After the events of May, 1856, in Kansas that I have described in the preceding posts, Brown continued to fight the Lecompton partisans and the Border Ruffians in Kansas Territory. Merrill Peterson gives a good summary of that period:
Brown became the terror of the prairie in 1856. Reporters for eastern newspapers lionized him. His fame increased in June with the defeat of a superior force under the Border Ruffian captain Henry Clay Pate at a place called Black Jack. It was sealed at Osawatomie in the fall. Here a cavalry force of 250, mounted and armed in Missouri under command of veteran officers of the Mexican War, undertook to wipe out Brown, his family, and his allies. Outnumbered 10 to1, they fought gamely but went down in defeat. Brown's son Frederick lost his life; the captain himself was reported killed; the town was consumed in flames. "God sees it," Brown said as he watched, then, face wet with tears, vowed to his son Jason, "I have only a short time to live - only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory. I will carry the war into Africa." Henceforth he was known as "Old Osawatomie Brown." (my emphasis)
Carrying the war "into Africa" meant into the South, into the domain of the slaveowners. And, indeed, that's what he worked on doing and eventually attempted in 1859 at Harpers Ferry. The Battle of Black Jack would look like a minor, even comical skirmish compared to the famous battles of the Civil War. But it was what first made Brown a hero to the abolitionists. Taking place on June 2, about a week after the Pottawatomie killings and less than two since the sack of Lawrence and Preston Brooks' attack on Charles Sumner, that skirmish was the Free States' first clear victory in the Kansas conflict. It came at a time when it was badly needed, and much appreciated.
During the next few years, Brown travelled in the North raising money to provide supplies, guns and money for the Free State side in Kansas. And also for his plan to "take the war into Africa". He was even invited to address the Massachusetts Legislature during this time in support of a bill to provide aid to Kansas. His address didn't convince the legislature to pass the bill. But it did boost Brown's own reputation, and provides us with some kind of benchmark of how the Free State cause in Kansas was perceived in the North.
During these years, he gathered around him a group of supporters that helped him finance his "Africa" project, a group that would become known as the Secret Six: Franklin Sanborn, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe (husband of the Julia Ward Howe who later wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the tune of "John Brown's Body"), George Luther Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Garrit Smith. Parker and Higginson were both Christian ministers.
The Harpers Ferry raid has been described many times, and the basic facts of the raid are not in dispute. The motivations and justifications, as well as the historical effects, are very much in dispute. As are the nature of Brown’s plans.
I’ll let these three paragraphs from James McPherson serve as a basic description of the raid itself:
In the summer of 1859 Brown rented a farm across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry and began to gather his seventeen white and five black recruits. He hoped for more blacks, but even Brown's determined dedication and undoubted charisma could not persuade some potential recruits to take part in an apparently suicidal enterprise. Brown pleaded with his friend Frederick Douglass to join the raid. "I want you for a special purpose," he told Douglass. "When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them." Douglass refused, and tried to dissuade Brown. He knew that Harpers Ferry was a military trap. Situated at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers and surrounded by commanding heights, the town could be completely cut off by troops that controlled those heights and the two bridges. And so it proved.
Brown considered himself a skilled military leader. And some of his guerrilla activities in Kansas seemed to demonstrate that skill. But his attack on Harpers Ferry the night of October 16–17, 1859, was poorly thought out. With the advantage of surprise he managed to capture the undefended armory and arsenal. He also sent patrols to seize hostages and a few slaves. But he neglected to plan an escape route if things went wrong. He did nothingabout laying in supplies or establishing a defensive line against an inevitable counterattack. The nineteen men who invaded the town carried no rations. After his initial success, Brown seemed not to know what to do next. He stopped the night train heading to Baltimore, but then inexplicably let it proceed after a few hours - spread the alarm.
Brown continued to sit tight, apparently waiting for slaves to flock to his banner. Few did. But at daylight the local residents began shooting at the raiders, who fired back. Militia from the surrounding areas seized the bridges, cutting off any chance of escape. Several men on both sides were killed in the fighting on October 17, including two of Brown's sons. Brown's remaining men retreated to the strongly constructed fire engine house where they made their last stand. That night a detachment of US marines arrived from Washington, commanded by none other than army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee, who interrupted his leave at Arlington to accept this duty. After Brown refused a summons to surrender, the marines attacked and carried the engine house, killing two more raiders and wound-ing Brown. Thirty-six hours after it began, John Brown's war to liberate the slaves was over. No slaves were freed. The whole effort seemed a miserable failure.
In saying, “No slaves were freed,” MacPherson presumably means in the larger plan. As part of the Harpers Ferry operation itself, Brown’s group did free a number of slaves.
The raid began on Sunday evening, 10/16/1859, and ended with Brown’s surrender on Tuesday morning. After a speedy and not terribly fair trial by the State of Virginia, he was convicted of treason against Virginia (a state of which he was not a citizen), murder and inciting slave insurrection. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Several of his men were hanged soon after.
Between the time of the raid and the time of his hanging, Brown had become a polarizing figure throughout the nation. His few speeches in court, his letters from prison, along with the statements of prominent supporters in the North like the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, established his reputation as a principled enemy of slavery, a white man who was willing to risk his own life in defense of democracy and the will of God in destroying slavery. To the South, he became the sum of all fears.
Herman Melville introduced Battle Pieces, his postwar volume of Civil War poems, with this one about Old Osawatomie hanging on the gallows:
The Portent. (1859.)
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!The cut is on the crown(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
Online resources for the Harpers Ferry raid: The Harper's Ferry Raid (PBS American Experience); John Brown and the Valley of the Shadow; A Lecture on John Brown by Frederick Douglass; Dr. Stephen Oates on John Brown (audio and video).
(See Sources on John Brown for references to quotes in this post.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Showing posts with label bleeding kansas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bleeding kansas. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 18: John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (5)
Before moving on to other aspects of the John Brown story, I want to mention two other observations in connection with the Pottawatomie killings of May 1856. It's important to recognize how high passions were running North and South over the slavery issue at that time, and Kansas was the focus of those passions.
As I described before, the sack of Lawrence, Preston Brooks' beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate, and the Pottawatomie massacre occurred within less than a week. Richard Boyer writes about the mood at the time:
Seldom in all of America's political or criminal annals has there been such overwhelming shock and indignation as swept the North the day after the assault on Sumner. The most conservative of men in Boston were talking of a march on Washington, a taking over by force of the Southern-owned government ...
Now the talk of revolution was more prevalent than ever before, revolution against the slaveholder-owned national government which, many Northerners believed, was using violence in Washington as it had in Kansas to subvert on behalf of slavery the most fundamental of American rights, including the right of Senate debate. Sumner had used the terms of Revolution and 1776 in describing the administration's tyranny in Kansas, and Seward had said in so many words "Kansas is today in the very act of revolution against a tyranny of the President of the United States." In Kansas many more than John Brown were declaring, despite the strategy of peace urged by Charles Robinson and other Free State leaders, that only a recourse to the armed Revolutionary resistance of 1776 could save Kansas and the nation. (Doyle; 113; my emphasis)
In 1856, and in the years following until Lincoln's election, the national government was dominated by the Slave Power, and the ways in which slavery was undermining democracy for everyone was becoming more and more obvious, even to whites who wanted nothing to do with free blacks. The Free Staters in Kansas Territory - against the bitter opposition of John Brown and his sons - voted by a large majority to exclude all blacks, slave or free, from the Territory. It's tempting today to imagine that opponents of slavery were particularly favorable toward blacks. Only in some cases was that true. But that shouldn't obscure the intensity of the hostility to slavery among increasing numbers of people in the free states who rejected the Slave Power's increasingly tyrannical use of their power in the national government.
Boyer continues:
But as Seward talked, and Sumner spoke, and Free State leaders in Kansas attempted negotiation, the South was acting and the South was winning. Six Free State settlers had been killed by the Border Ruffians and one of the slain had been tortured before he died, lynched by a mob one of whom fractured his skull with a hatchet. The North was growing tired of saint-liness, of passive resistance like that of Garrison's, of triumphs of character won by turning the other cheek. They admired Sumner, the martyr, but they longed for victories other than the moral grandeur of physical defeat. As they spoke of charred and looted Lawrence, the Free State center which had been reduced by Missouri's forces, there were those who yearned passionately for a hero who would meet the South on its own ground and on its own terms, for a champion who would oppose the slaveholders not with the purity of superior character but with the strength of superior force. Soon they were to have such a hero [in John Brown]. And if his methods were occasionally dubious they were ignored because his victories were bloody, actual, and sorely needed, many felt, at a time when all victories actual and not [merely] moral had seemed to belong only to the partisans of slavery. (Boyer; 113-114; my emphasis)
Oswald Garrison Villard clearly believed the Pottawatomie killings were not justified. But his discussion of the various issues around that event is a thorough one. And his descriptions of the generals situation in Kansas paint a vivid picture of the particular situation:
In Kansas in 1856 the situation was different from that of California in 1849-50, in that most of the existing lawlessness had its origin largely in the national politics of the day. That there were the same rude and dangerous characters to be found on every frontier is proved by the recital of thecrimes committed in Kansas prior to the Pottawatomie murders. In the case of Kansas, the high character of part of the emigration was offset by the lawless character of the Border Ruffians. Slavery itself tended to that overbearing lawlessness which is inevitable wherever the fate of a dark-colored people is placed unreservedly in the hands of whites. It was the spirit of intolerance and lawlessness bred by slavery which dictated the destruction of Lawrence and made the abuse of the ballot-boxes seem proper and justifiable. (Villard; 171; my emphasis)
And this framing of the Pottawatomie massacre is also a good one:
In the light of all the evidence now accumulated, the truth would seem to be that John Brown came to Kansas bringing arms and ammunition, eager to fight, and convinced that force alone would save Kansas. He was under arms at the polls within three days of his arrival in Kansas, to shed blood to defend the voters, if need be, and he was bitterly disappointed that the Wakarusa "war" ended without a single conflict. Thereafter he believed that a collision was inevitable in the spring, and Jones and Donaldson proved him to be correct. Fired with indignation at the wrongs he witnessed on every hand, impelled by the Covenanter's spirit that made him so strange a figure in the nineteenth century, and believing fully that there should be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, he killed his men in the conscientious belief that he was a faithful servant of Kansas and of the Lord. He killed not to kill, but to free; not to make wives widows and children fatherless, but to attack on its own ground the hideous institution of human slavery, against which his whole life was a protest. He pictured himself a modern crusader as much empowered to remove the unbeliever as any armored searcher after the Grail. It was to his mind a righteous and necessary act; if he concealed his part in it and always took refuge in the half-truth that his own hands were not stained, that was as near to a compromise for the sake of policy as this rigid, self-denying Roundhead ever came. Naturally a tenderhearted man, he directed a particularly shocking crime without remorse, because the men killed typified to him the slave-drivers who counted their victims by the hundreds. It was to him a necessary carrying into Africa [i.e.,carrying it to the slavery supporters] of the war in which he firmly desired himself engaged. And always it must not be forgotten that his motives were wholly unselfish, and that his aims were none other than the freeing of a race. With his ardent, masterful temperament, he needed no counsel from a Lane or a Robinson to make him ready to strike a blow, or to tell him that the time for it had come. The smoke of burning Lawrence was more than sufficient.
If this interpretation of the man and his motives lifts him far above the scale of that Border Ruffian who boasted that he would have the scalp of an Abolitionist within two hours and actually killed and scalped the very first one he met, it cannot be denied that the Border Ruffians who sacked Lawrence believed as thoroughly in the justice of their cause, and their right to establish in Kansas what was to them a sacred institution, as John Brown did in his. Their leaders had told them of an agreement in Congress that Kansas should be a slave State and Nebraska free. Hence their belief that the North had broken this compact rendered them particularly bitter against the Free Soilers. It was to them also a holy war in which they were engaged, - even with its admixture of whiskey and lawlessness, characteristics of the Southern "poor white" civilization of the period. (Villard; 185-6; my emphasis)
Of course, as we have seen, many of the foot-soldiers of slavery in Kansas may have been poor whites who had no slaves. But the fact that a former Senator of Missouri came over the lead the proslavery irregulars is an illustration that the cause they were serving was that of the large slaveholders.
I've given a lot of attention in this series of posts to the Pottawatomie massacre. But it's also important to keep in mind that John Brown the man is not the same as John Brown, the legend and symbol. Brown's supporters tended to deny or brush over his alleged role in Pottawatomie. It was his exploits later that year in Kansas that made him a well-known antislavery figure. It's even the case that many of his most devoted admirers did not endorse even his failed raid at Harper's Ferry, though it wasn't nearly so morally ambiguous as the Pottawatomie action. Even before he was hanged in December of 1859, his admirers were consciously distinguishing betweeen John Brown the man and John Brown the symbol.
