonel John King, first chief justice for Du- buque county, and J. V. Berry, public prosecutor for the Third judicial district containing Jackson county.
Both gentlemen wrote letters to Governor Lucas, denouncing the mob in the most scathing language, Berry telling the governor "Jackson county is in a com- plete state of disorganization, the sheriff, judge of probate and the celebrated Colonel Cox on the first of this month (April 1, 1840) headed a mob at Bell- vieu (so spelled then) and attacked a peaceful citizen of that place with a view of driving him out of town. The result was that a most disgraceful fight took place and, as report says, from six to nine lives were lost and several wounded. It is correctly reported at this place (Dubuque) and generally believed, that Warren, the sheriff, went about the country procuring the names of persons pledging themselves to support the mob several days previous to the day of the assembling of the most infamous mob that ever assembled in this or any other country."
Not only Warren, but Cox went through the country several days previous to the Bellevue tragedy. Cox's plea was for help to drive Brown out of the coun- try as "he was getting rich too fast to get it honestly." He did not get a man out of the forks or from south of the river, and he threatened A. H. Wilson with lynching because he favored Brown and flatly refused to help Cox mob Brown.
J. E. Goodenow, the founder of Maquoketa, and its first settler, postmaster, and landlord, and first in nearly everything else that would promote the best, told Cox in unmistakable language he considered Brown a good citizen and the best man for the country there was in it. Warren's plea was for help to force, if necessary, a legal arrest of Brown and others charged with being criminals. According to his own written account, he was only able to lead three men into Bellevue on the morning of April 1, 1840, where he found Cox in command of seventy odd men.
A small portion of "Cox's army" were men from Bellevue, who, Joseph . Henry (a Bellevue constable at that time) says, in a letter published in Number 2 of the Jackson Annals, were business rivals of Brown, a few of Cox's imme- diate neighbors in the settlement south of Andrew, nearly all the county officials, all of whom it has been said were political wire pullers for Colonel Cox, and comrades of Colonel Cox and Captain W. A. Warren in the Black Hawk war. The balance of the eighty men (all told) that composed the mob were said to have been, by many of Jackson county's best citizens among the first settlers, collected by Cox from associates and Black Hawk war comrades from the lead
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mines of Galena, Illinois, and a captain of a Mississippi steamer, a friend of Cox, who came and brought his crew to take part in the fight, if there should be one.
As an excuse for this mob's act at that time, it was in all the year following claimed that the people of Jackson county, and especially of the western part of it, were continually suffering loss from this so called Brown gang of horse thieves and "shovers of the queer." But, from all I can find bearing on the matter, not half a dozen from the farming and commercial class outside of the political ring in Jackson county, would have anything to do with it; and at least three fourths of the mob were not even citizens of Iowa Territory but men from Galena and off the river, there to see and take part in the excitement.
Sheriff Warren, in his after years' writings on the subject, states, in sub- stance, that the people refused to help him try to take Brown and his men be- cause if they failed their lives wouldn't be safe. (Warren always claimed he, at least, was within the law.) We have lived in Iowa over a half century and knew many of those old pioneers with the bark on and fail to believe they would refuse to help dispose of a gang of criminals endangering their properties and draining the substance of their homes, if they had believed Brown and his friends were such and the law helpless.
One of our home writers, a painstaking historian, adept in searching out the last links of past events, and a past master in adroitly leading the future on the blind side of the weak strands in his heroes' life thread, in commenting in An- nals Number 2 on the burning criticism of the Cox-Warren mob by the two letters by Colonel John King and Public Prosecutor Berry to Governor Lucas, as found in the Lucas letter files, says when they wrote these "histericle" let- ters they knew nothing of what had transpired at Bellevue except what had been told them by Mrs. Brown and the friend who had taken her to Dubuque. Mr. R- must have been watching "Mr. Hyde" in Mr. Cox, a planet of the first mag- nitude in his historical firmament. Berry and King's letters were written four and six days after the massacre, and from Warren's writings we learn a steam- boat load had been down from Dubuque and Galena, among them Prosecuting Attorney James L. Crawford, Geo. L. Nitengale, and Sheriff Cummins, of Dubuque. Runners had been sent from Bellevue to Galena and Dubuque for surgeons and Dr. Crawford, of Galena, and Dr. Findlay, of Dubuque, had gone to the seat of war and returned. And Colonel John King, in his letter to the governor, tells him a mass meeting, that the largest building in Dubuque wouldn't hold, had been held to denounce the action of the mob and resolve that steps be taken to have Representative Cox, Sheriff Warren, Probate Judge Moss, and General McDonald removed from office and members of the mob brought to justice (which it was never possible to do).
