Arrived in Kansas in October, 1855, Brown went actively to work at breaking up the soil. All his people had fever and ague. The cold and stormy winter was spent wretchedly in a tent banked about with earth. Brown's wife and little children, for their part, were living at North Elba in a cold house, and suffering much. Brown wrote pityingly to his wife, and said, "May God abundantly reward all your sacrifices for the cause of humanity!" The patient woman was content. About him there were frequent killings of Free State men by the "Border Ruffians," and Brown was soon involved hotly in the Free State men's reprisals. The Emigrant Aid Company of New England were sending settlers into Kansas with the object of outnumbering and outvoting the Pro-slavery settlers. They also sent rifles out to help their settlers make some headway against the Missourians, who did not come as settlers, but rode across the line into the territory to vote fraudulently, to shoot and rob, and to ride back to the security of their homes in a slave State. Brown bestirred himself promptly against these invaders, and in December, 1855, was made captain of a band organized to resist a Missourians' raid on the Free State town of Lawrence. The raiders were repulsed ignominiously, after killing one settler. Brown described in a letter to his wife the heart-rending scene when the wife of the murdered man, whose body the Free State men had found, was brought in to see him.
In a letter written in February, 1856, Brown showed that he had no respect for the federal authority, which was doing its best to bolster up the slavery cause in Kansas. "We hear," he said, "that Frank Pierce means to crush the men of Kansas. I do not know how well he may succeed; but I think he may find his hands full before it is all over." Brown had at times in his life—very few the times were, as must be admitted—expressed some veneration for the Constitution and the fiag; but, when these got in the way of his purpose and his conscience, the President became "Frank Pierce" and nothing more, and the flag had little respect from him. He certainly did his best in Kansas to bring on a clash with the federal arms; and it is worth noting that in March, 1866, the abolitionist Congressman from Ohio, John R. Giddings, wrote to him urging that such a clash be brought about, and asserting that it "would light up the fires of civil war throughout the North." There is reason to believe that this was what Brown had already desired, believing firmly that nothing would bring about negro emancipation but an armed conflict. There was a conservative party among the Free State men in Kansas; and those conservatives soon became aware that they had among them an extremist in Old John Brown—as he began to be called for the sake of distinction, since his son John, who had been elected a member of the Free State legislature, was acquiring prominence, and was inclined to more moderate views than his father.
There were now two legislatures in the Territory, one Free State and the other Pro-slavery, each accusing the other of unlawful usurpation. Bands of armed men representing both sides had gone into camp. Brown himself took to ranging and bushwhacking, and acquired a reputation for cool, brave, and clever exploits. One of the neatest of these was his marching, with one or two of the youngest of his boys, in May, 1856, into the camp of a large body of armed Pro-slavery fighters fresh from the South. He carried a surveyor's tripod and chain. He "sighted a line" through the centre of their camp, and with, his sons began chaining the distance. The pro-slavery band supposed him to be a government surveyor, and, consequently, a Pro-slavery man; and they did not interfere. Brown counted them, and noted their strength. More than that, he engaged them in conversation, and got out of them the betrayal of a plan for a raid on "Old Brown and his gang"!
There was a good deal of pretence of law, and a good deal of invocation of the "sacred authority of the United States," on the part of the Pro-slavery authorities in Missouri and Kansas at this time, but no real law. The lives of Brown and his sons were threatened by men who were perfectly capable of taking them. A Pro-slavery grand jury "indicted" the Free State Hotel at Lawrence, which the abolitionists had turned into a sort of fortress, and sent a posse, under a "United States deputy marshal, to destroy it. On May 22, Brown and others, with one small company of mounted men, and John Brown, Jr., with another, started to the defence of this building and of Lawrence; but to Brown's great disgust the Lawrence people decided to make no resistance to a United States officer, and the place was ravaged. Brown was further infuriated by the refusal of the people at Osawatomie to make a brave stand against the Missourians. Beyond doubt he reached the conclusion that a blow of desperate violence must be struck to arouse the people and overcome the tendency which he saw on the part of the Free State people to temporize, to waver. He also, doubtless, believed his own life to be in danger.