It also worth recalling at this point that human frailty is what it is. As Boyer observes:
The growing conviction in the North that something had to be done to stop the expansion of slavery did more than bring thousands of his fellow citizens into partial agreement with views long held by Brown. It provided the necessary setting, the essential scene, for his own individual renascence, after a critical failure that for some time made him almost incapable of decisive action. It brought him four years of success, of a kind at least, after all his reverses. The fevered political scene, the gathering crisis, seemed to revitalize the Old Man and give his life a force and meaning that it had never had before.
Still, in understanding the historical image of John Brown, it wasn't for "midnight assassinations" that he was admired. And many admired him while disapproving of his less controversial violent exploits.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index toConfederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
As I described before, the sack of Lawrence, Preston Brooks' beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate, and the Pottawatomie massacre occurred within less than a week. Richard Boyer writes about the mood at the time:
Seldom in all of America's political or criminal annals has there been such overwhelming shock and indignation as swept the North the day after the assault on Sumner. The most conservative of men in Boston were talking of a march on Washington, a taking over by force of the Southern-owned government ...
Now the talk of revolution was more prevalent than ever before, revolution against the slaveholder-owned national government which, many Northerners believed, was using violence in Washington as it had in Kansas to subvert on behalf of slavery the most fundamental of American rights, including the right of Senate debate. Sumner had used the terms of Revolution and 1776 in describing the administration's tyranny in Kansas, and Seward had said in so many words "Kansas is today in the very act of revolution against a tyranny of the President of the United States." In Kansas many more than John Brown were declaring, despite the strategy of peace urged by Charles Robinson and other Free State leaders, that only a recourse to the armed Revolutionary resistance of 1776 could save Kansas and the nation. (Doyle; 113; my emphasis)
In 1856, and in the years following until Lincoln's election, the national government was dominated by the Slave Power, and the ways in which slavery was undermining democracy for everyone was becoming more and more obvious, even to whites who wanted nothing to do with free blacks. The Free Staters in Kansas Territory - against the bitter opposition of John Brown and his sons - voted by a large majority to exclude all blacks, slave or free, from the Territory. It's tempting today to imagine that opponents of slavery were particularly favorable toward blacks. Only in some cases was that true. But that shouldn't obscure the intensity of the hostility to slavery among increasing numbers of people in the free states who rejected the Slave Power's increasingly tyrannical use of their power in the national government.
Boyer continues:
But as Seward talked, and Sumner spoke, and Free State leaders in Kansas attempted negotiation, the South was acting and the South was winning. Six Free State settlers had been killed by the Border Ruffians and one of the slain had been tortured before he died, lynched by a mob one of whom fractured his skull with a hatchet. The North was growing tired of saint-liness, of passive resistance like that of Garrison's, of triumphs of character won by turning the other cheek. They admired Sumner, the martyr, but they longed for victories other than the moral grandeur of physical defeat. As they spoke of charred and looted Lawrence, the Free State center which had been reduced by Missouri's forces, there were those who yearned passionately for a hero who would meet the South on its own ground and on its own terms, for a champion who would oppose the slaveholders not with the purity of superior character but with the strength of superior force. Soon they were to have such a hero [in John Brown]. And if his methods were occasionally dubious they were ignored because his victories were bloody, actual, and sorely needed, many felt, at a time when all victories actual and not [merely] moral had seemed to belong only to the partisans of slavery. (Boyer; 113-114; my emphasis)
Oswald Garrison Villard clearly believed the Pottawatomie killings were not justified. But his discussion of the various issues around that event is a thorough one. And his descriptions of the generals situation in Kansas paint a vivid picture of the particular situation:
In Kansas in 1856 the situation was different from that of California in 1849-50, in that most of the existing lawlessness had its origin largely in the national politics of the day. That there were the same rude and dangerous characters to be found on every frontier is proved by the recital of thecrimes committed in Kansas prior to the Pottawatomie murders. In the case of Kansas, the high character of part of the emigration was offset by the lawless character of the Border Ruffians. Slavery itself tended to that overbearing lawlessness which is inevitable wherever the fate of a dark-colored people is placed unreservedly in the hands of whites. It was the spirit of intolerance and lawlessness bred by slavery which dictated the destruction of Lawrence and made the abuse of the ballot-boxes seem proper and justifiable. (Villard; 171; my emphasis)
And this framing of the Pottawatomie massacre is also a good one:
In the light of all the evidence now accumulated, the truth would seem to be that John Brown came to Kansas bringing arms and ammunition, eager to fight, and convinced that force alone would save Kansas. He was under arms at the polls within three days of his arrival in Kansas, to shed blood to defend the voters, if need be, and he was bitterly disappointed that the Wakarusa "war" ended without a single conflict. Thereafter he believed that a collision was inevitable in the spring, and Jones and Donaldson proved him to be correct. Fired with indignation at the wrongs he witnessed on every hand, impelled by the Covenanter's spirit that made him so strange a figure in the nineteenth century, and believing fully that there should be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, he killed his men in the conscientious belief that he was a faithful servant of Kansas and of the Lord. He killed not to kill, but to free; not to make wives widows and children fatherless, but to attack on its own ground the hideous institution of human slavery, against which his whole life was a protest. He pictured himself a modern crusader as much empowered to remove the unbeliever as any armored searcher after the Grail. It was to his mind a righteous and necessary act; if he concealed his part in it and always took refuge in the half-truth that his own hands were not stained, that was as near to a compromise for the sake of policy as this rigid, self-denying Roundhead ever came. Naturally a tenderhearted man, he directed a particularly shocking crime without remorse, because the men killed typified to him the slave-drivers who counted their victims by the hundreds. It was to him a necessary carrying into Africa [i.e.,carrying it to the slavery supporters] of the war in which he firmly desired himself engaged. And always it must not be forgotten that his motives were wholly unselfish, and that his aims were none other than the freeing of a race. With his ardent, masterful temperament, he needed no counsel from a Lane or a Robinson to make him ready to strike a blow, or to tell him that the time for it had come. The smoke of burning Lawrence was more than sufficient.
If this interpretation of the man and his motives lifts him far above the scale of that Border Ruffian who boasted that he would have the scalp of an Abolitionist within two hours and actually killed and scalped the very first one he met, it cannot be denied that the Border Ruffians who sacked Lawrence believed as thoroughly in the justice of their cause, and their right to establish in Kansas what was to them a sacred institution, as John Brown did in his. Their leaders had told them of an agreement in Congress that Kansas should be a slave State and Nebraska free. Hence their belief that the North had broken this compact rendered them particularly bitter against the Free Soilers. It was to them also a holy war in which they were engaged, - even with its admixture of whiskey and lawlessness, characteristics of the Southern "poor white" civilization of the period. (Villard; 185-6; my emphasis)
Of course, as we have seen, many of the foot-soldiers of slavery in Kansas may have been poor whites who had no slaves. But the fact that a former Senator of Missouri came over the lead the proslavery irregulars is an illustration that the cause they were serving was that of the large slaveholders.
I've given a lot of attention in this series of posts to the Pottawatomie massacre. But it's also important to keep in mind that John Brown the man is not the same as John Brown, the legend and symbol. Brown's supporters tended to deny or brush over his alleged role in Pottawatomie. It was his exploits later that year in Kansas that made him a well-known antislavery figure. It's even the case that many of his most devoted admirers did not endorse even his failed raid at Harper's Ferry, though it wasn't nearly so morally ambiguous as the Pottawatomie action. Even before he was hanged in December of 1859, his admirers were consciously distinguishing betweeen John Brown the man and John Brown the symbol.
It also worth recalling at this point that human frailty is what it is. As Boyer observes:
The growing conviction in the North that something had to be done to stop the expansion of slavery did more than bring thousands of his fellow citizens into partial agreement with views long held by Brown. It provided the necessary setting, the essential scene, for his own individual renascence, after a critical failure that for some time made him almost incapable of decisive action. It brought him four years of success, of a kind at least, after all his reverses. The fevered political scene, the gathering crisis, seemed to revitalize the Old Man and give his life a force and meaning that it had never had before.
... Like most Americans of the period, he was still under the spell of the American Revolution and the words "All men are created equal" were to him not a Fourth of July orator's phrase but a fact his grandfather had died to prove in the War for Independence and to which he would similarly attest. Sometimes he enjoyed speaking of the Revolution to the eminent as if it were still going on and then he liked to say, bristling and rearing back and savoring himself a little, that he believed in the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule, sir, that he believed they meant the same thing, sir, and that it would be better for a whole generation to pass from the earth, men, women, and children, than that one jot or tittle of either should be lost, adding with an imperious flash, "I mean exactly so, sir."
When he spoke so to Emerson and Thoreau in Concord in 1857, they regarded him with unfeigned admiration. After all, in their view he was the foremost victor of Kansas, the pre-eminent champion against slavery in that Territory's civil war. It was an age of absolutes, and both Thoreau and Emerson were inclined to regard him as spotless. Yet they had every reason for knowing, if they wished to know, of his bloody exploit at Pottawatomie, where he supervised the midnight execution of five pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, since it had been reported in a widely circulated government report. (Boyer; 121)
It's always valuable to remember that it's very tempting to overlook the misdeeds or questionable judgment of Our Side. That's not to say passing more responsible judgments isn't possible. It's just that it's all too human not to do so.Still, in understanding the historical image of John Brown, it wasn't for "midnight assassinations" that he was admired. And many admired him while disapproving of his less controversial violent exploits.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index toConfederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006, April 17: John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (4)
The Pottawatomie massacre is not only important for its role in John Brown's biography. Looking at it more closely, as I've been doing in these posts, is also a way of understanding a bit of the intensity of those pre-Civil War days, and the rehearsal for that war that occurred in Kansas.
In the last post, I talked about the various objections to the action of Brown and his men in executing the five Free State settlers. In this post, I'm looking at some of the elements that those who condemn them as unjustified also have to take into account.
One is the nature of the conflict in Kansas. As we've seen, the pro-slavery crowd fully intended to impose slavery on the Territory by force. Law and the normal rules of conduct in peacetime were not going to stop them. If those who stood for democracy and opposed slavery hoped to prevent that outcome in the short term, they had to fight. We can make counter-factual speculations about what non-violent resistance might have accomplished. But in the immediate situation, the Free State settlers had to fight or surrender.
The larger justice of the cause doesn't justify any act taken in pursuit of it, of course. But in the case of the Pottawatomie killings, which were an immediate response to the sack of Lawrence, inspiring the Free State settlers to fight was Brown's immediate goal in the action. And it was successful. DuBois wrote:
The deed inflamed Kansas. The timid rushed to disavow the deed. The free state people were silent and the pro-slavery party was roused to fury. ...
To this day men differ as to the effect of John Brown's blow [the Pottawatomie killings]. Some say it freed Kansas, while other say it plunged the land back into civil war. Truth lies in both statements. The blow freed Kansas by plunging it into civil war, and compelling men to fight for freedom which they had vainly hoped to gain by political diplomacy. At first it was hard to see this, and even those sons of John Brown whom he had not taken with him, recoiled at the news. (DuBois; 157; my emphasis)
Whatever the immediately emotional context, Brown was taking a step to achieve a calculated political effect in that particular moment of the guerrilla war. And his success in that regard shows that his judgment on that aspect of the deed was sound.
Stephen Oates describes the aftermath this way:
The crisis had certainly arrived in terror-stricken southeastern Kansas, as columns of Missourians and their Southern allies ransacked the area, plundering homesteads, taking "horses & cattle, and everything else they can lay hold of" as they searched for the Pottawatomie killers. "The War seems to have commenced in real earnest, an Osawtomie minuteman wrote his cousin. ... (Oates; 146)
And describing the situation a couple of weeks later, Oates writes:
By now southeastern Kansas was in complete chaos. Dozens of settlers - proslavery as well as free-state - had fled the region out of fear for their lives. Armed bands of men - one led by John Brown himself - prowled the countryside, shooting at one another and looting enemy stores and homesteads. As Samuel Adair wrote some friends from Osawatomie, the sacking of Lawrence and the assassinations at Pottawatomie had triggered a terrible guerrilla war in southeastern Kansas, one in which "as many pro-slavery men must die as free state men are killed by them." An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - that was the war cry of both sides in Bleeding Kansas - and nobody knew what the end would be. (Oates; 146)
There is also the fact that the victims were chosen carefully. Although they were not convicted of any crime, there was no doubt that all them were active pro-slavery partisans who could be expected to fight against the Free State settlers. This was not indiscriminate violence or an emotional killing frenzy. On the contrary, they were careful not to hurt family members of those captured at their homes and executed. They granted Mrs. Doyle's plea to not take her 16-year-old son, who was already active in the [pro-slavery] Law and Order Party there. The victims were not tortured, nor were they killed in front of their families.
