USA > Kansas > Kansas : the prelude to the war for the union > Part 8
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" attempt the administration of law on principles of perjury and brigandage, . utterly ignoring the oaths they have taken, . . . at will despoiling men of their property and lives." These nine sharp-tongued citizens wish to put on record the fact that many "captains of the invading com- panies exerted themselves to the utmost for the protection of life and property. Some of them . . . endeavored to dissuade Samuel J. Jones from [his fell designs ]. . Colonel Zadock Jackson, of Georgia, did not scruple to denounce either in his own camp or in Lawrence the outrages. . Colonel Buford, of Alabama, also disclaimed hav- ing come to Kansas to destroy property." But the immitigable Jones successfully faced down all pacific talk.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when the great posse marched down from its camp, drag- ging along five pieces of artillery, and began slowly to feel its way up Massachusetts Street - a main thoroughfare of the town. The caution and deliberation of the movement indicated fear that a hidden enemy might suddenly dash out from the cabins, or deliver an unexpected volley from behind the still extant earth-works built during the Wakarusa war. Banners this host bore with various devices - "South Carolina," "Southern rights," "Superiority of the white race," "Kan- sas the outpost." One flag was alternately striped in black and white; another had the national
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stripes with a tiger in place of the union. But no ambushing enemy sprang upon the wary war- riors. When the last rifle-pits were reached, and all visions of peril vanished like smoke-wreaths into the air, a yell of triumph burst from the ranks. It was now straightforward, innoxious, larkish business. The posse made short work of the printing-offices - breaking up presses, rioting calamitously among files, type, stock, exchanges ; hurling the ruins into the street, or dumping them into the river. Here assuredly was a legi- ble lesson which impudent newspapers that railed against territorial laws and spoke disrespectfully of slavery might profitably lay to heart.
The stone hotel required more elaborate and painstaking attention. Jones rode up in front of it, called for S. C. Pomeroy, a representative of the Emigrant Aid Company, and as " deputy marshal of the United States and sheriff of Doug- las County " demanded possession of all Sharpe's rifles and all artillery in town. Pomeroy, after an expeditious and fugitive consultation with the committee of safety, replied that the rifles were private property, and therefore beyond his con- trol, but that a cannon had been secreted there- abouts which would be turned over to him. The concession was enhanced by the fact of Pomeroy's consenting to act as guide to the surreptitious arsenal. Such service ought to have put him on good terms with the champions of law and order,
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but the ingrates, so far from appreciating his ex- ertions, had the heartlessness to discuss, though probably with no very serious intent, the question of hanging him.
Jones directed the hotel to be emptied of furni- ture, but his order was only partially carried out. The five pieces of artillery bristled in a row just across the street, and opened fire upon the nui- sance that had sinned so grievously and unforgiva- bly against the public safety. "I counted thirty shots," said an on-looker. The cannonade inflicted trifling damage in the porous concrete walls, and a swifter method of destruction was sought out. If the building could not readily be battered down, certainly it could be blown to pieces. A keg of gunpowder was carried into the parlor and a slow-match of bepowdered lard prepared. Fu- riously did the train hiss and sizzle and splutter, emitting great volumes of smoke, and promising a hideous climax of devastation; but the explosion, which reminded the spectator, who counted the artillery discharges, of " a blast down in a well," accomplished little beyond breaking a few panes of glass. In the discomfiture of more pretentious appliances of destruction, an elemental and prim- itive leveler remained, to which there was suc- cessful resort - the torch. The sons of law and order victoriously fired the hotel, but not until after a careful examination of the liquor cellar. Researches in that quarter may have been in some
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degree responsible for the turbulence with which the nuisance-abating concluded. Stores were pil- laged, houses rummaged, and Governor Robin- son's residence was burnt to the ground. Nothing escaped the curious and inquisitive marauders - neither trunks, drawers, cupboards, nor clothes- presses. More than one seedy wardrobe was re- fitted out of the spoils. Gladstone encountered some of the ruffians at Kansas City on their re- turn, and remarked a " grotesque intermixture in their dress, having crossed their native red shirt with a satin vest or narrow dress - coat pillaged from some Lawrence Yankee, or having girded themselves with the cords and tassels which the day before had ornamented the curtains of the free-state hotel."