Getting together a small party of trusted men, John Brown went on the night of May 24 to the shores of Pottawatomie creek, where lived several Pro-slavery men who had terrorized the neighborhood. He called them one by one out of their beds, and put five of them to death,—not with his own hands, but with those of men who obeyed his command. This deed was committed near a place called Dutch Henry's Crossing, after one of the men whom Brown killed.
Brown had not the smallest doubt that he was directed by Providence in these "executions," as he called them; though he never sought to evade his personal responsibility for them, and talked of them as being committed in cold blood. The party did not kill all they took, but carried off several as prisoners. There is a Kansas legend, ben trovato at least, that, on the morning after the Pottawatomie executions. Brown called his followers and his captives together for divine worship in his camp, and raised to Heaven in fervent invocation hands to which still clung the dried blood of his victims of the night. Sanborn notes in this terrible deed the evident prompting of the story of Gideon's night exploit in overthrowing the altar of Baal. The killings were certainly committed in true Biblical fashion,—with rude curved swords "made like the Boman shortsword," which Brown himself had carried to Kansas from Akron, Ohio, where they had belonged to a militia artillery company then disbanded. Brown had previously had the swords fastened on sticks to use as pikes, but for this occasion he had separated them from the sticks and ground them to a good edge. Brown evidently had a sort of Berserker fondness for a good blade, as two or three subsequent incidents in his life proved.
This fearful deed on the Pottawatomie sent a thrill of horror through the whole country. The Free State leaders repudiated and condemned it, but before long admitted that it was putting backbone into their people. Terror was certainly struck into the Pro-slavery ranks. It soon became perfectly well known that Brown was the author of the deed. The Missourians waited until he and his sons were all absent in the direction of Lawrence, and swooped down on their houses, burning them to the ground. The federal military authorities also bestirred themselves; and John, Jr., and Jason were taken prisoners by them, and kept in chains for some time. The younger John Brown had, from anxiety, from horror at the thought of his father having committed the Pottawatomie murders, joined very likely with a tendency inherited from his mother, become temporarily insane. Meantime John Brown the elder, with nine men, and one Captain Shore, with eighteen, encountered and attacked, on June 2, in a ravine at a place called Black Jack, a considerable force of Pro-slavery men under a Virginian named H. Clay Pate. There was a fierce fight, with Brown in command on the Free State side. Through manœuvring, some wounds, and evidently some running away, Brown's force was reduced to nine, including himself; and to these nine men Pate and twenty-one well-armed men soon surrendered unconditionally. It was an astonishingly brilliant little victory. All of Pate's men laid down their arms on the ground for these nine Free State men to pick up, and were marched off into captivity after the signing of an agreement with Brown that an exchange of prisoners was to be effected, man for man, until all the Free State men held by the authorities were liberated; and John Brown caused it to be specified that his sons were to be the first men exchanged.