The affadavit of James Harris in the Howard Committee Report describes the Brown party's arrival at his house, where they too "Dutch Bill" Sherman. Brown and his party were not so familiar with Harris as with Dutch Bill. He describes their interrogation of him:
They asked if I had ever taken any hand in aiding pro-slavery men in coming to the Territory of Kansas, or had ever taken any hand in the last troubles at Lawrence, and asked me whether I had ever done the free State party any harm or ever intended to do that party any harm; they asked me what made me live at such a place. I then answered that I could get higher wages there than anywhere else.
Satisfied with his answers, they released Harris. It could well be argued that there is no particular virtue in that, because executing Harris would have been just as wrong as killing the five. But what it does illustrate is that the action was a disciplined act of guerrilla warfare in pursuit of a conscious goal. It wasn't indiscriminate slaughter, or an impulsive act of thoughtless brutality. (If it's worth mentioning, releasing Harris is also an argument against the goofy charge of Robert Penn Warren that the whole operation was just a cover for horse theft.)
Brown's actions when he returned to Kansas Territory in 1858 also shed light on his approach to the conflict. His decision to execute the pro-slavery partisans at Pottawatomie was based on a precise judgment of a very particular moment in the Kansas conflict. In January 1858, Free State settlers won a large majority in the legislature in a genuine free election. In May, almost two years to the day after the Pottawatomie killings, a slavery partisan named Charles Hamilton led a band of 25 followers in killing five men, presumed to be Free State. This was known as the Marais des Cygnes massacre.
Brown returned to Kansas the following month. David Reynolds writes:
No one was better prepared to retaliate for the massacre than John Brown, who had proved at Pottawatomie he could answer blood with blood. He did retaliate for Hamilton's crime, but not immediately and not in Pottawatomie fashion. He saw that Kansas was moving inevitably toward freedom through normal political channels. There was no need now for arbitrary killing. Reynolds; 269; my emphasis in bold)
Since Reynolds makes clear elsewhere in the book his disapproval of the 1856 Pottawatomie murders, I assume the "arbitrary killing" is in part a reference to the Pottawatomie killings. But, whether they were justified or not, the killings by the Brown party in May 1856 were not "arbitrary".
But Reynolds account makes clear that Brown was choosing his actions based on a well-informed judgment about the political situation, not hacking up his enemies in a moment of anger.
Villard provides a long description by Eli Snyder of an moment in 1858 when Brown had the opportunity to kill the Rev. Martin White, a rabid pro-slavery partisan who had personally shot and killed John Brown's son Frederick in 1856. Snyder's account:
During the time that Brown was at my place (1858), he wished me to take a short trip into Missouri and I agreeing, Brown took an old surveyor's compass and chain and he and I followed down along the river, while Kagi and Tidd took the road to Butler. They pretended to be looking for situations to teach a school. We were all to meet at Pattenville, but not to appear to know each other. Brown and I were ostensibly surveying. On meeting at Pattenville we had an opportunity to come to an understanding to meet again at a clump of trees on a certain hill. Brown and I took the river and when we met again Martin White's house was half a mile east of us. Brown had a small field glass which I asked him to loan me, as I had seen some one near the house that I took to be Martin White, whom I knew; having heard him address a meeting at West Point a few days after the burning of Osawatomie, when Clarke was raising a force to drive and burn out Free State men between there and Fort Scott. At that time White had just returned from accompanying Reid and I heard him describe how he killed Frederick Brown, — making the motion of lowering a gun. Brown adjusted the glass and looking I could recognize Martin White reading a book as he sat in a chair in the shade of a tree. I handed the glass to Brown and asked him to look and he said he also recognized him saying: — 'I declare that is Martin White.' For a few minutes nothing was said when I remarked ' Suppose you and I go down and see the old man and have a talk with him.' 'No, no, I can't do that,' said Brown. Kagi said, 'let Snyder and me go.' Capt. Brown said: 'Go if you wish to but don't youhurt a hair of his head; but if he has any slaves take the last one of them.' Kagi said: 'Snyder and I want to go without instructions [i.e., with Brown's permission to kill White], or not at all.' Therefore as Brown was unwilling that Martin White, who had murdered his son, should receive any harm we did not go near him. It was thus shown that John Brown had no revenge to gratify. (Villard; 359)
This incident speaks to Brown's self-discipline and to his attitude toward political violence. If the goal of abolishing slavery could be achieved through peaceful means, which was then occurring in Kansas, Brown was not seeking violence. In this case, he refused to allow his supporters to kill the man who had killed Brown's own son - even though White had done more in the pro-slavery cause than any of the five men killed at Pottawatomie.
These are all factors that have to be taken into account when evaluating what Brown did with the Pottawatomie killings. These are all reasons that I would judge Brown's actions in that case to be justified in that particular situation, which were unusual in the extreme.
After the Harper's Ferry raid in 1859, Senator Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee political leader who later became President on Lincoln's death and made himself one of the worst Presidents in history (a contemparary coparison is tempting, but that would take me too far afield), denounced John Brown and recalled the Pottawatomie killings. With that action, Johnson said, "hell entered [Brown's] soul. ... Then it was that he shrank from the dimensions of a human being into those of a reptile. Then it was, if not before, that he changed his character to a demon who had lost all the virtues of man. And you talk of sympathy for John Brown!" .)(Reynolds; 403)
Andrew Johnson was to stick with the Union as an American patriot during the Civil War. But while John Brown was risking his life for democracy, Johnson was defending the interests of his home state's slaveowners in the Senate.
G.W. Brown of the proslavery Kansas paper Herald of Freedom also brought up the Pottawatomie killings after Harper's Ferry. In response, at a time when politicians of virtually all stripes were trying to distance themselves from Brown and his Harper's Ferry raid, Reynolds reports:
In response to [G.W. Brown's new recriminations against John Brown over the Pottawatomie massacre], a council of antislavery Kansas issued a declaration that "according to the ordinary rules of war" the Pottawatomie episode was "not unjustifiable, but ... was performed from the sad necessity which existed at that time to defend the lives and liberties of the settlers in that region." (Reynolds; 340)
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index toConfederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
In the last post, I talked about the various objections to the action of Brown and his men in executing the five Free State settlers. In this post, I'm looking at some of the elements that those who condemn them as unjustified also have to take into account.
One is the nature of the conflict in Kansas. As we've seen, the pro-slavery crowd fully intended to impose slavery on the Territory by force. Law and the normal rules of conduct in peacetime were not going to stop them. If those who stood for democracy and opposed slavery hoped to prevent that outcome in the short term, they had to fight. We can make counter-factual speculations about what non-violent resistance might have accomplished. But in the immediate situation, the Free State settlers had to fight or surrender.
The larger justice of the cause doesn't justify any act taken in pursuit of it, of course. But in the case of the Pottawatomie killings, which were an immediate response to the sack of Lawrence, inspiring the Free State settlers to fight was Brown's immediate goal in the action. And it was successful. DuBois wrote:
The deed inflamed Kansas. The timid rushed to disavow the deed. The free state people were silent and the pro-slavery party was roused to fury. ...
To this day men differ as to the effect of John Brown's blow [the Pottawatomie killings]. Some say it freed Kansas, while other say it plunged the land back into civil war. Truth lies in both statements. The blow freed Kansas by plunging it into civil war, and compelling men to fight for freedom which they had vainly hoped to gain by political diplomacy. At first it was hard to see this, and even those sons of John Brown whom he had not taken with him, recoiled at the news. (DuBois; 157; my emphasis)
Whatever the immediately emotional context, Brown was taking a step to achieve a calculated political effect in that particular moment of the guerrilla war. And his success in that regard shows that his judgment on that aspect of the deed was sound.
Stephen Oates describes the aftermath this way:
The crisis had certainly arrived in terror-stricken southeastern Kansas, as columns of Missourians and their Southern allies ransacked the area, plundering homesteads, taking "horses & cattle, and everything else they can lay hold of" as they searched for the Pottawatomie killers. "The War seems to have commenced in real earnest, an Osawtomie minuteman wrote his cousin. ... (Oates; 146)
And describing the situation a couple of weeks later, Oates writes:
By now southeastern Kansas was in complete chaos. Dozens of settlers - proslavery as well as free-state - had fled the region out of fear for their lives. Armed bands of men - one led by John Brown himself - prowled the countryside, shooting at one another and looting enemy stores and homesteads. As Samuel Adair wrote some friends from Osawatomie, the sacking of Lawrence and the assassinations at Pottawatomie had triggered a terrible guerrilla war in southeastern Kansas, one in which "as many pro-slavery men must die as free state men are killed by them." An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - that was the war cry of both sides in Bleeding Kansas - and nobody knew what the end would be. (Oates; 146)
There is also the fact that the victims were chosen carefully. Although they were not convicted of any crime, there was no doubt that all them were active pro-slavery partisans who could be expected to fight against the Free State settlers. This was not indiscriminate violence or an emotional killing frenzy. On the contrary, they were careful not to hurt family members of those captured at their homes and executed. They granted Mrs. Doyle's plea to not take her 16-year-old son, who was already active in the [pro-slavery] Law and Order Party there. The victims were not tortured, nor were they killed in front of their families.
The affadavit of James Harris in the Howard Committee Report describes the Brown party's arrival at his house, where they too "Dutch Bill" Sherman. Brown and his party were not so familiar with Harris as with Dutch Bill. He describes their interrogation of him:
They asked if I had ever taken any hand in aiding pro-slavery men in coming to the Territory of Kansas, or had ever taken any hand in the last troubles at Lawrence, and asked me whether I had ever done the free State party any harm or ever intended to do that party any harm; they asked me what made me live at such a place. I then answered that I could get higher wages there than anywhere else.
Satisfied with his answers, they released Harris. It could well be argued that there is no particular virtue in that, because executing Harris would have been just as wrong as killing the five. But what it does illustrate is that the action was a disciplined act of guerrilla warfare in pursuit of a conscious goal. It wasn't indiscriminate slaughter, or an impulsive act of thoughtless brutality. (If it's worth mentioning, releasing Harris is also an argument against the goofy charge of Robert Penn Warren that the whole operation was just a cover for horse theft.)
Brown's actions when he returned to Kansas Territory in 1858 also shed light on his approach to the conflict. His decision to execute the pro-slavery partisans at Pottawatomie was based on a precise judgment of a very particular moment in the Kansas conflict. In January 1858, Free State settlers won a large majority in the legislature in a genuine free election. In May, almost two years to the day after the Pottawatomie killings, a slavery partisan named Charles Hamilton led a band of 25 followers in killing five men, presumed to be Free State. This was known as the Marais des Cygnes massacre.
Brown returned to Kansas the following month. David Reynolds writes:
No one was better prepared to retaliate for the massacre than John Brown, who had proved at Pottawatomie he could answer blood with blood. He did retaliate for Hamilton's crime, but not immediately and not in Pottawatomie fashion. He saw that Kansas was moving inevitably toward freedom through normal political channels. There was no need now for arbitrary killing. Reynolds; 269; my emphasis in bold)
Since Reynolds makes clear elsewhere in the book his disapproval of the 1856 Pottawatomie murders, I assume the "arbitrary killing" is in part a reference to the Pottawatomie killings. But, whether they were justified or not, the killings by the Brown party in May 1856 were not "arbitrary".
But Reynolds account makes clear that Brown was choosing his actions based on a well-informed judgment about the political situation, not hacking up his enemies in a moment of anger.
Villard provides a long description by Eli Snyder of an moment in 1858 when Brown had the opportunity to kill the Rev. Martin White, a rabid pro-slavery partisan who had personally shot and killed John Brown's son Frederick in 1856. Snyder's account:
During the time that Brown was at my place (1858), he wished me to take a short trip into Missouri and I agreeing, Brown took an old surveyor's compass and chain and he and I followed down along the river, while Kagi and Tidd took the road to Butler. They pretended to be looking for situations to teach a school. We were all to meet at Pattenville, but not to appear to know each other. Brown and I were ostensibly surveying. On meeting at Pattenville we had an opportunity to come to an understanding to meet again at a clump of trees on a certain hill. Brown and I took the river and when we met again Martin White's house was half a mile east of us. Brown had a small field glass which I asked him to loan me, as I had seen some one near the house that I took to be Martin White, whom I knew; having heard him address a meeting at West Point a few days after the burning of Osawatomie, when Clarke was raising a force to drive and burn out Free State men between there and Fort Scott. At that time White had just returned from accompanying Reid and I heard him describe how he killed Frederick Brown, — making the motion of lowering a gun. Brown adjusted the glass and looking I could recognize Martin White reading a book as he sat in a chair in the shade of a tree. I handed the glass to Brown and asked him to look and he said he also recognized him saying: — 'I declare that is Martin White.' For a few minutes nothing was said when I remarked ' Suppose you and I go down and see the old man and have a talk with him.' 'No, no, I can't do that,' said Brown. Kagi said, 'let Snyder and me go.' Capt. Brown said: 'Go if you wish to but don't youhurt a hair of his head; but if he has any slaves take the last one of them.' Kagi said: 'Snyder and I want to go without instructions [i.e., with Brown's permission to kill White], or not at all.' Therefore as Brown was unwilling that Martin White, who had murdered his son, should receive any harm we did not go near him. It was thus shown that John Brown had no revenge to gratify. (Villard; 359)
This incident speaks to Brown's self-discipline and to his attitude toward political violence. If the goal of abolishing slavery could be achieved through peaceful means, which was then occurring in Kansas, Brown was not seeking violence. In this case, he refused to allow his supporters to kill the man who had killed Brown's own son - even though White had done more in the pro-slavery cause than any of the five men killed at Pottawatomie.