Before the aforesaid two letters had been written, details of the fight were in nearly every ear in Jackson and Dubuque counties, and a highly colored de- fense of the mob's action had reached the capital at Burlington and was published in the Iowa Territorial Gazette, April 4, 1840, the day Berry's letter was written and two days before Mr. King's letter was written, in which, among other things equally strong, he, on commenting on what should be done in the case, says :
"All agree that your long experience in public business gives you the advan- tage of us all in knowing how to dispose of those persons who have committed the most willful, premeditated murders and have brought a stigma and a disgrace upon our young and beautiful territory that years cannot efface." That letter in the Gazette and the writings of Captain Warren in the years following 1840 in defense of mob violence by the Cox-Warren faction has been the foundation of nearly all written versions of the "Bellevue War" and with the noted men who were leaders in the affray is apparently the mentor that has moulded public opinion as to the justice of the whole transaction. Mr. Reid, in his digest of the J. V. Berry letter, as found in Number 2 of Jackson County Annals, says "thus it appears that within the ranks or aiding and abetting this 'most infamous
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mob of brutish beasts' (he quotes Berry) were legislators, past and prospective, of two territories and two states, three of whom helped frame constitutions for Iowa, the probate judge, sheriff, recorder, treasurer, clerk of courts, surveyor and coroner of the county, with two of the county commissioners advising and consenting, and nearly all of the panel of grand jurors; there were also two militia officers and a man who became probate judge, two who became sheriffs, a prospective recorder, clerk and county commissioner, surely a body of men who did not need instructions from the hysterical Berry or from the Hon. Colonel John King, past master and first chief justice of Dubuque county." The histo- rians might have said the same of the Brown faction, if they had been successful; who knows ?
The clash of public opinion as to the matter has awakened in me an intense interest in that early tragedy and led me to follow the blinded trails of its history. For grouping the damaging evidence against the whole proceedings, we, along with others, were sorely criticized by Charles Wykoff at the old settlers' last reunion for writing anything that cast reflections upon the good name of Captain Warren. We, for one, are not trying to cast reflections on Captain Warren or others, but if in trying to present this historical drama, as it seems to me to have been enacted, I present any evidence that reflects that way, we will not turn the reflections onto some other party to favor the captain or other pioneers. There is one thought that will appeal to the unbiased thinker, and that is, if the act justifies the means, why it became necessary at all to go to any great length to excuse the acts of such an array of dignitaries.
The knowledge, as alleged by the people, of all these violent and criminal acts against their property, and the knowledge they must have had of the powerless- ness (if such existed) of the civil power to deal with the case, should have and would have set every law abiding man's mind at rest and made it unnecessary to keep fighting the ghost of Brown for years even to aborting the evidence. Captain Warren, thirty years after the tragedy, in his fiery letter published in the. 1879 History of Jackson County, and in answer to a letter in the Excelsior signed "Old Settler" and known to have been written by Shadrach Burleson (who administered W. W. Brown's estate and was appointed guardian of the daughter, Roxanna Brown), says, on page 617 of the aforesaid history, that on account of a petition signed by citizens, a special sheriff and grand jury were appointed temporarily at the spring term of court 1840 to inquire into the "wholesale slaughter of human life on the Ist of April, 1840," and further states "They (the mob) were acquitted of all blame by a grand jury composed of Brown's own friends, and, after a thorough investigation, reported that they found the sheriff and his posse had acted under legal authority in an endeavor to 'enforce the law;' and, to give extra power to his statement, says: These judicial proceedings may be found in the records of the spring term of court in Jackson county." I don't pretend to give the exact wording of the report, but its substance and meaning. I have been over the old territorial court docket, page by page, and those "judicial proceedings" that Mr. Warren speaks of are like his and others' statement as to the many alibis proven by Brown and his "gang." They are not there. We do not say why they are not there, as Mr. Warren says they are. But, all the same, they are not.
The Bellevue war was the greatest tragedy ever enacted in Jackson county, if not in Iowa, and the claim is and was that the "Brown gang" was the greatest menace to the country as they always proved an alibi whenever indicted. It seems strange that the court docket does not show any indictment of Brown or of any man known to have helped defend him on that eventful Ist of April, 1840, or substantiate Captain Warren's story of the vindication of the mob as he claims it does, while there are indictments against several of those known to have been with the mob, for different offenses. I can't explain it, but perhaps Charlie Wykoff, who said he had lived a long life among us and knew of these things,
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can. Still he was only old enough to squawk and far more interested in the nursing bottle than topics of the day.
