The Insurrectionist Read online

  One of the witnesses to the assault was a reporter from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. After a doctor determined Sumner’s wounds weren’t life threatening, the reporter rushed out of the Capitol and headed for Samuel Morse’s Northern and Eastern Telegraph office on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street. As he walked he took out his pencil and notepad and composed a message to the Tribune.

  The reporter handed the message to J. R. Bailey, the agent in charge of the telegraph office. Bailey began tapping out the words in code:

  Washington STOP Thursday May 22 STOP Vicious and cowardly attack in Senate chamber STOP Preston Brooks of South Carolina strikes down Sumner of Massachusetts STOP Defenseless Sumner beaten with cane while working at desk STOP Sumner collapses in pool of blood STOP Brooks flees as Sumner regains consciousness STOP More later STOP

  After the reporter left, Bailey gradually realized the seriousness of the message he’d sent. He took it upon himself to repeat the message, this time sending it along the western route, where it would be relayed through Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Saint Louis, reaching its terminus at a town along the Kansas-Missouri border.

  2

  Sixteen Hours Later

  May 23, 1856

  Kansas Territory

  Word of the caning of Charles Sumner had yet to reach the company of Free State militiamen camped alongside Ottawa Creek south of the town of Lawrence. The sun had barely cleared the horizon and the men could feel the heat coming on. Spring thunderstorms had let up, and the temperature hovered in the nineties. The prairie grass was stunted and wispy. The men, however, went about their tasks with quiet resignation—cleaning weapons, stowing gear, rolling up blankets. Meanwhile, the one they called the old man grumbled and fumed, his discontent spreading through the camp like an outbreak of cholera.

  John Brown—the man who came to Kansas Territory to fight slavery—was angry, and he wanted the people around him to know it. The town of Lawrence, a sanctuary for Northern immigrants, had fallen to an army of proslavery invaders, and he hadn’t fired a shot in its defense.

  He’d just turned fifty-six, and though his lean, once ramrod-straight frame had begun to buckle a little—giving the appearance his torso tilted forward slightly—he remained gritty and combative, more so than the other men in the company, all of whom were much younger. On this morning his chiseled, leathery face was exceptionally gaunt, the creases in his brow deeper. He’d stayed awake most of the night brooding over the debacle at Lawrence, struggling to devise a retaliatory response—a measure, in his words, so radical as to cause a restraining fear among the proslavery forces. By sunrise, what little moisture remaining in the grass had penetrated his blanket. The dampness added to his discomfort. But he’d come up with a plan.

  It would involve some killing.

  The old man had learned of the impending invasion two days earlier. He was with his sons at their homesteads, some thirty-five miles to the south of Lawrence, when a messenger on horseback reported that proslavery marauders were massing on a bluff above the town. The marauders, the messenger said, were Missouri border ruffians who were joined by Southern mercenaries. The whole whiskey-swilling mob was hell bent on ridding the town of Yankee abolitionists. The citizens of Lawrence needed help.

  So Brown jammed a Colt revolver under his belt and gathered up a half dozen double-edged broadswords—sinister looking weapons that once served as sidearms for artillerymen during the Canadian Rebellion of 1837. Then he and his sons and the rest of the local militiamen set out for Lawrence—most of them on foot. They marched until late in the evening, camped briefly, then resumed early the next day. Within three miles of the town, another rider intercepted them, said they were too late. Lawrence had fallen. There was no resistance. The people fled or simply refused to fight.

  “Cowards—all of them,” Brown growled. His voice had a rasping metallic sound like someone who habitually drank whiskey and smoked tobacco. Neither was true. He never used tobacco of any kind and had only drunk whiskey once, after which he vowed to never again consume anything that caused him to lose control of his ability to reason.

  “It’s because of Robinson,” one of the men offered. “He claims forbearance shows we’re in the right and our enemies are the aggressors.”