These are all factors that have to be taken into account when evaluating what Brown did with the Pottawatomie killings. These are all reasons that I would judge Brown's actions in that case to be justified in that particular situation, which were unusual in the extreme.
After the Harper's Ferry raid in 1859, Senator Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee political leader who later became President on Lincoln's death and made himself one of the worst Presidents in history (a contemparary coparison is tempting, but that would take me too far afield), denounced John Brown and recalled the Pottawatomie killings. With that action, Johnson said, "hell entered [Brown's] soul. ... Then it was that he shrank from the dimensions of a human being into those of a reptile. Then it was, if not before, that he changed his character to a demon who had lost all the virtues of man. And you talk of sympathy for John Brown!" .)(Reynolds; 403)
Andrew Johnson was to stick with the Union as an American patriot during the Civil War. But while John Brown was risking his life for democracy, Johnson was defending the interests of his home state's slaveowners in the Senate.
G.W. Brown of the proslavery Kansas paper Herald of Freedom also brought up the Pottawatomie killings after Harper's Ferry. In response, at a time when politicians of virtually all stripes were trying to distance themselves from Brown and his Harper's Ferry raid, Reynolds reports:
In response to [G.W. Brown's new recriminations against John Brown over the Pottawatomie massacre], a council of antislavery Kansas issued a declaration that "according to the ordinary rules of war" the Pottawatomie episode was "not unjustifiable, but ... was performed from the sad necessity which existed at that time to defend the lives and liberties of the settlers in that region." (Reynolds; 340)
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index toConfederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006, April 16: John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (3)
In writing about John Brown's actions against slavery, the easy approach would be to either softpedal the Pottawatomie massacre by saying it was obviously wrong but his later actions outweighed it, or just to avoid passing judgment on it.
That approach didn't make sense to me in the context of these posts, which are meant to throw light on the absurdity of neo-Confederate pseudohistory. So I've stated that in my jdugment, those killings were justified in that particular set of circumstances at that moment in time. One reason I think it's important to make such judgments is the fact that I'm apalled that so many Americans, including devout Christians, seemed to be so little interested in thinking seriously about the justice of the Iraq War, either from a Christian just-war doctrine or some counterpart. And there's much more involved in that than simply picking sides.
Those who take the position that the Pottawatomie killings could be justified have to take account of some storng arguments against it. The killings were not only brutal, they were targeted assassinations. And they were not killings in direct combat, but "knocks on the door in the middle of the night", of the kind we stereotypically associate with the state terror of practiced by dictatorships. (The main association then would have been Robespierre's official Terror during the French Revolution.)
The killings were illegal, done by private individuals and not under the cover of law. The men executed were not given even a kangaroo-court pretense of a trial.The initial response among Free State partisans in Kansas, including two of Brown's other sons who were not involved in those killings but who were active in an irregular Free State militia, was condemnation. Brown himself and the other participants consistently denied their involvement unitl well after the Civil War when some of them discussed the details. and the effect of the killings, one consciously anticipated by Brown, was to immediately polarize the political conflict in Kansas and to intensify the violence, thereby forestalling any more peaceful resolution of the issue.
In my mind, the last consideration is by far the most persuasive. Violence begets violence even in far less tense situations. In a genuine civil-war atmosphere like that, deciding to make a step like the Pottawatomie killings was a decision not only to kill those five individuals but to virtually guarantee that even more people would be hurt and killed.
The fact that the actions were outside the scope of acceptable military conduct interms of the prevailing laws of war and standards of conduct even of that time is also a strong one. I'll say more about these two considerations in the next post.
The other objections don't strike me as nearly so substantial. This was guerrilla war on both sides. Both pro-slavery and Free State partisans were acting in a largely lawless, wild-west environment. To the extent that the national government under Franklin Pierce had actual power to enforce the law in Kansas Territory at all, the administration was supporting the blatant criminality of the Border Ruffians in stealing elections by "force and fraud", in the words of the Howard Committee Report. The rule of law in any normal sense by the standards of the time was simply not in force there.
The fact that the members of Brown's party denied their involvement is also not a significant argument against it. This was guerrilla warfare, not civil disobedience. Willingly submitting to being prosecuted for the actions taken was just not a consideration.
It's worth mentioning at this point that there is still some dispute about Brown's exact motive in the action. I agree with Stephen Oates that Brown's stated reason of wishing to strike a retaliatory blow for the sack of Lawrence is correct. As he argues, "it seems to fit the logic of events and the behavior of Brown in all the frustration and hysteria that surrounded the sacking of Lawrence". (Oates; 384) He describes it this way:
As the hours [after the sack of Lawrence] dragged unbearably by, Brown "turned back to our troubles on the Pottawatomie." And his frenzy subsided into cold, calculating hatred as he bitterly condemned "the slave hounds" on the creek who had supported the "black laws," echoed the threats of the proslavery party, and were as guilty of the sacking of Lawrence as the Missouri mob assembled in Lecompton. With Lawrence in flames, with proslavery columns prowling the territory, and with the Pottawatomie Rifles [the local Free State militia then headed by John, Jr.] huddled here in inert confusion, it was up to him - it was up to him and his company - to avenge the proslavery atrocities, to show by actual work that there were two sides to this thing....
Sometime in all the commodtion and excitement that prevailed at Ottawa Creek that Thursday night the old man [Brown] decided what kind of work that should be: a blow against the enemy, their aiders and abettors, who sought to kill and burn out "our suffering people" - a blow delivered in such a frightful and shocking way as to cause "a restraining fear." He called his company about him and revealed the general purpose of his intentions. A "radical retaliatory measure" against their enemies on the Pottawatomie. It would involve "some killing." (Oates; 28)
Oates discusses some other possible contributing factors. One was a report, supported by multiple witnesses, that Brown had received word through a messenger that the Pottawatomie pro-slavery men were threatening to kill a particular Free State man. But the idea that this was a decisive factor in Brown's decision, Oates rejects as unsupported by the evidence.
Brown himself claimed afterward that he had heard news that the proslavery men at Pottowatomie were about to move immediately to kill all the Free State settlers there. Oates also rejects this as not substantiated by the available evidence. He does observe that in the state of mind in which Brown and the Pottawatomie Rifles found themselves after the sack of Lawrence, he might have believed something like that was about to happen. But even this is hard to square with the particular moves Brown made that weekend, i.e, if he had thought the danger was that immediate, it's unlikely that he would have lain low on that Saturday instead of rushing back to the creek to protect the Free States settlers.
Another possibility that has been suggested is that Brown had a grudge against the particular individuals because they were involved with the Lecompton-government local court or were set to testify against him. Oates also dismisses this as not only lacking evidence but being seemingly in contradiction to the available evidence.
Oates did not discuss the alternative suggested by the young Robert Penn Warren in his 1929 hostile biography of Brown. Warren argued that the killings were just cover for stealing horses. Actually, "argued" is a very generous term ; he makes the "argument' almost exclusively by sneering inuendo. Brown did steal horse as part of the Pottawatomie raid. Again, it was guerrilla war. Both sides routinely stole horses and cattle in their attacks on the other side. Warren's suggestion is not only unsupported by him, it's implausible in the extreme on the face of it to argue that Brown's band systematically sought out and executed five people in a midnight raid simply as a cover for stealing horses.
But it does suggest something of the quality of pro-Confederate historical perspective, which Warren's biography reflects, that he would go to the trouble to try to make Brown sound like a common horse-thief. To argue that he had murdered five people without cause just wasn't enough for the pro-Confederate view of John Brown.
The Howard Committee was in the Territory at this time, and they were able to take testimony on the Pottawatomie killings very soon after the events. Their report includes statements from Mahala Doyle, John Doyle, James Harris, on what they witnessed. The minority (pro-slavery) report, which was included as part of the Howard Committee's formal report, also has a description of the Pottawatomie massacre.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
That approach didn't make sense to me in the context of these posts, which are meant to throw light on the absurdity of neo-Confederate pseudohistory. So I've stated that in my jdugment, those killings were justified in that particular set of circumstances at that moment in time. One reason I think it's important to make such judgments is the fact that I'm apalled that so many Americans, including devout Christians, seemed to be so little interested in thinking seriously about the justice of the Iraq War, either from a Christian just-war doctrine or some counterpart. And there's much more involved in that than simply picking sides.
Those who take the position that the Pottawatomie killings could be justified have to take account of some storng arguments against it. The killings were not only brutal, they were targeted assassinations. And they were not killings in direct combat, but "knocks on the door in the middle of the night", of the kind we stereotypically associate with the state terror of practiced by dictatorships. (The main association then would have been Robespierre's official Terror during the French Revolution.)
The killings were illegal, done by private individuals and not under the cover of law. The men executed were not given even a kangaroo-court pretense of a trial.The initial response among Free State partisans in Kansas, including two of Brown's other sons who were not involved in those killings but who were active in an irregular Free State militia, was condemnation. Brown himself and the other participants consistently denied their involvement unitl well after the Civil War when some of them discussed the details. and the effect of the killings, one consciously anticipated by Brown, was to immediately polarize the political conflict in Kansas and to intensify the violence, thereby forestalling any more peaceful resolution of the issue.
In my mind, the last consideration is by far the most persuasive. Violence begets violence even in far less tense situations. In a genuine civil-war atmosphere like that, deciding to make a step like the Pottawatomie killings was a decision not only to kill those five individuals but to virtually guarantee that even more people would be hurt and killed.
The fact that the actions were outside the scope of acceptable military conduct interms of the prevailing laws of war and standards of conduct even of that time is also a strong one. I'll say more about these two considerations in the next post.
The other objections don't strike me as nearly so substantial. This was guerrilla war on both sides. Both pro-slavery and Free State partisans were acting in a largely lawless, wild-west environment. To the extent that the national government under Franklin Pierce had actual power to enforce the law in Kansas Territory at all, the administration was supporting the blatant criminality of the Border Ruffians in stealing elections by "force and fraud", in the words of the Howard Committee Report. The rule of law in any normal sense by the standards of the time was simply not in force there.
The fact that the members of Brown's party denied their involvement is also not a significant argument against it. This was guerrilla warfare, not civil disobedience. Willingly submitting to being prosecuted for the actions taken was just not a consideration.
It's worth mentioning at this point that there is still some dispute about Brown's exact motive in the action. I agree with Stephen Oates that Brown's stated reason of wishing to strike a retaliatory blow for the sack of Lawrence is correct. As he argues, "it seems to fit the logic of events and the behavior of Brown in all the frustration and hysteria that surrounded the sacking of Lawrence". (Oates; 384) He describes it this way:
As the hours [after the sack of Lawrence] dragged unbearably by, Brown "turned back to our troubles on the Pottawatomie." And his frenzy subsided into cold, calculating hatred as he bitterly condemned "the slave hounds" on the creek who had supported the "black laws," echoed the threats of the proslavery party, and were as guilty of the sacking of Lawrence as the Missouri mob assembled in Lecompton. With Lawrence in flames, with proslavery columns prowling the territory, and with the Pottawatomie Rifles [the local Free State militia then headed by John, Jr.] huddled here in inert confusion, it was up to him - it was up to him and his company - to avenge the proslavery atrocities, to show by actual work that there were two sides to this thing....
Sometime in all the commodtion and excitement that prevailed at Ottawa Creek that Thursday night the old man [Brown] decided what kind of work that should be: a blow against the enemy, their aiders and abettors, who sought to kill and burn out "our suffering people" - a blow delivered in such a frightful and shocking way as to cause "a restraining fear." He called his company about him and revealed the general purpose of his intentions. A "radical retaliatory measure" against their enemies on the Pottawatomie. It would involve "some killing." (Oates; 28)
Oates discusses some other possible contributing factors. One was a report, supported by multiple witnesses, that Brown had received word through a messenger that the Pottawatomie pro-slavery men were threatening to kill a particular Free State man. But the idea that this was a decisive factor in Brown's decision, Oates rejects as unsupported by the evidence.