It is so far in the past, I am unable to learn much of W. W. Brown's history before he came to Iowa, or his standing in life where he came from, except what can be surmised from several letters written in 1840 by P. Morehouse, Jr., and Mrs. W. W. Brown, sister of Morehouse, from Adamsville, Michigan, to S. Burleson, administrator of the Brown estate. But it is known that he came from Coldwater, Michigan. I have advertised in a Coldwater paper, asking knowledge as to Brown and as yet have received no information. Seventy years since he came to Iowa is a "far cry" from the present and no one may be living there who knew of him. It is my intention here to summarize the good that was known of him here and vouched for by verbal and written statements of old settlers who knew him, in order that the reader can put link and link together and mould his own opinion as to whether Brown was an ebonhued scoundrel or a martyr to Thomas Cox's political ambition and business rival's jealousy. Captain Warren, who was sheriff of Jackson county when Brown was shot and who, with Colonel Thomas Cox, led the attack on Brown's hotel, wrote much on that affair and was still at it as late as forty years after the bloody transaction. All of his writ- ings which have come to my vision are to me apparently to vindicate the Cox- Warren party and blight Brown sentiment.
We have read many accounts of the Bellevue war and the extermination of "Brown's outlaws" by "brave and determined citizens," led by the intrepid heroes, Captain W. A. Warren and Colonel Thomas Cox, and all of these several his- torical accounts were evidently marked with the same branding iron. Captain Warren was a fluent and versatile writer and might always have written with the force of honest conviction, but without equivocation or mental reservation, I put my pen to this belief, that all he wrote in Brown's favor was not done in charity to Brown, but to show him as a "Dr. Jekyl" masquerading as "Mr. Hyde," which could have been possible. But we consider the evidence of Mr. Warren favor- able to Brown as being a courteous, charitable, thorough going business man with all the bearings of a gentleman as of more value to Brown's case than even that of Brown's sympathizers, whose written and verbal opinion of Brown as a man was most favorable. It is not a historian's place to show partiality be- tween the players on the stage of life, nevertheless in trying to resurrect what he believes is living truth from the grave of public sentiment, it is his place and only hope to "show" the evidence.
In 1837 Brown, wife and child, with a party of immigrants with good out- fits and more or less money, landed in the little frontier village of Bellview (since changed to Bellevue). According to Mr. Warren, they spent several days looking over the prospects, discussing the desirability of this and that location for residence or business lots and finally purchased claim rights to different pieces of real estate and went actively to work building on and otherwise improving their purcases. Brown purchased a tavern stand and opened a hostelry for the wayfarer. He started a general mercantile business and opened trade with the public. He opened a meat market with Samuel Burtis as partner. In the winter of 1837-8 he employed forty or more choppers and started a wood yard for the steamboat trade. It has been said by old pioneers that it was the verdict of river men that he set the best table of any landlord on the river above New Orleans.
In early days there was more or less bad money (counterfeit and failed state bank money ) afloat and pioneers have told me that Brown always reimbursed his customers for bad money received at any of his places of business. It has been the voice of John E. Goodenow, the founder of Maquoketa, that Brown was a generous man, never refusing to trust any settler in need and short of money or other mediums of exchange, and he was considered a valuable man for the country.
Nathaniel Butterworth, the long while landlord of the "Butterworth House," near Andrew, and a man without business, social or moral blemish, was a fast
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friend of Brown, and like Wilson, Goodenow and others refused to lend his assistance to Warren and Cox in 1840 when Brown was mobbed, and was conse- quently threatened with lynching by a party composed of Cox, Watkins, and two or three more when they came home drunk after the fight and the whipping and banishment of their prisoners, Cox being too drunk to sit up in the wagon. This information came to me first hand from Nathaniel Butterworth, Jr., who, as a boy, was an eye witness, with his father, of the episode.
The following favorable mention of Brown is an extract from page 359 of the Jackson County History of 1879 and was taken from Captain Warren's writ- ings by compilers : "Brown was a man of fine personal appearance and had semblance of culture about him. He was possessed of an engaging manner ; was hospitable ; a good talker and well calculated as a leader of men." Another frag- ment says: "Mrs. Brown, too, was a handsome and accomplished lady and won many friends by her womanly manner and kind ways. Brown himself was a charitable man, benevolent to those in want, pleasant and kind to children and really possessed of a humane and generous heart."
The above noble admission is from one who as sheriff of the county helped lead the attack on Brown April 1, 1840, and in after years wrote much to jus- tify the act which many believe he never would have done if he had not been deceived as to Brown by the duplicity of Thomas Cox in revenge on Brown, for in 1839 taking what Cox claimed as an underhanded way to beat him out of the nomination for first representative from the newly organized county of Jackson. Cox had served one term in the territorial assembly in 1838-9, being one of four to represent what was termed a district and embraced the region north of what is now the south line of Jackson county and extended west into the unexplored distance and north to the British line.
