slavery was the 'sum of all villainies,' and its abolition the first essential work. If the American people did not take courage and end it speedily, human freedom and republican liberty would soon be empty names in these United States."

How long John Brown remained at the Willets farm near Topeka, to which he now proceeded, and where he spent the next two or three weeks, is not known. He neither entered Topeka on the fateful July 4, nor immediately thereafter. It is probable that he returned promptly to the neighborhood of his sick sons, more than ever disgusted with Free State leaders and their inability to adopt his view that the way to fight was to 'press to close quarters."62 On July 26, John Brown, Jr., wrote from his Leavenworth prison to his father:

"Am very glad that you have started as all things considered I am convinced you can be of more use where you contemplate going than here. My anxiety for your safe journey is very great. Hope that I shall yet see you all again. Where I shall go, if I get through this is more than I can tell, of one thing I feel sure now, and that is that I shall leave Kansas. I must get away from exciting scenes to some secluded region, or my life will be a failure. . . . The treatment I have received from the Free State party has wearied me of any further desire to coöperate with them. They, as a party, are guided by no principle but selfishness, and are withal most arrant cowards they deserve their fate.

63

Four days later, John Brown, Jr., wrote to Jason Brown that his father and his party were at Topeka "a few days ago on their way to the States. They were supplied at Topeka with provisions for the trip and by this time I hope they have passed without the limits of the Territory." 64 The party comprised Owen, Oliver, Frederick and Salmon Brown, and their father, Henry Thompson, and Lucius Mills, for whom John Brown had little regard because he had no desire to fight and was content to play the nurse and doctor. Salmon Brown states that they left because Lucius Mills insisted on the invalids' being moved, and because they were a drag on the fighting men. In their hot, primitive quarters, in which the flies were a scourge, Owen had been reduced "almost to a skeleton," and Henry Thompson was not much better off, while Salmon himself was still a cripple. Henry Thompson affirms that he, Oliver, Owen and Salmon had had enough of Kansas. They did not wish to

fight any more. They felt that they had suffered enough, that the service they had been called upon to perform at Pottawatomie squared them with Duty. They were, they thought, entitled to leave further work to other hands. They were sick of fighting and trouble. The burden of Pottawatomie did not, however, weigh upon Salmon; it was as an invalided soldier that he consented to leave. Jason Brown stayed at Osawatomie with his wife. John Brown himself never expressed an opinion as to his sons' resolution or their leaving Kansas.

A heretofore unrelated incident of this journey is now set forth by Salmon Brown. Oliver Brown, a great, stout, strapping fellow, was forbidden by his father to give to Lucius Mills a fine revolver. Says Salmon Brown:

"Oliver wanted to make him a present of a revolver that he [Oliver] had captured at Black Jack. Father objected; forbade Oliver to give Mills the pistol, saying that Mills would never use it. Oliver persisting, Father set out to take the pistol away from him by force. In the scuffle that ensued, I, alarmed lest the weapon might be accidentally discharged, took it out of Oliver's belt, saying: 'Now you fellows fight it out!' It looked foolish, to me. The pistol was Oliver's pistol. And the match was not an equal one. Father had been a strong man in his day, but his prime was past. Oliver was a splendid wrestler. Up in North Elba, he had thrown thirty lumbermen one day, one after the other, in a big 'wrastle.' Father was like a child in his hands. And Oliver was determined. He grabbed Father by the arms and jammed him against the wagon. 'Let go of me!' said Father. 'Not till you agree to behave yourself,' said Oliver. And Father had to let him have his way.' 165

On August 3 and 4, John Brown and those with him were overtaken by a party of Free State men who were marching north to the Nebraska line, to meet James H. Lane's Free State caravan and to protect it from the merciless Kickapoo Rangers, the murderers of Captain R. P. Brown. One of these volunteer guards, Samuel J. Reader, still a resident of Kansas, has transcribed from his journal the following impressions of his meeting with John Brown: 66

"Between three and four o'clock we formed in marching column, and started forward at a swinging pace. We were all well rested, and a little tired of staying in camp. We had been on the road perhaps an hour or more when someone in front shouted, 'There he is! Sure enough, it was Brown. Just ahead of us we saw the

dingy old wagon-cover, and the two men, and the oxen, plodding slowly onward. Our step was increased to 'quick time;' and as we passed the old man, on either side of the road, we rent the air with cheers. If John Brown ever delighted in the praises of men, his pleasure must have been gratified, as he walked along, enveloped in our shouting column. But I fear he looked upon such things as vainglorious, for if he responded by word or act, I failed to hear it or see it. In passing I looked at him closely. He was rather tall, and lean, with a tanned, weather-beaten aspect in general. He looked like a rough, hard-working old farmer; and I had known several such who pretty closely resembled Brown in many respects. He appeared to be unarmed; but very likely had shooting irons inside the wagon. His face was shaven, and he wore a cotton shirt, partly covered by a vest. His hat was well worn, and his general appearance, dilapidated, dusty and soiled. He turned from his ox team and glanced at our party from time to time as we were passing him. No doubt it was pleasing sight to him to see men in armed opposition to the Slave Power."