Brown himself claimed afterward that he had heard news that the proslavery men at Pottowatomie were about to move immediately to kill all the Free State settlers there. Oates also rejects this as not substantiated by the available evidence. He does observe that in the state of mind in which Brown and the Pottawatomie Rifles found themselves after the sack of Lawrence, he might have believed something like that was about to happen. But even this is hard to square with the particular moves Brown made that weekend, i.e, if he had thought the danger was that immediate, it's unlikely that he would have lain low on that Saturday instead of rushing back to the creek to protect the Free States settlers.
Another possibility that has been suggested is that Brown had a grudge against the particular individuals because they were involved with the Lecompton-government local court or were set to testify against him. Oates also dismisses this as not only lacking evidence but being seemingly in contradiction to the available evidence.
Oates did not discuss the alternative suggested by the young Robert Penn Warren in his 1929 hostile biography of Brown. Warren argued that the killings were just cover for stealing horses. Actually, "argued" is a very generous term ; he makes the "argument' almost exclusively by sneering inuendo. Brown did steal horse as part of the Pottawatomie raid. Again, it was guerrilla war. Both sides routinely stole horses and cattle in their attacks on the other side. Warren's suggestion is not only unsupported by him, it's implausible in the extreme on the face of it to argue that Brown's band systematically sought out and executed five people in a midnight raid simply as a cover for stealing horses.
But it does suggest something of the quality of pro-Confederate historical perspective, which Warren's biography reflects, that he would go to the trouble to try to make Brown sound like a common horse-thief. To argue that he had murdered five people without cause just wasn't enough for the pro-Confederate view of John Brown.
The Howard Committee was in the Territory at this time, and they were able to take testimony on the Pottawatomie killings very soon after the events. Their report includes statements from Mahala Doyle, John Doyle, James Harris, on what they witnessed. The minority (pro-slavery) report, which was included as part of the Howard Committee's formal report, also has a description of the Pottawatomie massacre.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 14: John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (1)
The most controversial incident in John Brown’s career as an antislavery fighter is not the raid on Harper’s Ferry, though that incident was by far the most consequential. Oswald Garrison Villard wrote that “the debate in Kansas today” (1910) over the Pottawatomie killings “is almost as bitter as at the time of the crime”. But, he continued one cannot reach a “true understanding” of John Brown without “a clear appreciation” of those killings. Villard even argued:
As one views Brown’s conduct in the killing of the five pro-slavery men on Pottawatomie Creek depends to a large degree the place which may be assigned to him in history. (Villard; 148)
Because Pottawatomie was used especially to paint Brown as a reckless and cruel murderer, and because it remains so controversial, I decided to start my discussion of Brown this year by talking about this incident.
What happened is that Brown led a small band of men to execute five proslavery men who lived along the Pottawatomie Creek, where Brown and those of his sons who were in Kansas also lived. Four of them, Salmon, Owen, Oliver and Frederick, were part of the execution team. The men killed were James Doyle and two of his three sons, Drury (age 22) and William (age 20), all of them proslavery immigrants from Tennessee and part of the proslavery Law and Order Party – Doyle and William had worked for the proslavery court in the area; Allen Wilkinson, a member of the illegitimate Lecompton state legislature and a district attorney for it; and, William (“Dutch Bill” Sherman), one of three brothers who were Lecompton partisans.
Brown’s group went to the houses of each of the men (Sherman was caught at the cabin of James Harris) on the night of Saturday, May 24, 1855, to Sunday, May 25. Brown normally was scrupulous about reverencing the Christian Sabbath. Presumably he felt that doing the Lord’s work on an urgent basis took priority over his conventional Sunday habits.
The five proslavery men were taken – the three Doyles together, then Wilkinson, then Sherman – some distance from their houses and executed by blows to the head with broadswords.
Salmon and Owen Brown executed the Doyles. There was no attempt to torture or further humiliate them, but the bodies of all three men showed defensive wounds. John Brown shot James Doyle in the head after he was felled with the broadswords, presumably to make sure he was dead.
Theodore Winer and Henry Thompson (it may have been one of the Brown sons instead of Thompson) killed Wilkinson with a blow to the head and cuts to his side and throat.
Finally, Weiner and Thompson executed Dutch bill Sherman. He was also struck in the head, but his left hand was severed, presumably a defensive wound.
Those are the basic facts of the Pottawatomie killings. It was ugly, brutal stuff. In the “wild west” condition of Kansas Territory at that time, no one was ever prosecuted for the murders – and John Brown himself described them as murders. But there is a great deal of detail known about the killings now. There were contemporary reports, and an 1856 Congressional investigation of the Kansas conflict included testimony about the incident. Three of the participants, James Townsley, Henry Thompson and Salmon Brown, later gave their own accounts of what happened.
I’m going to be talking more about this incident and its context, because it gives a real sense of what kind of conflict was occurring in Kansas.
But I’ll also mention here that I view the actions of Brown and his crew at Pottawatomie to be a justifiable act of guerrilla warfare in the particular circumstances in Kansas Territory at that time.
Yet I would also emphasize that there was nothing romantic or glorious about it. Nor did Brown himself think so. It’s also notable that he apparently did not ask for anyone’s retroactive approval of the action, though in later years he did at times explain his motives. His son Jason, who had not been part of the Pottawatomie raid and had not known what was planned, asked Brown the next morning if he had taken part in the killings. Brown responded, “I did not do it, but I approved of it”.
Jason then stated he thought the action was unjustified. Brown said, “God is my judge, we were justified under the circumstances”.
Villard, who did not view those killings as justifiable, wrote:
How may the killings on the Pottawatomie, this terrible violation of the statue and the moral laws, be justified? This is the question which has confronted every student of John Brown’s life since it was definitely established that Brown was, if not actually a principal in the crime, an accessory and an instigator. There have been advanced many excuses for the killings, and a number of them deserve careful scrutiny. (Villard; 170)
Villard proceeds to examine several of those “excuses” in some detail.
However, Brown himself evidently did not ask for approval or care about disapproval of the action, either from his contemporaries or from us. He was content to let God be his judge.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
As one views Brown’s conduct in the killing of the five pro-slavery men on Pottawatomie Creek depends to a large degree the place which may be assigned to him in history. (Villard; 148)
Because Pottawatomie was used especially to paint Brown as a reckless and cruel murderer, and because it remains so controversial, I decided to start my discussion of Brown this year by talking about this incident.
What happened is that Brown led a small band of men to execute five proslavery men who lived along the Pottawatomie Creek, where Brown and those of his sons who were in Kansas also lived. Four of them, Salmon, Owen, Oliver and Frederick, were part of the execution team. The men killed were James Doyle and two of his three sons, Drury (age 22) and William (age 20), all of them proslavery immigrants from Tennessee and part of the proslavery Law and Order Party – Doyle and William had worked for the proslavery court in the area; Allen Wilkinson, a member of the illegitimate Lecompton state legislature and a district attorney for it; and, William (“Dutch Bill” Sherman), one of three brothers who were Lecompton partisans.
Brown’s group went to the houses of each of the men (Sherman was caught at the cabin of James Harris) on the night of Saturday, May 24, 1855, to Sunday, May 25. Brown normally was scrupulous about reverencing the Christian Sabbath. Presumably he felt that doing the Lord’s work on an urgent basis took priority over his conventional Sunday habits.
The five proslavery men were taken – the three Doyles together, then Wilkinson, then Sherman – some distance from their houses and executed by blows to the head with broadswords.
Salmon and Owen Brown executed the Doyles. There was no attempt to torture or further humiliate them, but the bodies of all three men showed defensive wounds. John Brown shot James Doyle in the head after he was felled with the broadswords, presumably to make sure he was dead.
Theodore Winer and Henry Thompson (it may have been one of the Brown sons instead of Thompson) killed Wilkinson with a blow to the head and cuts to his side and throat.
Finally, Weiner and Thompson executed Dutch bill Sherman. He was also struck in the head, but his left hand was severed, presumably a defensive wound.
Those are the basic facts of the Pottawatomie killings. It was ugly, brutal stuff. In the “wild west” condition of Kansas Territory at that time, no one was ever prosecuted for the murders – and John Brown himself described them as murders. But there is a great deal of detail known about the killings now. There were contemporary reports, and an 1856 Congressional investigation of the Kansas conflict included testimony about the incident. Three of the participants, James Townsley, Henry Thompson and Salmon Brown, later gave their own accounts of what happened.
I’m going to be talking more about this incident and its context, because it gives a real sense of what kind of conflict was occurring in Kansas.
But I’ll also mention here that I view the actions of Brown and his crew at Pottawatomie to be a justifiable act of guerrilla warfare in the particular circumstances in Kansas Territory at that time.
Yet I would also emphasize that there was nothing romantic or glorious about it. Nor did Brown himself think so. It’s also notable that he apparently did not ask for anyone’s retroactive approval of the action, though in later years he did at times explain his motives. His son Jason, who had not been part of the Pottawatomie raid and had not known what was planned, asked Brown the next morning if he had taken part in the killings. Brown responded, “I did not do it, but I approved of it”.
Jason then stated he thought the action was unjustified. Brown said, “God is my judge, we were justified under the circumstances”.
Villard, who did not view those killings as justifiable, wrote:
How may the killings on the Pottawatomie, this terrible violation of the statue and the moral laws, be justified? This is the question which has confronted every student of John Brown’s life since it was definitely established that Brown was, if not actually a principal in the crime, an accessory and an instigator. There have been advanced many excuses for the killings, and a number of them deserve careful scrutiny. (Villard; 170)
Villard proceeds to examine several of those “excuses” in some detail.
However, Brown himself evidently did not ask for approval or care about disapproval of the action, either from his contemporaries or from us. He was content to let God be his judge.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 13: The sack of Lawrence
The illegally-elected pro-slavery Shawnee Mission government in Kansas proceeded in 1855 to pass draconian "slave codes", which again illustrate the degree to which slavery in practice was eating away at the democratic rights of even white men in the slave states. As the PBS Bleeding Kansas site puts it:
The new state legislature enacted what Northerners called the "Bogus Laws," which incorporated the Missouri slave code. These laws levelled severe penalties against anyone who spoke or wrote against slaveholding; those who assisted fugitives would be put to death or sentenced to ten years hard labor. (Statutes of Kansas) The Northerners were outraged, and set up their own Free State legislature at Topeka. Now there were two governments established in Kansas, each outlawing the other. President Pierce only recognized the proslavery legislature.
Oswald Garrison Villard in his John Brown, 1800-1859 (1910) gives a more critical description of the Bogus Laws:
When the fraudulent Pawnee [pro-slavery] Legislature convened, July 2, 1855, it enacted, true to its lawless inception, a code of punishments for Free State men that must always rank as one of the foremost monuments of legislative tyranny and malevolence in the history of this country. Under that code no one conscientiously opposed to slavery, or who failed to admit the right of everybody to hold slaves, could serve as a juror; and the right to hold office was restricted to pro-slavery men. Five years at hard labor was to be the fate of any one introducing literature calculated to make a slave disorderly or dangerous or disaffected. Death itself was the penalty for raising a rebellion among slaves or supplying them with literature which advised them to rise or conspire against any citizen. The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was illegal in Kansas was made a grave crime, in the following words:
"Sec. 12: If any free person, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory, print, publish, write, circulate, or cause to be introduced into the Territory, any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular, containing any denial of the right of persons to hold slaves in this Territory, such persons shall be deemed guilty of felongy, and punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than five years." (my emphasis)
Such was the commitment of the slaveowners and their partisans to democracy and American freedoms of speech, press, religion, petition and assembly.
As I mentioned in my summary of events in Kansas at this time, Free State partisans organized their own state government in the fall of 1855, known as the "Topeka" government but whose real stronghold was Lawrence. In November, 1855, an armed group of 1,500 pro-slavery men surrounded Lawrence, where about 500 Free State men prepared to give battle. A peace agreement, known rather grandly as the "Wakarusa treaty", averted the clash, which was even more grandly called the Wakarusa War.
The Howard Committee described the 1855 confrontation at Lawrence as follows. Noting that the pro-slavery government (now called the Lecompton government) were looking for pretexts for moving against the Free State citizens' of Lawrence, they reported:
It is obvious that the only cause of this hostility is the known desire of the citizens of Lawrence to make Kansas a free State, and their repugnance to laws imposed on them by non-residents.
And on the event itself, they wrote:
Among the many acts of lawless violence which it has been the duty of your committee to investigate, this invasion of Lawrence is the most defenceless. A comparison of the facts proven with the official statements of the officers of the government will show how groundless were the pretexts which gave rise to it. A community in which no crime had been committed by any of its members, against none of whom had a warrant been issued or a complaint made, who had resisted no process in the hands of a real or pretended officer, was threatened with destruction in the name of " law and order," and that, too, by men who marched from a neighboring State with arms obtained by force, and who at every stage of their progress violated many laws, and among others the constitution of the United States.