While these calamities were overtaking the territory a startling pro - slavery denouement oc- curred in Washington. Charles Sumner began his speech on " The Crime against Kansas " May 19th, which he concluded on the afternoon of the 20th, when the posse of Marshal Donaldson was tightening its coils about Lawrence. The speech, a brilliant, indignant, unmeasured, exasperating philippic against the course of the slave-power in Kansas, raised a violent and angry excitement. General Cass pronounced it " the most un-Ameri- can and unpatriotic speech that ever grated on the ears " of Congress. " He has not hesitated to charge more than three fourths of the Senate
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with fraud, with swindling, with crime, with in- famy, at least a hundred times over in his speech," roared Douglas ; "is it his object to provoke some one of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement ?" Mason, of Virginia, lamented that public interests and usage forced association in the Senate Chamber with " one utterly incapa- ble of knowing what truth is " - with " one whom to see elsewhere is to shun and despise."
Preston S. Brooks, representative from South Carolina, reduced to practice Douglas's suggestion. After the adjournment of the Senate, May 22d, while Sumner remained writing at his desk, Brooks approached, muttered out charges of libeling South Carolina and her sons, and followed them up by repeated blows on the head with a cane. The senator fell insensible to the floor. This affair was a fit companion piece to the destruction of Lawrence.
When one more blow should be delivered - the dispersal of the free-state legislature, which was to meet at Topeka on the 4th of July - would not the pro-slavery triumph be complete ? On whom should be conferred the honor of adminis- tering a coup de grâce to abolitionism in Kansas was a matter of debate. The patriots who distin- guished themselves in May were anxious to take the field again in July. A hum of preparation ran along the border. Buford and the Southern
9
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colonels put their men into training, but the au- thorities in Washington began audibly to demur. The suspicions and fears of President Pierce ri- pened into convictions ; he did not wish to have any more armed mobs convoked to enforce the laws. It was settled that federal troops should furnish whatever assistance territorial officers might need in their dealings with the pin-feather state government. These functionaries concurred in advising a semi-heroic treatment as the mildest recommendable course. Governor Shannon, tem- porarily out of the territory, wrote Colonel Sum- ner to disperse the legislature, should it assemble - "peaceably if you can, forcibly if you must." Sumner, though friendly to free-state interests, disapproved the Topeka movement. "I am de- cidedly of opinion," he wrote Acting - governor Woodson June 28th, "that that body of men ought not to be permitted to assemble. It is not too much to say that the peace of the country de- pends upon it." June 30th Woodson wrote Sum- ner in an apprehensive strain. " There is now no ground to doubt," he said, " that the bogus legis- lature will attempt to convene on the 4th proximo at Topeka, and the most extensive preparations are being made for the occasion. The country in the vicinity of Topeka is represented to be filled with strangers, who are making their way toward that point from all directions. Last evening I received information ... that General Lane was
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on his way to Topeka with a very large force, and was then somewhere between that place and the Nebraska line. . . . It is deemed important that you should be at Topeka in person. . .. Judge Cato will be on the ground, and I have addressed a letter to the United States district attorney, Colonel Isaacs, requesting him to come over at once and attend in person to getting out the necessary legal processes." Colonel Sumner left Leavenworth for Topeka July 1st, where he con- centrated five companies of dragoons with two pieces of artillery. "I shall act very warily," he wrote the adjutant general, " and shall require the civil authorities to take the lead in the matter throughout."
The bustle of hostile preparations in federal camps and in Missouri, as well as among terri- torial officials, had a discouraging and unbracing influence upon members of the state legislature. Unless a tonic of some kind could be adminis- tered, many of them might fail to appear in To- peka on the 4th of July, and the whole anti-slav- ery movement come to an inglorious collapse. To keep up courage, to secure a general interchange and discussion of opinion, a curious double-headed conference began in Topeka on the 3d - an extra and informal session of the legislature and a nu- merously attended mass-convention. Both legis- lature and convention wrestled with the same perplexing question - What ought to be done in
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the present emergency ? No formal and accred- ited policy emerged from the babel of discordant sentiments. Some members of these bodies urged that the state legislature should meet and proceed with business until dispersed by the federal au- thorities ; others denounced further resistance to the territorial laws as a blunder, and counseled immediate submission. Governor Robinson and the free-state prisoners confined at Lecompton ad- dressed a letter to the legislature, deprecating the adoption of any timorous, faint-hearted policy. That in the disjointed condition of affairs there might be some recognized authority, the mass- convention appointed a " Kansas Central State Committee," thirteen in number, and authorized it " to assume the management and control of the free - state party of Kansas." The general com- mittee chose an executive committee of five : J. P. Root, president ; H. Miles Moore, secretary ; James Blood, William Hutchinson, and S. E. Martin.
