ery, and often no machinery at all outside of the Federal judiciary, 104

The Howard Committee found that, of all the crimes testified to during its sessions, an indictment had been found in but one case. 105 In that, the man charged with murder was a Free Soiler, Cole McCrea by name, who had killed a proslavery man, Malcolm Clark, at Leavenworth, on April 30, 1855, in a quarrel over certain trust lands and McCrea's right to participate in and vote in a squatter's meeting. The first of the long series of homicides which was to make of the Territory in very truth a "bleeding Kansas," was not a political one. It occurred near Lawrence on the first election day, November 30, 1854, Henry Davis, a Border Ruffian from Kentucky, being killed by Lucius Kibbey, of Iowa. Davis, in an intoxicated condition, had assailed Kibbey with a knife. 106 Such an election-day crime might easily have occurred anywhere. The killing of Clark, 107 in the following spring, became, on the other hand, of marked political significance, because of the treatment of his slayer, McCrea. The latter was imprisoned at Leavenworth until late in November. The injustice of his case lay in the court's denying to McCrea his counsel, James H. Lane, because the latter would not take the oath of allegiance to the pro-slavery Legislature, and in McCrea's subsequent treatment, on September 17, when he was brought before the grand jury of nineteen men summoned by Chief Justice Lecompte and picked by him. Sixteen were openly selected and three in private; one of the nineteen had been engaged with Clark in the attack on McCrea. For a whole week Justice Lecompte endeavored to induce the jury to indict McCrea, but in vain; the evidence was too strongly in favor of McCrea for even this picked jury to find a true bill against him. As the foreman refused to bring in a verdict of "not found," Justice Lecompte adjourned the court until the second Monday of November, when McCrea was finally indicted, after having been illegally deprived of liberty during the intervening period. When, in November, he was able to make his escape from jail and leave the Territory by way of Lawrence, the inability of its citizens to offer him protection added greatly to their stress of mind. The whole episode of McCrea's confinement had roused the indignation of the Free

Soilers everywhere, convinced as they were that McCrea had shot in self-defence. 108

Even more stirring to the friends of liberty was the illtreatment of William Phillips, an active Free State lawyer of Leavenworth, and a friend of Cole McCrea's, who was present when Clark was killed. Phillips received notice on April 30, from the pro-slavery vigilance committee appointed on that date, to leave the Territory. On his refusal to go or to sign a written agreement that he would leave Kansas, a majority of the committee, so one of its members testified, 'voted to tar and feather him. The committee could get no tar and feathers this side of Rialto; and we took him up there and feathered him a little above Rialto, Missouri." 109 This witness forgot to add that one side of Phillips's head was shaved; that after his clothes were stripped from him and the tar applied, he was ridden on a rail for a mile and a half, and then sold for one dollar by a negro auctioneer at the behest of his tormentors. A public meeting at Leavenworth on May 19 heartily endorsed this treatment of "William Phillips, the moral perjurer." 110 The next day the Leavenworth Herald said of the mob's work: "The joy, exultation and glorification produced by it in our community are unparalleled." This outrage failed to daunt Phillips's courage; he stayed in Kansas, only to die later at the hands of his pro-slavery enemies. As John Brown was leaving Ohio for Kansas, a similar experience befell the Rev. Pardee Butler at Atchison. His pro-slavery fellow citizens, on August 16, placed him on a raft and shipped him down the Missouri, throwing stones at him and his queer craft as the current bore him away. His forehead was ornamented with the letter R; and the flags on his raft bore the inscriptions, "Greeley to the rescue, I have a nigger;" "Eastern Aid Express;" and "Rev. Mr. Butler,' agent to the Underground Railroad." 111 The Squatter Sovereign, the Stringfellow newspaper, notified all the world that "the same punishment we will award to all free-soilers, abolitionists and their emissaries." In fact, one J. W. B. Kelly had already encountered the hatred of the pro-slavery leaders, for in the first week of August he was severely thrashed and ordered out of town for holding Abolition views. 112 Yet Butler returned to Atchison, as Phillips did to Leavenworth, only to

meet a graver fate. Another clergyman, the Rev. William C. Clark, was assaulted on a Missouri river steamer in September, for avowing Free State beliefs that seemed to his assailants to call for physical punishment.113

As John Brown crossed the boundary between Missouri and Kansas, on October 4, these outrages were still agitating the Territory and causing men everywhere to arm. That the pro-slavery election of October I had passed off peacefully, although fraudulently, had reassured no one; within five days the Free Soilers were to hold their own election and thus begin a Free Kansas governmental structure. Would their lawless Border Ruffian neighbors permit this without additional bloodshed and violence? Many a Free Soil settler who had found his way into Kansas only in the face of outspoken Missouri hostility, enduring privation if not starvation on the way, because of his being a Yankee,* envied the little Brown colony their rich supply of arms and ammunition. Upon John Brown, the apostle of the sword of Gideon, and his militant sons, outspoken in their defiance of slavery and its laws, each separate crime by a Missourian made a deep and lasting impression. Without loss of time their settlement was to become known on both sides of the border as a centre of violent resistance to all who wished to see human slavery introduced into the Territory. Indeed, three days after his arrival at his destination, October 9, he and his sons went to the election for a Free State delegate "most thoroughly armed (except Jason, who was too feeble) but no enemy appeared," so John Brown wrote his wife on October 14, adding, "nor have I heard of any disturbance in any part of the Territory." 114 The spirit of the Massachusetts minute-men was alive in Kansas.