  Brown had little use for Dr. Charles Robinson, the de facto leader of the Free State settlers who stood in opposition to the fraudulently elected proslavery legislature. Though Robinson had bestowed the rank of captain on Brown and given him command of a small group of militiamen, the old man viewed the doctor as a man to be pitied, a radical abolitionist who’d lost his nerve. As far as Brown could tell, Robinson had no fight left in him.

  Brown asked, “And what does forbearance mean?”

  No answer.

  “I’ll tell you what forbearance means,” he bristled. “It means we are to act as slaves . . . and allow the enemy to have his way with us.”

  Brown urged the company to continue on to Lawrence, even though it was apparent the town had capitulated. But cooler heads prevailed, one of which belonged to his eldest son, thirty-four-year-old John Jr.

  “Father,” he cautioned, “there are hundreds of them and only forty of us.”

  So they turned around, Brown complaining about those who too easily surrendered to the minions of slavery. As they retraced their steps, the men marching at his side were forced to listen to him condemn the citizens of Lawrence for failing to defend themselves.

  “We need more men like Thomas Barber,” he fumed. Barber was shot dead because he refused to be cowed by border ruffians looking to torment antislavery settlers. Brown was at the Free State Hotel in Lawrence when Barber’s body was brought in and laid out for public viewing. He witnessed the wailing of Barber’s wife. It hardened his resolve.

  During the intervals of silence that marked the long march back to their homesteads—when the constant placing of one foot in front of the other compelled the men to turn away from their comrades—Brown found himself gazing absently at the sparsely wooded prairie. It seemed to roll on forever, unlike the forested country of the Northeast he was accustomed to, where he found spiritual comfort in the chapels of sunlight hidden in dense stands of hardwood. He wouldn’t admit it, but the open prairie made him feel uncomfortable, vulnerable at times.

  The old man had moved to Kansas Territory almost eight months ago. He’d been reluctant to come. There were distractions, futile attempts to recover from business ventures gone sour. He failed as a wool merchant in Springfield, Massachusetts, and worked three farms in Ohio to pay off debts. If and when his financial problems were settled he hoped to join his wife, Mary, at their farm in North Elba, New York, in the wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains. The farm was a special place to Brown, a place where he was able to escape his financial difficulties—at least temporarily—and where he continued to help build an independent, self-sustaining community for runaway slaves. It was there he spoke to his wife about an idea that had been incubating in his mind for almost two decades. He wanted to muster an army of volunteers and strike a blow against slavery on Southern soil. For some time he leaked details of his intentions to a select few—abolitionists who promised to support him.

  Meanwhile, five of his sons—two of whom were married with children—decided to leave farms in drought-stricken Ohio and make a fresh start in Kansas Territory. Brown’s half sister Florilla and her missionary husband, the Reverend Samuel Adair, had already settled in the village of Osawatomie. The sons invited their father to come along. Even though he might not be interested in farming the land, he could at least help them defend their claims against proslavery marauders. He declined the invitation.

  “I feel committed to operate in another part of the field,” he said, intimating he was seriously considering an incursion into the South.

  Then came a letter from John Jr. that changed everything. The letter stated that Kansas Territory was being invaded by mean and desperate men, armed with revolvers, bowie knives, ri
fles, and cannons. The targets of the invaders were Northern immigrants, who exhibited the “most abject and cowardly spirit.” The immigrants needed to fight back, to organize into military companies. John Jr. and his brothers were ready to lead such an effort, but first they needed guns and ammunition.

  “We want you to get us arms,” the eldest son beseeched his father. “We need them more than we do bread.”

  Brown put his own plans on hold. He’d find a way to get the weapons to his sons—even if he had to deliver them himself.

  He liquidated his business assets and arranged for the welfare of his wife and young daughters. Then, when he’d accumulated enough money and supplies, he and his son-in-law Henry Thompson picked up sixteen-year-old Oliver, the youngest of Brown’s sons, and headed for Kansas Territory, walking alongside a horse-drawn wagon loaded with guns, ammunition, and other weaponry, all of it concealed under surveyor’s instruments. Surveying was one of several trades Brown had plied over the years, so it seemed logical that it should serve as his cover if challenged during the journey through proslavery country.