The chief guilt must rest on [Sheriff] Samuel J. Jones. His character is illustrated by his language at Lecompton, where peace was made. He said Major Clark and Burns both claimed the credit of killing that damned abolitionist, and he didn't know which ought to have it. If Shannon hadn't been a damned old fool, peace would never have been declared. He would have wiped Lawrence out. He had men and means enough to do it. (my emphasis)
Such was the kind of "Southern honor" promoted by the allegedly superior civilization produced by the "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy".
Then in May of 1856, after a year of escalating tensions and violence, came the "sack of Lawrence". We can go to the PBS site for the short version of this one, too:
There had been several attacks during this time, primarily of proslavery against Free State men. People were tarred and feathered, kidnapped, killed. But now the violence escalated. On May 21, 1856, a group of proslavery men entered Lawrence, where they burned the Free State Hotel, destroyed two printing presses, and ransacked homes and stores.
The Howard Committe's account gives more details. They describe the state of things prior to sack of Lawrence:
In one case witnessed by one of your committee, an application for the writ of habeas corpus was prevented by the urgent solicitation of pro-slavery men, who insisted that it would endanger the life of the prisoner to be discharged under legal process.
While we remained in the Territory, repeated acts of outrage were committed upon quiet, unoffending citizens, of which we received authentic intelligence. Men were attacked in the highway, robbed, and subsequently imprisoned; others were seized and searched, and their weapons of defence taken from them without compensation. Horses were frequently taken and appropriated. Oxen were taken from the yoke while ploughing, and butchered in the presence of their owners. A minister was seized in the streets of the town of Atchison, and, under circumstances of gross barbarity, was tarred and cottoned, and in that condition was sent to his family. All the provisions of the constitution of the United States securing persons and property were utterly disregarded. (my emphasis)
Eventually, the defenders of the higher Southern civilization attacked Lawrence:
Under color of legal process, a company of about 700 armed men, the great body of whom your committee are satisfied were not citizens of the Territory, were marched into the town of Lawrence, under marshal Donaldson and sheriff Jones, officers claiming to act under the law, and then bombarded and burned to the ground avaluable hotel and one private house, destroyed two printing-presses and material, and then, being released by the officers whose posse they claimed to be, proceeded to sack, pillage, and rob houses, stores, trunks, &c., even to the clothing of women and children. Some letters thus unlawfully taken were private ones, written by the contesting delegate, and they were offered in evidence. Your committee did not deem that the persons holding them had any right thus to use them, and refused to be made the instruments to report private letters thus obtained.
This force was not resisted because it was collected and marshalled under the forms of law. But this act of barbarity, unexampled in the history of our government, was followed by its natural consequences. All the restraints which American citizens are accustomed to pay, even to the appearance of law, were thrown off. One act of violence led to another; homicides became frequent. A party, under H. C' [sic] Pate, composed chiefly of citizens of Missouri, were taken prisoners by a party of settlers, and while your committee were at Westport, a company, chiefly of Missourians, accompanied by the sitting delegate, went to relieve Pate and his party. A collision was prevented by the United States troops. Civil war seemed impending in the Terri tory. Nothing can prevent so great a calamity but the presence of a large force of United States troops, under a commander who will, with prudence and discretion, quiet the excited passions of both parties, and expel with force the lawless band of men coming from Missouri and elsewhere, who, with criminal pertinacity, infest the Territory. In some cases, and as to one entire election district, the condition of the country prevented the attendance of witnesses, who were either arrested and detained while, or deterred from, obeying our process. The sergeant-at-arms who served the process upon them was himself arrested and detained for a short time, by an armed force claiming to be a part of the posse of the marshal, but was allowed to proceed upon an examination of his papers, and was furnished with a pass signed by "Warren D. Wilkes, of South Carolina." John Upton, another officer of the committee, was subsequently stopped by a law less force on the borders of the Territory, and after being detained and treated with great indignity, was released. He, also, was fur nishled with a pass, signed by two citizens of Missouri, and addressed to "pro-slavery men." Bv reason of these disturbances we were delayed in Westport, so that while in session there our time was but partially occupied. But the obstruction which created the most serious embarrassment to your committee was the attempted arrest of Gov. Reeder, the contesting delegate, upon a writ of attachment issued against him br Judge Lecompte, to compel his attendance as a witness before the grand jury of Douglas county. (my emphasis)
Villard writes of Gov. Reeder:
Governor Reeder at once [mid-1856] became a valuable leader of the [anti-slavery] Kansas Free Soilers, being thus forcibly converted into an Abolitionist from a sympathizer with the [pro-slavery] Squatter Sovereignty policy, and was regarded in the East as a martyr to the Abolition cause, particularly after he was compelled to flee from Kansas in disguise, in May, 1856, never to return to that State.
Villard describes the sack of Lawrence as follows. The pretext of entering Lawrence was for Sheriff Jones to serve legal warrants. The Lecompton men carried banners that upset Northerners then even more than seeing a Mexican flag sends our present-day nativists to foaming at the mouth. Such as, "Southern Rights" and "South Carolina" and:
Let Yankees tremble, abolitionists fall,
Our Motto is, Give Southern rights to all
We saw above what "Southern rights" meant as compared to American democratic rights.
Villard gives this account of the attack on the town itself:
With the utmost alacrity the invitation was accepted [for the Lecompton forces to enter Lawrence], but no pretence of serving any writs was made. The Southerners were stimulated by the oratory of Atchison [of Missouri], but recently presiding officer of the United States Senate, who declared among other things: "And now we will go in with our highly honorable Jones, and test the strength of that damned Free State Hotel. Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead." But they did not go in until the Free State men had surrendered their arms to Jones, as further evidence of good faith. Once in, there was no John Brown to counsel resistance to them, no Lane to lead, and no Robinson to temporize. There was no real leader. The military company, the Stubbs, was not in evidence. There were only two hundred rifles and ten kegs of powder in all Lawrence. Many of the citizens were either in arrest or in hiding to escape capture. Many others had left town to save their families. So no defence was attempted when the two newspaper offices were destroyed and the types, papers, presses and books thrown into the river. The Free State Hotel remained, however, and the order of the court that it be "abated" was not yet enforced. Here Major Buford again protested that he had not come to Kansas to destroy property, and Atchison seems to have been sobered some. But Jones wanted his triumph complete, and the Free State Hotel was soon in flames, after the pro-slavery cannon had sent thirty-two shot into it, Atchison firing the first shot. "This," said Jones, "is the happiest moment of my life." As the walls of the hotel fell, he cried out in glee, "I have done it, by God, I have done it," and it in no wise troubled him that, when he dismissed his drunken posse, as the hotel lay in ruins, it promptly robbed the town, winding up by the burning of Governor Robinson's house. The majesty of the law was upheld; its flouting by Free Soillers avenged.
The pro-slavery leaders and their disbanded followers left the Territory exulting in their victory, and wholly unable to realize that it was not only to be their defeat, but that they had let loose a veritable Pandora's box of evil passions, and finally inaugurated a reign of bloodshed, midnight assassination and guerrilla warfare. (my emphasis)
The sack of Lawrence occurred on Thursday, May 21. On May 22 in Washington, the honorable Preston Brooks of Georgia brutally assaulted Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane, wounding him badly. That weekend, John Brown and foure of his sons and a few other supporters would take an action of "midnight assassination and guerrilla warfare" which remains the most controversial act in his career.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
The new state legislature enacted what Northerners called the "Bogus Laws," which incorporated the Missouri slave code. These laws levelled severe penalties against anyone who spoke or wrote against slaveholding; those who assisted fugitives would be put to death or sentenced to ten years hard labor. (Statutes of Kansas) The Northerners were outraged, and set up their own Free State legislature at Topeka. Now there were two governments established in Kansas, each outlawing the other. President Pierce only recognized the proslavery legislature.
Oswald Garrison Villard in his John Brown, 1800-1859 (1910) gives a more critical description of the Bogus Laws:
When the fraudulent Pawnee [pro-slavery] Legislature convened, July 2, 1855, it enacted, true to its lawless inception, a code of punishments for Free State men that must always rank as one of the foremost monuments of legislative tyranny and malevolence in the history of this country. Under that code no one conscientiously opposed to slavery, or who failed to admit the right of everybody to hold slaves, could serve as a juror; and the right to hold office was restricted to pro-slavery men. Five years at hard labor was to be the fate of any one introducing literature calculated to make a slave disorderly or dangerous or disaffected. Death itself was the penalty for raising a rebellion among slaves or supplying them with literature which advised them to rise or conspire against any citizen. The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was illegal in Kansas was made a grave crime, in the following words:
"Sec. 12: If any free person, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory, print, publish, write, circulate, or cause to be introduced into the Territory, any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular, containing any denial of the right of persons to hold slaves in this Territory, such persons shall be deemed guilty of felongy, and punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than five years." (my emphasis)
Such was the commitment of the slaveowners and their partisans to democracy and American freedoms of speech, press, religion, petition and assembly.
As I mentioned in my summary of events in Kansas at this time, Free State partisans organized their own state government in the fall of 1855, known as the "Topeka" government but whose real stronghold was Lawrence. In November, 1855, an armed group of 1,500 pro-slavery men surrounded Lawrence, where about 500 Free State men prepared to give battle. A peace agreement, known rather grandly as the "Wakarusa treaty", averted the clash, which was even more grandly called the Wakarusa War.
The Howard Committee described the 1855 confrontation at Lawrence as follows. Noting that the pro-slavery government (now called the Lecompton government) were looking for pretexts for moving against the Free State citizens' of Lawrence, they reported:
It is obvious that the only cause of this hostility is the known desire of the citizens of Lawrence to make Kansas a free State, and their repugnance to laws imposed on them by non-residents.
And on the event itself, they wrote:
Among the many acts of lawless violence which it has been the duty of your committee to investigate, this invasion of Lawrence is the most defenceless. A comparison of the facts proven with the official statements of the officers of the government will show how groundless were the pretexts which gave rise to it. A community in which no crime had been committed by any of its members, against none of whom had a warrant been issued or a complaint made, who had resisted no process in the hands of a real or pretended officer, was threatened with destruction in the name of " law and order," and that, too, by men who marched from a neighboring State with arms obtained by force, and who at every stage of their progress violated many laws, and among others the constitution of the United States.
The chief guilt must rest on [Sheriff] Samuel J. Jones. His character is illustrated by his language at Lecompton, where peace was made. He said Major Clark and Burns both claimed the credit of killing that damned abolitionist, and he didn't know which ought to have it. If Shannon hadn't been a damned old fool, peace would never have been declared. He would have wiped Lawrence out. He had men and means enough to do it. (my emphasis)
Such was the kind of "Southern honor" promoted by the allegedly superior civilization produced by the "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy".
Then in May of 1856, after a year of escalating tensions and violence, came the "sack of Lawrence". We can go to the PBS site for the short version of this one, too:
There had been several attacks during this time, primarily of proslavery against Free State men. People were tarred and feathered, kidnapped, killed. But now the violence escalated. On May 21, 1856, a group of proslavery men entered Lawrence, where they burned the Free State Hotel, destroyed two printing presses, and ransacked homes and stores.
The Howard Committe's account gives more details. They describe the state of things prior to sack of Lawrence:
In one case witnessed by one of your committee, an application for the writ of habeas corpus was prevented by the urgent solicitation of pro-slavery men, who insisted that it would endanger the life of the prisoner to be discharged under legal process.
While we remained in the Territory, repeated acts of outrage were committed upon quiet, unoffending citizens, of which we received authentic intelligence. Men were attacked in the highway, robbed, and subsequently imprisoned; others were seized and searched, and their weapons of defence taken from them without compensation. Horses were frequently taken and appropriated. Oxen were taken from the yoke while ploughing, and butchered in the presence of their owners. A minister was seized in the streets of the town of Atchison, and, under circumstances of gross barbarity, was tarred and cottoned, and in that condition was sent to his family. All the provisions of the constitution of the United States securing persons and property were utterly disregarded. (my emphasis)
Eventually, the defenders of the higher Southern civilization attacked Lawrence:
Under color of legal process, a company of about 700 armed men, the great body of whom your committee are satisfied were not citizens of the Territory, were marched into the town of Lawrence, under marshal Donaldson and sheriff Jones, officers claiming to act under the law, and then bombarded and burned to the ground avaluable hotel and one private house, destroyed two printing-presses and material, and then, being released by the officers whose posse they claimed to be, proceeded to sack, pillage, and rob houses, stores, trunks, &c., even to the clothing of women and children. Some letters thus unlawfully taken were private ones, written by the contesting delegate, and they were offered in evidence. Your committee did not deem that the persons holding them had any right thus to use them, and refused to be made the instruments to report private letters thus obtained.