For instance, Samuel Walker, later a leading citizen of Lawrence, was not allowed, in April 1855, to take his little girl, who was suffering from a broken leg, into the house of a Baptist minister living on the Missouri border, because he came from the North. Not until he reached the Shawnee nation could he, a Yankee, get shelter at night for his injured child; food was obtained only at night and from slaves. — Kansas Historical Collections, vol. 6, p. 253.

CHAPTER IV

THE CAPTAIN OF THE LIBERTY GUARDS

FORTUNATELY, the Brown minute-men were not called upon for active service for a few weeks after the arrival of their arms, so that home-building could progress with some rapidity, if one can really give the name of home to a shed open in front, its roof of poles covered by long shingles, and its three sides formed of bundles of long prairie grass pressed close between upright stakes. Such a shanty sheltered John Brown, Jr., his wife and some of the others, until late in February, 1856; while Jason's mansion during that period consisted only of log walls and a roof of cotton sheeting. It had some advantages, however, for Mrs. Jason Brown wrote, on November 25, 1855, that "the little house we live in now has no floor in it, but has quite a good chimney in so that I can cook a meal without smoking my eyes almost out of my head." The permanent house-building was rendered slow and difficult by the enfeeblement of two of the new arrivals, for Henry Thompson and Oliver Brown succumbed to the prevailing ague in November, and had not recovered by the end of the month.2 Nor had Jason when, late in November, there came the first real call to arms of the Brown settlement, to which its povertystricken owners had given at various times three names, Brown's Station, Brownsville and Fairfield. Not one of them has survived, and the last, from the beginning a misnomer, was particularly so in November, 1855, not only because of the exceptionally cold and bleak Kansas winter, but also because of the reports of new and alarming crimes of which Free State men were the victims.

The killings began in earnest on October 25, at Doniphan, a town near Atchison, when Samuel Collins, owner of a sawmill at Doniphan, was shot by a pro-slavery man, Patrick Laughlin by name, for political reasons. Laughlin, having betrayed a secret Free Soil society known as the "Kansas Legion," of which he had for a time been a member, was de

nounced by Collins for his action. Like Montagues and Capulets, they met armed the next morning, with friends or relations about them. When the fight was over, Collins lay dead; Laughlin, seriously wounded, recovered and lived on in Atchison, no effort being made to indict or punish him.3. If there was possibly room for doubt as to whether Collins or Laughlin assumed the offensive, there was none whatever in the case of Charles Dow, a young Free State man from Ohio, who was shot from behind and cruelly murdered near Hickory Point, Douglas County, by Franklin N. Coleman, of Virginia, a pro-slavery settler. This killing was due to a quarrel over Coleman's cutting timber on Dow's claim, and was, therefore, in its origin non-political. Yet out of it, too, came alarming political consequences. After attending a Free Soil settlers' meeting, called November 26 to protest against the crime and to bring the murderer to justice, Jacob Branson, the Free State man with whom Dow had been living, was arrested that same night by the pro-slavery sheriff, Samuel J. Jones, who resided at Westport, Missouri. Jones was postmaster of Westport while also sheriff of Douglas County, Kansas, and as will be seen, the gravest menace to the peace of the little Lawrence community. The pro-slavery warrants upon which Jones arrested Branson charged him with making threats and with breaches of the peace. As Sheriff Jones and his posse, which had then shrunk to fifteen men, neared Blanton's Bridge with their prisoner, after having spent two hours carousing at a house on the road, a party of fifteen Free State men headed by Samuel N. Wood, of Lawrence, stopped them with levelled guns. In the parley which followed, Branson went over to his rescuers, who absolutely refused to recognize the authority of Sheriff Jones, and told him that the only Jones they knew was the postmaster at Westport. The rescuing party reached Lawrence with Branson before dawn; there it was at once recognized that the rescue would give the proslavery men precisely the excuse they needed for an attack upon the town. To an excited meeting of citizens held that evening, Branson related his story. His auditors were, however, calm enough to decline all responsibility for the affair in the name of Lawrence. Realizing that this action would probably avail them but little, a Committee of Safety was