Colonel Sumner, on reaching Topeka, opened communications at once with free-state men. He sent for Captain Samuel Walker - a personal friend and a member of the legislature. " I hear Lane is on the other side of the river," said Sum- ner, " and means to fight. How is that ?" " There is n't a word of truth in the story. Lane is not in the territory. He is somewhere in the East making speeches." Marshal Donaldson, who was
-
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present, listened to the conversation with interest. " If I should get up before those legislative fel- lows," he inquired, " to read a proclamation, would n't some devil shoot at me ? " " Nobody," said Walker, "will lift a finger against you."
The convention sent a committee to confer with Colonel Sumner. He was very anxious that the legislature should not meet at all, as he wished to escape the odium of coercive measures. That point the committee refused to yield. An under- standing, however, was reached that the legisla- ture should assemble and begin to organize, but quietly disperse at the command of the federal authorities.
The 4th of July found Topeka thronged with men, women, and children. Two free-state mili- tary companies were also in town. A nervous, wistful, depressed sentiment prevailed, as people at large were not in the secret of the cut-and- dried programme. The mass-convention, think- ing its mission not yet fully accomplished, fearing that at the last moment a panic might seize upon the legislature and prevent it from assembling, resumed its sessions in the morning and fell lus- tily to work.
During the forenoon Marshal Donaldson, accom- panied by Judge Rush Elmore, associate justice of the territory, sallied forth with a batch of of- ficial documents : President Pierce's proclama- tion of February 11th, which commanded "all
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persons engaged in unlawful combinations against the constituted authority of the territory of Kan- sas . . . to disperse ; " Governor Shannon's proc- lamation of June 4th ; a proclamation fresh from Acting - governor Woodson's own hand, forbid- ding " persons claiming legislative powers and au- thorities," on the point of assembling in Topeka, to organize "under the penalties attached to all willful violators of the laws of the land; " and finally a proclamation from Colonel Sumner, who announced that he should " sustain the executive of the territory."
Mistaking the mass-convention, gasconading in the streets, for the legislature, Marshal Donaldson informed the presiding officer that he had commu- nications for the assembly. The marshal declined to risk so doubtful an experiment as reading aloud in public, and asked Judge Elmore to take his place. Donaldson retired with confusion of face when he discovered that he had pitched his bomb- shells into the wrong camp.
As the hour of twelve, when the legislature was to meet, approached, the dragoons, encamped on the outskirts of the town, formed in order of bat- tle, dashed toward Constitutional Hall and sur- rounded it, while the two pieces of artillery, with gunners at their posts and slow-matches burning, commanded the principal street.
It lacked a few minutes of noon when Colonel Sumner entered the House of Representatives.
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Roll-call soon began, but no quorum was present ; or, rather, a majority of the members, not under- standing that the perils which seemed so formi- dable were of a pasteboard sort, did not answer to their names. After some activity on the part of the sergeant-at-arms there was a second reading of the membership list. Only seventeen responded. Colonel Sumner then rose and commanded the legislature to disperse - a duty which at the be- ginning and at the close of his brief speech he declared to be the most painful of his whole life.
This 4th of July demonstration was accorded a cold reception in Washington. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war, was disturbed by the affair. "I looked upon them [the members of the state leg- islature]," said he, "as men assembled without authority, men who could pass no law that should ever be put in execution, and that the crime would be in attempting to put the law in execution, and in the mean time they might be considered as a mere town meeting." Colonel Sumner did not escape official displeasure for his part in the trans- action. In defense he fell back upon verbal req- uisitions of Acting-governor Woodson, who " was personally present in my camp desiring the in- terposition of the troops."