This force was not resisted because it was collected and marshalled under the forms of law. But this act of barbarity, unexampled in the history of our government, was followed by its natural consequences. All the restraints which American citizens are accustomed to pay, even to the appearance of law, were thrown off. One act of violence led to another; homicides became frequent. A party, under H. C' [sic] Pate, composed chiefly of citizens of Missouri, were taken prisoners by a party of settlers, and while your committee were at Westport, a company, chiefly of Missourians, accompanied by the sitting delegate, went to relieve Pate and his party. A collision was prevented by the United States troops. Civil war seemed impending in the Terri tory. Nothing can prevent so great a calamity but the presence of a large force of United States troops, under a commander who will, with prudence and discretion, quiet the excited passions of both parties, and expel with force the lawless band of men coming from Missouri and elsewhere, who, with criminal pertinacity, infest the Territory. In some cases, and as to one entire election district, the condition of the country prevented the attendance of witnesses, who were either arrested and detained while, or deterred from, obeying our process. The sergeant-at-arms who served the process upon them was himself arrested and detained for a short time, by an armed force claiming to be a part of the posse of the marshal, but was allowed to proceed upon an examination of his papers, and was furnished with a pass signed by "Warren D. Wilkes, of South Carolina." John Upton, another officer of the committee, was subsequently stopped by a law less force on the borders of the Territory, and after being detained and treated with great indignity, was released. He, also, was fur nishled with a pass, signed by two citizens of Missouri, and addressed to "pro-slavery men." Bv reason of these disturbances we were delayed in Westport, so that while in session there our time was but partially occupied. But the obstruction which created the most serious embarrassment to your committee was the attempted arrest of Gov. Reeder, the contesting delegate, upon a writ of attachment issued against him br Judge Lecompte, to compel his attendance as a witness before the grand jury of Douglas county. (my emphasis)
Villard writes of Gov. Reeder:
Governor Reeder at once [mid-1856] became a valuable leader of the [anti-slavery] Kansas Free Soilers, being thus forcibly converted into an Abolitionist from a sympathizer with the [pro-slavery] Squatter Sovereignty policy, and was regarded in the East as a martyr to the Abolition cause, particularly after he was compelled to flee from Kansas in disguise, in May, 1856, never to return to that State.
Villard describes the sack of Lawrence as follows. The pretext of entering Lawrence was for Sheriff Jones to serve legal warrants. The Lecompton men carried banners that upset Northerners then even more than seeing a Mexican flag sends our present-day nativists to foaming at the mouth. Such as, "Southern Rights" and "South Carolina" and:
Let Yankees tremble, abolitionists fall,
Our Motto is, Give Southern rights to all
We saw above what "Southern rights" meant as compared to American democratic rights.
Villard gives this account of the attack on the town itself:
With the utmost alacrity the invitation was accepted [for the Lecompton forces to enter Lawrence], but no pretence of serving any writs was made. The Southerners were stimulated by the oratory of Atchison [of Missouri], but recently presiding officer of the United States Senate, who declared among other things: "And now we will go in with our highly honorable Jones, and test the strength of that damned Free State Hotel. Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead." But they did not go in until the Free State men had surrendered their arms to Jones, as further evidence of good faith. Once in, there was no John Brown to counsel resistance to them, no Lane to lead, and no Robinson to temporize. There was no real leader. The military company, the Stubbs, was not in evidence. There were only two hundred rifles and ten kegs of powder in all Lawrence. Many of the citizens were either in arrest or in hiding to escape capture. Many others had left town to save their families. So no defence was attempted when the two newspaper offices were destroyed and the types, papers, presses and books thrown into the river. The Free State Hotel remained, however, and the order of the court that it be "abated" was not yet enforced. Here Major Buford again protested that he had not come to Kansas to destroy property, and Atchison seems to have been sobered some. But Jones wanted his triumph complete, and the Free State Hotel was soon in flames, after the pro-slavery cannon had sent thirty-two shot into it, Atchison firing the first shot. "This," said Jones, "is the happiest moment of my life." As the walls of the hotel fell, he cried out in glee, "I have done it, by God, I have done it," and it in no wise troubled him that, when he dismissed his drunken posse, as the hotel lay in ruins, it promptly robbed the town, winding up by the burning of Governor Robinson's house. The majesty of the law was upheld; its flouting by Free Soillers avenged.
The pro-slavery leaders and their disbanded followers left the Territory exulting in their victory, and wholly unable to realize that it was not only to be their defeat, but that they had let loose a veritable Pandora's box of evil passions, and finally inaugurated a reign of bloodshed, midnight assassination and guerrilla warfare. (my emphasis)
The sack of Lawrence occurred on Thursday, May 21. On May 22 in Washington, the honorable Preston Brooks of Georgia brutally assaulted Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a cane, wounding him badly. That weekend, John Brown and foure of his sons and a few other supporters would take an action of "midnight assassination and guerrilla warfare" which remains the most controversial act in his career.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 12: The March 1855 election in Kansas (2)
The Howard Committee Report summarized the experience of the March, 1855, Kansas elections as follows:
Of the 2,905 voters named in the census rolls, 831 are found on the poll-books. Some of the settlers were prevented from attending the election by the distance of their homes from the polls, but the great majority were deterred by the open avowal that large bodies of armed Missourians would be at the polls to vote, and by the fact that they did so appear and control the election. The same causes deterred the free-State settlers from running candidates in several districts, and in others induced the candidates to withdraw. ...
By the election as conducted, the pro-slavery candidates in every district but the 8th representative district received a majority of the votes; and several of them, in both the council and house, did not "reside in" and were not "inhabitants of" the district for which they were elected, as required by the organic law [the Kansas-Nebraska Act].
By that act, it was declared to be " the true intent and meaning of this act to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions [including slaery] in their own way, subject to the constitution of the Un:ted States." So careful was Congress of the right of popular sovereignty, that to secure it to the people, without a single petition from any portion of the country, they removed the restriction against slavery imposed by the Missouri compromise [of 1820]. And yet this right, so carefully secured, was thus by force and fraud overthrown by a portion of the people of an adjoining state.
The striking difference between this republic and other republics on this continent is not in the provisions of constitutions and laws, but that here changes in the administration of those laws have been made peacefully and quietly through the ballot-box. This invasion [of Kansas by the Missouri Border Ruffians] is the first and only one in the history of our government, by which an organized force from one State has elected a legislature for another State or Territory, and as such it should have been resisted by the whole executive power of the national government. (my emphasis)
This is something to keep in mind when "states rights" is advanced as the cause of Southern secession. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the slaveowners had not the slightest hestitation in the 1850s about violating states rights to defend slavery. In fact, the major sectional political battles in the 1850s up until John Brown's Harper's Ferry raid in 1859 were over instance of the Slave Power violating the states rights of the free states in order to defend slavery. As in the case of Kansas.
The Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder, who had switched from the anti-slavery to the Free State side after seeing the thuggery of the pro-slavery partisans, required that a third of the district have new elections, which were held in May, 1855, and were more fair. The Howard Committe reported evidence of fraud in only one of those districts, the 16th. The Border Ruffians stole that one in the now-usual manner. But then the Shawnee Mission legislature refused to seat the delegates from the May elections, accepting the previously- (and illegally-) elected pro-slavery delegates from those districts. Reeder protested to President Franklin Pierce to reject the results of the election theft. But it was in vain.
The rest of the country was paying attention. Oswald Garrison Villard writes in John Brown, 1800-1859 (1910) that "this high-handed ourtrage ... fairly set the North aflame with indignation".
It was the experience of the outrages in Kansas, especially the blantantly criminal stealing of the election in March, 1855, that prompted Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to deliver in the Senate his The Crime Against Kansas speech, which would become one of the most famous in American history. Although Sumner may have exceeding others in the eloquence of his indignation, his anger over the situation was widely shared in the North, and by no means only among abolitionists. And this was because of repeated efforts by the Slave Power to impose their will and their rules on the free states, in complete disregard of any consideration of "states rights" - which the Lords of the Lash always put a distant second in important to defending slavery.
Against this Territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a crime has been committed, which is without example in the records of the past. Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance, which may show at least the path of justice. In the terrible impeachment by which the great Roman orator has blasted through all time the name of Verres, amidst charges of robbery and sacrilege, the enormity which most aroused the indignant voice of his accuser, and which still stands forth with strongest distinctness, arresting the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, is, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome that the cry, "I am a Roman citizen," had been interposed in vain against the lash of the tyrant governor. ... Sir, speaking in an age of light, and a land of constitutional liberty, where the safeguards of elections are justly placed among the highest triumphs of civilization, I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much abused Sicily, thus memorable in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, have been desecrated . . .where the ballot-box, more precious than any work, in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered . . .and where the cry, " I am an American citizen," has been interposed in vain against outrage of every kind, even upon life itself. Are you against sacrilege? I present it for your execration. Are you against robbery ? I hold it up to your scorn. Are you for the protection of American citizens ? I show you how their dearest rights have been cloven down, while a Tyrannical Usurpation has sought to install itself on their very necks!
But the wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force, ay, sir, FORCE has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power. There is the simple fact, which you will in vain attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues.
But this enormity, vast beyond comparison, swells to dimensions of wickedness which the imagination toils in vain to grasp, when it is understood that for this purpose are hazarded the horrors of intestine feud not only in this distant Territory, but everywhere throughout the country. Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with the mutterings of civil war. The fury of the propagandists of Slavery, and the calm determination of their opponents, are now diffused from the distant Territory over widespread communities, and the whole country, in all its extent marshalling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a strife which, unless happily averted by the triumph of Freedom, will become war fratricidal, parricidal war with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals; justly provoking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history, and constituting a strife, in the language of the ancient writer, more than foreign, more than social, more than civil; but something compounded of all these strifes, and in itself more than war; sed potius commune quad dam ex omnibus, et plus quam bellum.
Such is the crime which you are to judge. But the criminal also must be dragged into day, that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained. From no common source could it proceed. In its perpetration was needed a spirit of vaulting ambition which would hesitate at nothing; a [hardihood] of purpose which was insensible to the judgment of mankind; a madness for Slavery which would disregard the Constitution, the laws, and all the great examples of our history; also a consciousness of power such as comes from the habit of power; a combination of energies found only in a hundred arms directed by a hundred eyes; a control of public opinion through venal pens and a prostituted press; an ability to subsidize crowds in every vocation of life - the politician with his local importance, the lawyer with his subtle tongue, and even the authority of the judge on the bench; and a familiar use of men in places high and low, so that none, from the President to the lowest border postmaster, should decline to be its tool; all these things and more were needed, and they were found in the slave power of our Republic. There, sir, stands the criminal, all unmasked before you - heartless, grasping, and tyrannical - with an audacity beyond that of Verres, a subtlety beyond that of Machiavel, a meanness beyond that of Bacon, and an ability beyond that of Hastings. Justice to Kansas can be secured only by the prostration of this influence; for this the power behind greater than any President which succors and sustains the crime. Nay, the proceedings I now arraign derive their fearful consequences only from this connection. (my emphasis [as if the speech itself weren't emphatic enough!])
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Of the 2,905 voters named in the census rolls, 831 are found on the poll-books. Some of the settlers were prevented from attending the election by the distance of their homes from the polls, but the great majority were deterred by the open avowal that large bodies of armed Missourians would be at the polls to vote, and by the fact that they did so appear and control the election. The same causes deterred the free-State settlers from running candidates in several districts, and in others induced the candidates to withdraw. ...
By the election as conducted, the pro-slavery candidates in every district but the 8th representative district received a majority of the votes; and several of them, in both the council and house, did not "reside in" and were not "inhabitants of" the district for which they were elected, as required by the organic law [the Kansas-Nebraska Act].
By that act, it was declared to be " the true intent and meaning of this act to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions [including slaery] in their own way, subject to the constitution of the Un:ted States." So careful was Congress of the right of popular sovereignty, that to secure it to the people, without a single petition from any portion of the country, they removed the restriction against slavery imposed by the Missouri compromise [of 1820]. And yet this right, so carefully secured, was thus by force and fraud overthrown by a portion of the people of an adjoining state.
The striking difference between this republic and other republics on this continent is not in the provisions of constitutions and laws, but that here changes in the administration of those laws have been made peacefully and quietly through the ballot-box. This invasion [of Kansas by the Missouri Border Ruffians] is the first and only one in the history of our government, by which an organized force from one State has elected a legislature for another State or Territory, and as such it should have been resisted by the whole executive power of the national government. (my emphasis)
This is something to keep in mind when "states rights" is advanced as the cause of Southern secession. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the slaveowners had not the slightest hestitation in the 1850s about violating states rights to defend slavery. In fact, the major sectional political battles in the 1850s up until John Brown's Harper's Ferry raid in 1859 were over instance of the Slave Power violating the states rights of the free states in order to defend slavery. As in the case of Kansas.
The Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder, who had switched from the anti-slavery to the Free State side after seeing the thuggery of the pro-slavery partisans, required that a third of the district have new elections, which were held in May, 1855, and were more fair. The Howard Committe reported evidence of fraud in only one of those districts, the 16th. The Border Ruffians stole that one in the now-usual manner. But then the Shawnee Mission legislature refused to seat the delegates from the May elections, accepting the previously- (and illegally-) elected pro-slavery delegates from those districts. Reeder protested to President Franklin Pierce to reject the results of the election theft. But it was in vain.