A picturesque story concerning this battle has been told me by Mrs. George L. Stearns, of Medford, widow of the wealthy merchant of Boston who supplied Brown with a great part of the funds which enabled him to do his campaigning. In 1859, on the occasion of his very last visit before the Harper's Ferry raid,—when, in fact, he was starting for that final desperate adventure,—Brown was leaving Mr. Stearns's house. He paused near the door, bent down, and drew something from his boot-leg. "I shall very likely never return, Mr. Stearns," he said, "and I wish to give you a little personal memento of myself." He handed out a remarkably fine bowie-knife which he gave to Mr. Stearns, at the same time telling its story; this knife is still in Mrs. Stearns's possession; it is a large, beautiful, and well-balanced blade, broad, yet tapering neatly to a sharp point; it is of English make. It had been bought. Brown said, by a subscription, for Jefferson Buford, and, when that Southern chieftain had been discomfited in Kansas and his band scattered, he had passed it on to the Virginian Clay Pate, with the injunction that it was to be used in taking the life of Old John Brown. When Brown captured Pate at Black Jack, this knife, hanging at Pate's belt, instantly attracted Brown's eye. "I will thank you for that knife," he said. Pate demurred, and declared that there was a special reason why he did not wish to give it up. Brown demanded to know the reason. "Well, the fact is," Pate said at last, "that knife was given me to put an end to your career with, Captain Brown." Brown took the knife, slung it on his belt, and then said, "Well, it seems that the Almighty had other designs concerning it!" One can imagine Brown's fine repression of any tendency to smile as he made this response. His humor was grim, but it was unquestionably present. He also took a sabre from Pate's lieutenant, and kept it until he found use for it in a deal for pikes in Connecticut.
As Brown rode away with the prisoners taken in this admirable fight, intending to make use of them in procuring the liberation of his sons, he fell in, unluckily, with a body of United States troops under Colonel Sumner, a Massachusetts man, an anti-slavery sympathizer, and afterward a successful commander on the federal side in the Civil War. Brown was too good a soldier to suppose that, with some nine or ten men and with twenty-two prisoners on his hands, he could successfully engage a large force of United States dragoons, even if he had cared to make a direct issue then with the United States authorities. But he came ojvenly and parleyed with Colonel Sumner as if he were his equal, and Sumner seems to have done the same with him. There was a most impressive incident at this meeting. Brown was at that time charged with murder on the Pottawatomie, with treason and conspiracy; and a price had been put on his head. He was several times an outlaw. A civil officer accompanied Sumner; and the colonel, who must have estimated the situation cleverly, sympathizing with Brown and yet feeling bound to do his duty, turned to this civil officer, and said, "Have you not some warrants to serve here?" The man looked at Brown, standing there armed to the teeth, tall, with terrible eye. No one in Kansas believed that the old man would allow himself to be taken alive. "I—I see no one that I have a warrant against," the civil officer said. If this were a scene in a play, one can imagine the silence, and then the applause.
So Colonel Sumner, who could hardly do less, or more, compelled Brown to release his prisoners, and ordered him to disband his own party, but did not undertake to disarm one of them. Brown's men "disbanded"—and banded again a mile or two further on, and kept up their guerilla warfare.
Within no very long time Brown's sons were given their liberty. He and they fought and lived on the prairies and in the gulches, and shook and burned with fever and ague, and sometimes lived for days almost without food, and bushwhacked on.
Mr. W. A. Phillips, who was afterward member of Congress from Kansas and a general in the Civil War, and obviously a man of cultivation, has left an account of a night passed with Brown at this period, in the midst of all the fighting. They slept in the open air under the same blanket, and talked, certainly in a very unsoldierly manner, all night, about the stars, about politics, about the rights of man. The talk ran on until after midnight, and at last Brown impressed Phillips greatly by telling him, from the evidence of the position of certain stars which were now exactly over their heads, that it was two o'clock; and, without a wink of sleep, Brown called his men, who responded with alacrity. In less than ten minutes the company had saddled, packed, mounted, and was on the way to Topeka. Brown refused to follow the road, but insisted on taking a straight course across the country, guided only by the stars; and they had a rough time of it, floundering in the thickets and crossing streams.