Missouri leaders, not sharing in the apprehen- sions of reaction that troubled the administration, now sunned themselves in the glow of victories apparently decisive. " It was everywhere antici-
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pated," in the words of an address issued Janu- ary, 1857, by the National Democracy of Kansas, "that these events would put an end to violence and restore the country to law and order and quiet." But these anticipations turned out to be delusive. Heavy blows had indeed been struck, but they were ill-advised, misdirected blows, and recoiled disastrously upon those who delivered them.
CHAPTER VIII.
DUTCH HENRY'S CROSSING, BLACK JACK, AND OSAWATOMIE.
JOHN BROWN is a parenthesis in the history of Kansas. The immense vibration of his career upon the nation had its source in the Virginia campaign and its ill-fated but heroic sequel, rather than in contributions to the territorial struggle. His course there - at war with the policy which finally defeated the slave power and saved Kansas from its clutch, pitched to the strain of revolution, tending to inaugurate a conflict of arms on the border - would never have given wing to his re- nown.
Born in Torrington, Connecticut, May 9th, 1800, and descended from substantial Puritan an- cestors, John Brown had a youth and boyhood full of hardships and privations. He pursued differ- ent vocations - was successively tanner, wool-mer- chant, and farmer - but won no great success in any of these callings. Other interests absorbed him.
"From childhood I have been possessed
By a fire-by a true fire, or faint or fierce."
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That fire was a consuming sentiment of anti-slav- ery passion.
John Brown reached Kansas in the autumn of 1855. He came in response to appeals for arms from his sons, five of whom preceded him to the territory and settled at Osawatomie. He found them in circumstances sufficiently uncomfortable : "no houses to shelter one of them; no hay or corn-fodder of any account secured; shivering over their little fires, all exposed to the dreadfully cutting winds morning and evening and stormy days."
It was not the purpose to make a home for him- self in Kansas, nor to aid his sons in their wilder- ness-struggle, that brought John Brown to the ter- ritory, but the conviction that opportunity, long deferred, had at last offered for a blow at the slave system.
" "T is time
New hopes should animate the world, new light Should dawn from new revealings to a race Weighed down so long."
Such were the inspirations that dictated an im- mediate and personal response to the western sig- nal of distress. Whatever else may be laid to his charge - whatever rashness, unwisdom, equivoca- tion, bloodiness - no faintest trace of self-seeking stains his Kansas life. In behalf of the cause which fascinated and ruled him he was prepared to sacrifice its enemies, and if the offering proved
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inadequate to sacrifice himself. He belonged to that Hebraic, Old Testament, iron type of human- ity in which the sentiment of justice - narrowed to warfare upon a single evil, pursuing it with concentrated and infinite hostility as if it epito- mized all the sinning of the universe - assumed an exaggerated importance. It was a type of humanity to which the lives of individual men, weighed against the interests of the inexorable cause, seem light and trivial as the dust of a but- terfly's wing. John Brown would have been at home among the armies of Israel that gave the guilty cities of Canaan to the sword, or among the veterans of Cromwell who ravaged Ireland in the name of the Lord. When the " Souldier's Pocket Bible " - a collection of texts which lent inspira- tion to Cromwell's veterans, and shows the "qual- ifications of his inner man that is a fit Souldier to fight in the Lord's Battels both before he fight, in the fight, and after the fight " - was once put into his hands he sat down and read it, apparently with
the most intense and absorbing interest. There he read, "Scriptures ... fitly applied to the Soul- diers several occasions "-read that the soldier must be valiant for God's cause, must put his con-
fidence in God's wisdom and strength, must pray
before he goes to fight, must love his enemies as they are his enemies, and hate them as they are God's enemies, and must consider that God hath ever been accustomed to give the victory to a few !