  On an unusually cold and windy day in October 1855, he arrived in eastern Kansas at the settlement his sons had staked out near Osawatomie. He found them and their families shivering and feverish. They had waited too long to build permanent shelters and were living in tents and log huts with canvas roofs and doors, unprotected from the winds and ice storms that swept through the prairie.

  Now, nearly eight months later, the old man had plenty to stew about as he plodded across the Kansas prairie, grumbling about the sacking of Lawrence.

  With the sky darkening, the company, fatigued and hungry, had pitched camp at Ottawa Creek on land belonging to John Tecumseh Jones, better known as Ottawa Jones, a man Brown’s age whose mother was a Chippewa from Indiana. Jones had come to the territory as a Christian missionary and ended up a prosperous farmer who served as spiritual advisor to the Ottawa tribe on its ten-square-mile reservation. In Jones and his wife, Brown found kindred spirits. They were intelligent, feared God, and prized action over inertia. They shared Brown’s commitment to the abolition of slavery, and he shared their respect and affection for the native people. He was always welcomed at their spacious log home. This time, however, he chose to stay with his men. Within sight of Jones’s house and barn, beside clear-running Ottawa Creek, Brown bedded down for the evening.

  At dawn he was up and about, cooking breakfast for the handful of men he regarded as a little company of his own. The group included his unmarried sons—Owen, Frederick, Salmon, and Oliver—and son-in-law Henry Thompson. Though they marched with the rest of the men, their loyalty was clearly to Brown. They sat around a cooking fire as he served a meal of bacon and johnnycakes. Ottawa Jones had donated a pail of fresh milk.

  Toward the end of the meal, Brown unburdened himself.

  “Something must be done,” he said. “Something will be done.”

  The men put aside their plates and looked to the old man.

  His eyes glistened. “We cannot allow these acts of murder and destruction to go unpunished. I would rather be ground into the earth than passively submit to the barbarians.”

  Owen, the eldest of his unmarried sons at thirty-one, spoke up. “What do you suggest we do, Father?”

  “Blood,” he said, the metallic timbre of his voice infusing the word with such malevolence that men standing nearby abandoned their chores and moved closer. After a pause, he added, “I have said slavery is a sin before God. And there can be no remission of that sin without the shedding of blood.” He turned, faced the fire, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Most of the company, including Brown’s married sons—John Jr. and Jason—were now gathered at the fire.

  Brown surveyed the men crowding around him, many of whom he hardly knew. Except for his own boys, he doubted any of them could appreciate who he was and why he came to Kansas. He was an abolitionist—dyed in the wool, he liked to say. Blacks—free or slave—were his brothers, his equals. He took the words of the Declaration of Independence literally. And while he’d traveled to the South only once, he’d become a student of slavery. Like his father, he was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and escorted runaway slaves to freedom in Canada. He’d befriended former slaves, some of them leaders in the abolitionist movement. He had little formal education but was an avid reader of history and had a keen interest in slave revolts. He expressed admiration for the Haitian liberator Toussaint-Louverture and the rebel slave Nat Turner, whose 1831 rampage in Virginia resulted in the deaths of fifty-seven whites—men, women, and children.

  The old man had come to view the South’s slaveholding planters as members of a prideful aristocracy who persuaded themselves over the course of two hundred years that slavery was both natural and good. He believed the slaveholders ensured the preservation of slavery by creating a social order that placed the slave at the bottom of the heap, thus securing the supremacy and loyalty of all whites, regardless of wealth or position. And because slavery ultimately relied for its survival on violence and brutality—the lash, the irons, mutilation, the splitting apart of families—it had turned the South into a place where violence and brutality penetrated the very core of Southern life. “The South,” Brown said, “allowed slavery to seep into its bones, and no amount of moral persuasion by antislavery Northerners would change that.” He once told his friend and confidant Frederick Douglass—the former slave turned abolitionist—that slaveholders would never be induced to give up their slaves until they felt a big stick about their heads.