Mr. Reader, on this expedition, on August 7, was an eyewitness of the first meeting between John Brown and a remarkable man who subsequently became one of Brown's most trusted lieutenants, Aaron Dwight Stevens, who at that time went by the name of Captain Whipple, for the good reason that he had escaped from the military prison at Fort Leavenworth while serving a three years' sentence for taking part in a soldiers' mutiny at Don Fernandez de Taos, New Mexico, and resisting the authority of an officer of his regiment, Major G. A. H. Blake, of the First Dragoons.67*

John Brown himself did not set foot in Iowa, but turned back at Nebraska City, on the Nebraska boundary, his invalids then being quite safe.68 "Frederick turned and went back with his father," Henry Thompson testifies. "Frederick felt that Pottawatomie bound him to Kansas. He did not wish to leave. He felt that a great crime had been committed, and that he should go back into Kansas and live it out." It was a decision that cost him his life.

* A myth that this officer was Captain James Longstreet, later the famous Confederate Lieutenant-General, persists in lives of Brown and sketches of A. D. Stevens. Captain Longstreet, at the time of Stevens's trial, was on duty with his regiment, the Eighth Infantry, in Texas, and does not figure in the court-martial

CHAPTER VII

THE FOE IN THE FIELD

AT Nebraska City, John Brown found a notable caravan. Under the erratic James Henry Lane, there had arrived at that point a body of several hundred Free State emigrants, many of whom had attempted to reach Kansas by the usual route of the Missouri River, only to learn that the chivalric Missourians had barred that means of entrance. As early as June 20, 1856, a party of seventy-five men from Chicago, understood to be the vanguard of the "army of the North" which Lane had been raising in Chicago and elsewhere, was forced to give up its arms on the steamer Star of the West, at Lecompton, Missouri, by a mob of Missourians headed by Colonel Joseph Shelby, later a prominent Confederate brigadier. At Kansas City, General Atchison, with another armed force, compelled the Northerners to stay on their boat and return to Illinois, an achievement about which the Border Ruffian press boasted loudly and long.1 Thereafter parties of Northerners, on the steamers Sultan and Arabia and other river-craft, were similarly driven back, some even being robbed of their possessions. By the 4th of July, the blockade of the river was complete; thereafter the Free State reinforcements were compelled to take the tedious and expensive overland trip from Iowa City, which was in railroad communication with Chicago, to Nebraska City, and thence southward through Nebraska to Kansas. This route was opened by Lane, whose party finally comprised one hundred and twenty-five wellarmed single men, and is said by most writers to have numbered, all told, six hundred men, women and children when he reached the Kansas line. There General Lane found it desirable to assume the name of "General Joe Cook." While in the East, General Lane had made a sensation by a most eloquent speech in behalf of Kansas, delivered at Chicago on the 31st of May, 1856. He made full use of the sacking of Lawrence and of the pro-slavery outrages in the Territory, and it was in

large part to his eloquence that much of the heavy emigration to Kansas in the summer and fall of 1856 was due. How great his oratorical powers were may be seen from a letter of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of September 18, 1856, now preserved in the collections of the Kansas Historical Society:

"Last night he [Lane] spoke in a school house; never did I hear such a speech; every sentence like a pistol bullet; such delicacy and lightness of touch; such natural art; such perfect adaptation; not a word, not a gesture, could have been altered; he had every nerve in his audience at the end of his muscles; not a man in the United States could have done it; and the perfect ease of it all, not a glimpse of premeditation or effort; and yet he has slept in his boots every night but two for five weeks."

5

The opening of the presidential campaign between Frémont and Buchanan, as well as the events in the Territory, kept Kansas in the forefront of national politics. [The first Republican National Convention resolved, on June 17, that “Kansas should be immediately admitted as a state of the Union with her present free constitution." The majority of the Howard Committee submitted its report on July 1, with much resultant Congressional discussion of the Kansas situation, and Oliver, the minority of the committee, followed suit on July 11 with his report containing the evidence in regard to the Pottawatomie massacre. Even then, curiously enough, the Pottawatomie affair did not in any degree injure the Free State cause in the North. Oliver himself used it in a speech on July 31,6 and Toombs, of Georgia, also made a passing reference to it; but no one else in Congress. The Democrats continued to base most of their criticisms upon the general policy of the Free State settlers in taking Sharp's rifles with them to Kansas. The Elections Committee of the House reported against the admission of Whitfield as a delegate and in favor of Reeder; the House on August I voted against Whitfield by 110 to 92, and against Reeder by 113 to 88, and thus neither was given a seat. There were various attempts to legislate during the summer. On June 25, Congressman Grow, of Pennsylvania, presented a bill in the House for the admission of Kansas under the Tokepa Constitution, and the House passed it by 99 to 97 on the day before Colonel Sumner dis