Brown carried his wounded son-in-law, Henry Thompson, into Iowa, to be taken care of, and in August returned to the Kansas war-path again, doing some sharp skirmishing, at first in company with and under the leadership of James H. Lane. Brown commanded the "Kansas Cavalry" in these encounters. On the 30th of August Brown's son Frederick was shot and killed, apparently in cold blood, by a Pro-slavery preacher named White. The sort of life Brown was leading now, and the work he was doing, is told well in a letter which he wrote from Lawrence to his wife and children in New York State on the 7th of September, 1856. "I have one moment to write to you," he said, "to say that I am yet alive, that Jason and his family were well yesterday; John and family, I hear, are well, he being yet a prisoner. On the morning of the 30th of August an attack was made by the Ruffians on Osawatomie, numbering some four hundred, by whose scouts our dear Frederick was shot dead without warning, he supposing them to be Free State men, as near as we can learn. One other man, a cousin of Mr. Adair [his son-in-law], was murdered by them about the time that Frederick was killed, and one badly wounded at the same time. At this time I was about three miles off, where I had some fourteen or fifteen men over night that I had just enlisted to service under me as regulars. These I collected as well as I could, with some twelve or fifteen more; and in about three quarters of an hour I attacked them from a wood with thick undergrowth. With this force we threw them into confusion for about fifteen or twenty minutes, during which time we killed or wounded from seventy to eighty of the enemy—as they say—and then we escaped as well as we could, with one killed while escaping, two or three wounded, and as many more missing. Four or five Free State men were butchered during the day in all. Jason fought bravely by my side during the fight, and escaped with me, he being unhurt. I was struck by a partly spent grape, cannister or rifle shot, which bruised me some, but did not injure me seriously. 'Hitherto the Lord has helped me,' in spite of my afflictions. . . . May the God of our Fathers save and bless you all!"
This fight was the one commonly called "the battle of Osawatomie," though there were two other fights at or near that place. Brown's methods were frankly those of the guerilla. He liberated many slaves, and, as the phrase went in Kansas, incidentally converted many Pro-slavery horses and cattle to Free State principles. At this time a Pro-slavery federal governor, Geary, was vainly trying to reduce the constantly increasing Free State population to submission. Finally, the Missourians and other Southerners raised a force of twenty-seven hundred men for a last attack on the Anti-slavery stronghold, Lawrence. They were resisted by the Free State men in force. Naturally, Brown was there. He assembled the people in the street on September 16, 1856, and made them a speech, which was reported in the papers. It is so good that it could hardly have been an invention: it deserves to rank as "classic amongst fighting exhortations of the sort:—
"Gtentlemen,—It is said there are twenty-five hundred Missourians down at Franklin, and that they will be here in two hours. You can see for yourselves the smoke they are making by setting fire to the houses in that town. Now is probably the last opportunity you will have of seeing a fight, so you had better do your best If they should come up and attack us, don't yell and make a great noise, but remain perfectly silent and still, wait till they get within twenty-five yards of you, get a good object, be sure you see the hind sight of your gun, then fire. A great deal of powder and lead and very precious time is wasted by shooting too high. You had better aim at their legs than at their heads. In either case, be sure of the hind sights of your guns. It is from neglect of this that I myself have so many times escaped; for, if all the bullets that have been aimed at me had hit, I should have been as full of holes as a riddle."
The Missourians made their onset. Brown commanded the Free State advance-guard. He had some men armed with nothing but pitchforks, but they were not in the advance line. A brass cannon was brought out to support his rifles. There was some desultory firing; and then the Missourians, seeing, no doubt, that the Lawrence men were entirely ready for them, withdrew in good order.
Really, the Kansas battle was now won. Free State men had poured into the Territory. Slavery was impossible there: slave property could not be held, largely as the result of Brown's fierce guerilla warfare. He had seen clearly enough that the Territory could not be made a slave State if no slave could be peaceably held there. But now his mission, as the wielder of the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, called him elsewhere. He had a larger field in view. Whether as early as the end of 1856 he contemplated an attack in the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, is not clearly known. But he certainly had further and more extensive operations against slavery in mind. To carry them out, it was necessary to have money. There was money, and there were rich abolitionists, in Boston; and there Brown went to beg. And there he begged with as much pertinacity and insistence as he had fought. There were rifles to buy and move, men to subsist and transport, a blow to be struck.