  Brown had to remind himself that although the men waiting to hear him speak favored a free Kansas, they weren’t necessarily committed—as he was—to making war on the very existence of slavery. Many of the Northern immigrants saw nothing wrong with slavery—as long as it was kept out of the territory. They came to Kansas because of incentives provided by the immigrant aid organizations and because they wanted to make a new life for themselves; they wanted to plow the cheap, abundant, fertile soil of Kansas as free men, and to most of them that meant free white men. They called themselves Free State men, but often they were as racist as the proslavery marauders who were trying to drive them out of the territory. If they hated slavery it wasn’t because they felt it was a sin against God or a crime against humanity. They hated slavery because it threatened their livelihoods. How were they expected to compete and prosper in a country that permitted slave labor?

  Such was Brown’s audience at Ottawa Creek. A gathering of men who couldn’t be expected to grasp the motives behind the slaughter he would soon direct just a few miles from where they stood. Rumors about Brown’s intentions had been circulating in camp since the previous evening. Some of the men hoped he would dispel their anxiety. Others were just curious. A few were prepared to join him, whatever his plan.

  He began speaking in little more than a whisper. “You men know the enemy has no fear. He commits his acts of violence without a thought to the consequences. He thinks we are cowards and this emboldens him to commit even greater outrages.”

  A murmur of assenting voices.

  “Remember these men,” he said. “Charles Dow, shot in the back by Frank Coleman. No punishment. Thomas Barber, unarmed, shot by George Clarke. No punishment. Reese Brown, mutilated by a pack of hatchet-wielding scoundrels, flung onto his doorstep to bleed to death in the arms of his wife. No punishment—”

  One of the men interrupted. “We all expect to be butchered, every damn Free State settler in the region.”

  “And you will,” Brown responded, his voice growing louder, “unless the enemy learns there are two sides to this thing—that he cannot commit these crimes without fear of retaliation.”

  The sound of hooves hammering the dry ground shattered the moment. A lone rider came into view.

  Brown stooped to pick up his revolver—then recognized the man as Gardner, one of Ottawa Jones’s hired hands. Gardner reined in his horse at Brown’s feet and slid from the saddle. He reached i
nto his boot and withdrew a folded slip of paper moist with perspiration.

  “They’ve murdered Senator Sumner,” he said, thrusting the paper into Brown’s hand.

  The old man unfolded the message. Gardner apparently had misunderstood what it said. As Brown read the news of the caning, the image of a bloody, prostrate Charles Sumner flashed before his eyes.

  He’d first met the senator in 1851 while dealing with the aftermath of an unsuccessful wool business in Massachusetts. It was a time of both disappointment and anticipation. The business had failed, but Brown had befriended leading abolitionists. He was pleased a senator from his adopted state was a champion of the antislavery movement.

  The men were waiting for the old man to speak. Choked with rage, he said nothing, crumpled the paper, flung it into the fire.

  Gardner continued his story. He’d been dispatched to Kansas City by Ottawa Jones to send a message to a Saint Louis grain merchant. The telegraph office was crowded with young men and women—refugees from the Lawrence invasion. They were fed up with the border ruffians and said they were returning to their homes in the Northeast. When Gardner turned to leave, the telegraph operator handed him a note, asking that it be delivered to Dr. Charles Robinson in Lawrence. Gardner tucked the message into his boot. He spurred his horse toward the postal road—a rugged but shorter route that ran close to the Kansas River. He ran into more refugees. They warned him to avoid Lawrence. It was late when he neared the town. He saw the flames of burning buildings and decided it would be too dangerous to enter the town. He turned off the trail and headed for Jones’s house. He’d ridden across the prairie most of the night, stopping only long enough to rest and water his horse.

  Brown waited until Gardner finished. Then—in a voice cool and detached—he looked to his eldest son and said, “Jones keeps a grinding wheel in his barn. I have need of it.”