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That such a man, an astray and out-of-season Puritan, persuaded that God had called him, as prophets and priests were called in ancient times, to the work of fighting slavery, his policy one seamless garment of force - that such a man should stand almost alone in Kansas, should fail to rally any large following, should touch the general councils and activities spasmodically, in- cidentally, was inevitable. The policy of free- state leaders, in general harmony with the advice of outside friends, shunned violence of every sort. It especially avoided collision with the federal au- thorities. This wise policy experienced compara- tively few lapses, though at times the temptation to abandon it was very strong. John Brown dis- trusted peaceful methods. He was quite as ready to fight as "the adventurous young men from South Carolina." In his opinion all marauding rascals from Missouri and elsewhere should be asked to show their passports. For the disorders of the territory (mere local eruptions of a chronic, deadly national malady, the cure of which rather than the salvation of Kansas haunted him) he had one sovereign remedy - violence. Gerrit Smith, in a speech before the Kansas Convention at Buffalo, July 9th and 10th, 1856, gave expres- sion to sentiments of which John Brown was a strenuous, uncompromising exponent on the bor- der. " You are here," he said, " looking to bal- lots when you should be looking to bayonets ;
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counting up voters when you should be muster- ing armed, and none but armed, emigrants. They [members of the convention] are here to save Kansas. . . . But I am here to promote the killing of American slavery."
News of the attack upon Lawrence May 21st reached Osawatomie by courier during the day. Two rifle companies, recently organized for the defense of the neighborhood, and numbering fifty or sixty men, hastily mustered under command of John Brown, Jr., and began a forced night march toward Lawrence. John Brown accompanied the expedition. On the morning of the 22d they halted and went into camp near Palmyra, where they were joined by Captain S. T. Shore with a number of armed men, who informed them of the destruction of Lawrence. Here they remained until the 23d, when they moved on to Palmyra. Two days later Lieutenant J. R. Church with thirteen men reached their camp.
" I came upon a body of men from Osawatomie and the surrounding country," the lieutenant reported, " who, as well as I could judge, numbered some seventy or eighty, although they pretended to have about a hun- dred and thirty. This body was commanded by a Cap- tain Brown. . . . They had been at Palmyra two days, and had frightened off a number of pro-slavery settlers, and forced off, as far as I could learn, two families. I immediately stated to Captain Brown that the assembly of large parties of armed men, on either side, was illegal,
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and called upon him to disperse. After considerable talk he consented to disband his party and return home."
Two days before this interview with Lieutenant Church, disquieting rumors reached camp from Dutch Henry's Crossing. H. H. Williams arrived from this neighborhood and reported that pro- slavery men, in the absence of the rifle compa- nies, were attempting a line of policy which Cap- tain John Brown, Jr., prosecuted successfully at Palmyra - the expulsion of obnoxious people. Border-ruffian notifications to leave the country breezed with particular violence about a timid, nervous old shop-keeper, by the name of Morse, who supplied the riflemen with ammunition.
Though a company of Buford's men had pitched camp not far away, to which John Brown once paid a visit of espial in the mask of a federal surveyor ; though the Rev. Martin White, a de- vout, biblical, rabid, shot-gun pro-slavery divine, resided in the neighborhood, yet no serious dis- turbances had hitherto broken out in the vicin- ity of Osawatomie, or Dutch Henry's Crossing - nothing worse than gusty, sulphurous, foul- mouthed talk, in which both parties were remark- ably proficient.
Williams's narrative caused the sudden organi- zation of a secret foray into the troubled district. Williams represents John Brown, who had joined the group of listeners gathered about him, as say- ing at the close of his story, "It is time to stop
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that sort of thing. It has gone on long enough.
I'll attend to those fellows." An hour or two later Williams visited a shed near the camp, under which stood a grindstone. A squad of men were there sharpening their cutlasses. " What's up?" asked Williams. "We are going down upon the Pottawatomie to take care of the ruffians who are making trouble there," somebody replied. “We are going down," added John Brown, who was watching operations with interest, " to make an example. Won't you go ?" Williams declined.
The expedition was a meagre affair numerically. Seven or eight men comprised the entire muster- roll. They were all members of John Brown's household with two exceptions - James Townsley and Theodore Weiner. Early in the afternoon of May 23d the raiders - bestowed in Townsley's farm-wagon, except Weiner, who rode a pony - left camp, amid a round of cheers, for Dutch Henry's Crossing. Toward sundown, and not far from his destination, Brown met James Blood, of Lawrence, with whom he became acquainted dur- ing the Wakarusa war. Brown talked for a few minutes. His habitual reserve relented into a nervous impetuosity of speech. The sack of Law- rence and denunciation of the peace-policy as cow- ardly, ignoble, ruinous were chief matters in his discourse. " We are on a secret mission -don't speak of meeting us," said the old man as the lit- tle company moved on.
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