During this first one year term Jackson county was organized, making the fall election in 1839 a county affair with one representative, and Colonel Cox, of Jackson county, as a matter of course, expected to be a candidate without any opposition. He had been chosen one of the four who represented the district through the influence of General George W. Jones and Henry Dodge who knew him in Geneva, Missouri, and as a Black Hawk war comrade, and had secured for him the contract for surveying a part of Jackson county, Wisconsin, that brought him to what is now Jackson county, Iowa, in 1837.
But his nomination for candidate for the second assembly rested with the voters of the new county of Jackson in caucus assembled .. Up to the time of this first Jackson county caucus to nominate a candidate for representative, Cox seems to have understood himself to be the only possible democratic candidate for the office in Jackson county, therefore, as the county was strongly democratic, sure of being elected.
Buit Cox wasn't as popular at that time with the people of Jackson county as he was with Colonel Cox and a few old comrades of the Black Hawk war. When the above said caucus came to business some friend of Cox offered him as a nominee, but there was another man in Jackson county at that time more popular with the people than Colonel Cox, and William W. Brown was nomin- ated in opposition to Colonel Cox. When the votes of Jackson county's voters in caucus were counted Brown was declared elected over Cox by a vote of two to one. Page 259 of the Annals of Iowa, January, 1906, states Brown secured the nomination by "rank treachery." I have lived in Jackson county something over half a century and that statement is news to me. I never have been much of a politician and cannot tell, being duly proposed and fairly nominated by a two to one vote of the electors means treachery. I have read more or less Jackson county history and conversed with pioneers, and I have no recollection of anything else to show that Brown unfairly sought the nomination. Brown was, undoubtedly, nominated because the people wanted him.
The result of Brown's large majority over Cox for candidate for represen- tative was to Colonel Cox's vanity as the earthquake shock to San Francisco,
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and awakened all the demon in his seemingly overbearing, arrogant, domineer- ing nature, and rebelling against the will of the large majority in the county convention he rose and in a passionate outburst of angry words denounced Brown as a chief of horse thieves and counterfeiters and accused him of keep- ing a resort of thieves and outlaws in general.
Warren in his account of the caucus, page 361, Jackson County History, 1879, says Cox was "high tempered and fond of whiskey which frequently got the better of him." He denounced Brown as a base villain and his enmity never let up as he was found to be one of the leaders when the thieves were exterminated. Until the day of the caucus Cox had been a pronounced friend of Brown, had spent much of his time at Brown's hotel, associating with this newly discovered "villain" and his "band of outlaws," and drinking at Brown's bar, and as Warren says was frequently more than "half seas over." In fact he was said to have been seldom sober and often lay intoxicated in the gutter.
The same day of the caucus, he had a warrant sworn out for Brown's arrest, charging him with thieving, which could not be served on account of the indig- nant population. Warren says (coupled with the above quotation) "a large majority of the people of Bellevue were Brown's friends, and Cox was per- suaded by friends to leave for home and save himself from injury after declar- ing himself an independent candidate for the legislature to which he was sub- sequently elected." There is yet evidence beyond need to show that the large majority of the citizens of Bellevue and Jackson county were friendly to Wil- liam Brown at that time. There is also evidence and plenty of it to show a majority of the people engaged in the industrial pursuits were Brown sympa- thizers the next April when he was killed by the mob, under the leadership of Colonel Cox. But the evidence is not so conspicuous as to what elected Col- onel Cox in the fall of 1839.
There is seemingly pretty good evidence, however, to lead one to believe he would achieve victory by fair means or means not so fair. He began the cam- paign by branding Brown as a leader of horse thieves and counterfeiters, doing all in his power to make his cause look plausible. Anson Wilson, the only man of those days now living here, tells me it was understood then, that through Cox's henchmen a minute description of horses in Brown's possession, would reach dishonest characters at a distance who would come to Bellevue claiming to be looking for stolen horses and giving so clear a description of the animals that nobody could deny but that the horses in Brown's possession were the ones described; and the suspicion goaded on by Cox and his friends grew to a conviction of Brown's guilt.
If the judges of election were impartial, the count fair, no intimidation ex- ercised with the then publicity of the voter's choice (no Australian ballot then) and Galena whiskey and the Mississippi River didn't vote, it is hard to under- stand how, with Brown's proven popularity in the county at the time of the caucus, he was overcome by Cox at the election following the caucus by only about two months, unless Cox's underhanded wire pulling so wrought public sentiment as to create a great revolution of feeling unfavorable to Brown which doesn't seem fully justified.
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