The rest of the country was paying attention. Oswald Garrison Villard writes in John Brown, 1800-1859 (1910) that "this high-handed ourtrage ... fairly set the North aflame with indignation".
It was the experience of the outrages in Kansas, especially the blantantly criminal stealing of the election in March, 1855, that prompted Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to deliver in the Senate his The Crime Against Kansas speech, which would become one of the most famous in American history. Although Sumner may have exceeding others in the eloquence of his indignation, his anger over the situation was widely shared in the North, and by no means only among abolitionists. And this was because of repeated efforts by the Slave Power to impose their will and their rules on the free states, in complete disregard of any consideration of "states rights" - which the Lords of the Lash always put a distant second in important to defending slavery.
Against this Territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a crime has been committed, which is without example in the records of the past. Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance, which may show at least the path of justice. In the terrible impeachment by which the great Roman orator has blasted through all time the name of Verres, amidst charges of robbery and sacrilege, the enormity which most aroused the indignant voice of his accuser, and which still stands forth with strongest distinctness, arresting the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, is, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome that the cry, "I am a Roman citizen," had been interposed in vain against the lash of the tyrant governor. ... Sir, speaking in an age of light, and a land of constitutional liberty, where the safeguards of elections are justly placed among the highest triumphs of civilization, I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much abused Sicily, thus memorable in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, have been desecrated . . .where the ballot-box, more precious than any work, in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered . . .and where the cry, " I am an American citizen," has been interposed in vain against outrage of every kind, even upon life itself. Are you against sacrilege? I present it for your execration. Are you against robbery ? I hold it up to your scorn. Are you for the protection of American citizens ? I show you how their dearest rights have been cloven down, while a Tyrannical Usurpation has sought to install itself on their very necks!
But the wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force, ay, sir, FORCE has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power. There is the simple fact, which you will in vain attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues.
But this enormity, vast beyond comparison, swells to dimensions of wickedness which the imagination toils in vain to grasp, when it is understood that for this purpose are hazarded the horrors of intestine feud not only in this distant Territory, but everywhere throughout the country. Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with the mutterings of civil war. The fury of the propagandists of Slavery, and the calm determination of their opponents, are now diffused from the distant Territory over widespread communities, and the whole country, in all its extent marshalling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a strife which, unless happily averted by the triumph of Freedom, will become war fratricidal, parricidal war with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals; justly provoking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history, and constituting a strife, in the language of the ancient writer, more than foreign, more than social, more than civil; but something compounded of all these strifes, and in itself more than war; sed potius commune quad dam ex omnibus, et plus quam bellum.
Such is the crime which you are to judge. But the criminal also must be dragged into day, that you may see and measure the power by which all this wrong is sustained. From no common source could it proceed. In its perpetration was needed a spirit of vaulting ambition which would hesitate at nothing; a [hardihood] of purpose which was insensible to the judgment of mankind; a madness for Slavery which would disregard the Constitution, the laws, and all the great examples of our history; also a consciousness of power such as comes from the habit of power; a combination of energies found only in a hundred arms directed by a hundred eyes; a control of public opinion through venal pens and a prostituted press; an ability to subsidize crowds in every vocation of life - the politician with his local importance, the lawyer with his subtle tongue, and even the authority of the judge on the bench; and a familiar use of men in places high and low, so that none, from the President to the lowest border postmaster, should decline to be its tool; all these things and more were needed, and they were found in the slave power of our Republic. There, sir, stands the criminal, all unmasked before you - heartless, grasping, and tyrannical - with an audacity beyond that of Verres, a subtlety beyond that of Machiavel, a meanness beyond that of Bacon, and an ability beyond that of Hastings. Justice to Kansas can be secured only by the prostration of this influence; for this the power behind greater than any President which succors and sustains the crime. Nay, the proceedings I now arraign derive their fearful consequences only from this connection. (my emphasis [as if the speech itself weren't emphatic enough!])
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 11: The March 1855 election in Kansas (1)
The Howard Committe Report leaves no doubt about the systematic theft of the March 1855 election in Kansas by the Missouri Border Ruffians:
On the same day that the census was completed, the governor issued his proclamation tor an election to be held on the 30th of March, A. D. 1855, for members of the legislative assembly of the Territory. It prescribed the boundaries of districts, the places for polls, the names of judges, the apportionment of members, and recited the qualification of voters. If it had been observed, a just and fair election would have reflected the will of the people of the Territory, Before the election, false and inflammatory rumors were busily circulated among the people of western Missouri. The number and character of the emigration then passing into the Territory were grossly exaggerated and misrepresented. Through the active exertions of many of its leading citizens, aided by the secret society before referred to, the passions and prejudices of the people of that State were greatly excited, Several residents there have testified to the character of the reports circulated among and credited by the people. These efforts were successful. By an organized movement, which extended from Andrew county in the north, to Jasper county in the south, and as far eastward as Boone and Cole counties, Missouri, companies of men were arranged in irregular parties and sent into every council district in the Territory, and into every representative district but one. The numbers were so distributed as to control the election in each district. They went to vote, and with the avowed design to make Kansas a slave State. They were generally armed and equipped, carried with them their own provisions and tents, and so marched into the Territory.
This description of events in the 2nd district gives an idea of the character of the gentlemen who came over from Missouri. After stealing the poll books:
They then chose two new judges and proceeded with the election. They also threatened to kill the judges if they did not receive their votes without swearing them, or else resign. They said no man should vote who would submit to be sworn; that they would kill any man who would offer to do so, "Shoot him;" "Cut his guts out," &c. They said no man should vote this day unless he voted an open ticket, and was all right on the goose [i.e., pro-slavery]; and that if they could not vote by fair means, they would by foul means. They said they had as much right to vote if they had been in the Territory two minutes as if they had been there two years, and they would vote. Some of the citizens who were about the window, but had not voted when the crowd of Missourians marched up there, upon attempting to vote were driven back by the mob, or driven off. One of them, Mr. I. M. Mace, was asked if he would take the oath [which only legal residents who were Free State would be expected to agree to]; and upon his replying that he would if the judges required it, he was dragged through the crowd away from the polls, amid cries of "kill the damned nigger-thief," "cut his throat," "tear his heart out," &c. After they got him to the outside of the crowd, they stood around him with cocked revolvers and drawn bowie-knives; one man putting a knife to his breast so that it touched him; another holding a cocked pistol to his ear, while another struck at him with a club.
The Missourians said they had a right to vote, if they had been in the Territory but five minutes. Some said they had been hired to come there and vote, and got a dollar a day, and by God they would vote or die there. (my emphasis)
Such was the slaveowners idea of "democracy". It's no wonder the Missouri Border Ruffians were also known as "Pukes".
In Missouri, US Senator David Atchison recruited Missourians to go vote illegally in Kansas. James McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) quotes the honorable Senator's lieutenant John Stringfellow as follows speaking to a crowd in St. Joseph, Missouri:
Mark every scoundrel among you that is the least tainted with free-soilism, or abolitionism, and exterminate him. To those having qualms of conscience ... the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your lives and property are in danger. ... Enter every election district in Kansas ... and vote at the point of a Bowie knife or revolver!
Obviously, the Missourians from the 2nd district followed that latter advice. Sen. Atchison himself led a band of Pukes into Kansas to vote illegally. He told them, "There are eleven hundred men coming over from Platte County [Missouri] to vote, and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand - enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory". (Also quoted by McPherson)
This was obviously an intense situation. And the pro-slavery forces had every intent of preventing a fair election by force and violence. And did so. Throw away your qualms of conscience, this pro-slavery agitators said. We can "kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory," the distinguished Senators told his followers in election-stealing.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
On the same day that the census was completed, the governor issued his proclamation tor an election to be held on the 30th of March, A. D. 1855, for members of the legislative assembly of the Territory. It prescribed the boundaries of districts, the places for polls, the names of judges, the apportionment of members, and recited the qualification of voters. If it had been observed, a just and fair election would have reflected the will of the people of the Territory, Before the election, false and inflammatory rumors were busily circulated among the people of western Missouri. The number and character of the emigration then passing into the Territory were grossly exaggerated and misrepresented. Through the active exertions of many of its leading citizens, aided by the secret society before referred to, the passions and prejudices of the people of that State were greatly excited, Several residents there have testified to the character of the reports circulated among and credited by the people. These efforts were successful. By an organized movement, which extended from Andrew county in the north, to Jasper county in the south, and as far eastward as Boone and Cole counties, Missouri, companies of men were arranged in irregular parties and sent into every council district in the Territory, and into every representative district but one. The numbers were so distributed as to control the election in each district. They went to vote, and with the avowed design to make Kansas a slave State. They were generally armed and equipped, carried with them their own provisions and tents, and so marched into the Territory.
This description of events in the 2nd district gives an idea of the character of the gentlemen who came over from Missouri. After stealing the poll books:
They then chose two new judges and proceeded with the election. They also threatened to kill the judges if they did not receive their votes without swearing them, or else resign. They said no man should vote who would submit to be sworn; that they would kill any man who would offer to do so, "Shoot him;" "Cut his guts out," &c. They said no man should vote this day unless he voted an open ticket, and was all right on the goose [i.e., pro-slavery]; and that if they could not vote by fair means, they would by foul means. They said they had as much right to vote if they had been in the Territory two minutes as if they had been there two years, and they would vote. Some of the citizens who were about the window, but had not voted when the crowd of Missourians marched up there, upon attempting to vote were driven back by the mob, or driven off. One of them, Mr. I. M. Mace, was asked if he would take the oath [which only legal residents who were Free State would be expected to agree to]; and upon his replying that he would if the judges required it, he was dragged through the crowd away from the polls, amid cries of "kill the damned nigger-thief," "cut his throat," "tear his heart out," &c. After they got him to the outside of the crowd, they stood around him with cocked revolvers and drawn bowie-knives; one man putting a knife to his breast so that it touched him; another holding a cocked pistol to his ear, while another struck at him with a club.
The Missourians said they had a right to vote, if they had been in the Territory but five minutes. Some said they had been hired to come there and vote, and got a dollar a day, and by God they would vote or die there. (my emphasis)
Such was the slaveowners idea of "democracy". It's no wonder the Missouri Border Ruffians were also known as "Pukes".
In Missouri, US Senator David Atchison recruited Missourians to go vote illegally in Kansas. James McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) quotes the honorable Senator's lieutenant John Stringfellow as follows speaking to a crowd in St. Joseph, Missouri:
Mark every scoundrel among you that is the least tainted with free-soilism, or abolitionism, and exterminate him. To those having qualms of conscience ... the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your lives and property are in danger. ... Enter every election district in Kansas ... and vote at the point of a Bowie knife or revolver!
Obviously, the Missourians from the 2nd district followed that latter advice. Sen. Atchison himself led a band of Pukes into Kansas to vote illegally. He told them, "There are eleven hundred men coming over from Platte County [Missouri] to vote, and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand - enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory". (Also quoted by McPherson)
This was obviously an intense situation. And the pro-slavery forces had every intent of preventing a fair election by force and violence. And did so. Throw away your qualms of conscience, this pro-slavery agitators said. We can "kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory," the distinguished Senators told his followers in election-stealing.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 10: The November 1854 election in Kansas
The Howard Committee Report gives us a valuable resource to get something of the tenor of the times in the Kansas crisis, because they took testimony in Kansas relatively close to the time of the events they report. (The testimony is from the first half of 1956.) Their descriptions of the November 1854 elections and how the Border Ruffians from Missouri stole them are an example:
The election in the 15th district was held at Penseneau's, on Stranger creek, a few miles from Weston, Missouri. On the day of the election a large number'of citizens of Platte county, but chiefly from Westoa and Platte City, Missouri, came in small parties, in wagons and on horseback, to the polls. Among them were several leading citizens of that town; and the names of many of them are given by the witnesses. They generally insisted upon their right to vote, on the ground that every man having a claim in the Territory could vote, no matter where he lived. All voted who chose. No man was challenged or sworn. Some of the residents did not vote. The purpose of me strangers in voting was declared to be to make Kansas a slave State. Your committee find, by the poll-books, that 306 votes were cast; of these we find but 57 are on the census-rolls as legal voters in February following. Your committee are satisfied, from the testimony, that not over 100 of those who voted had any right so to do, leaving at least 208 illegal votes cast. (my emphasis)
John Landis, who became a resident in Kansas just after this election, testified:
I moved into the Territory in December, 1854, and into the Doniphan precinct, fourteenth district, and have resided there ever since. I cam from Buchanan county, Missouri. At the time of the first election [Nov. 1854] I was solicited there by some of my friends to go over into Kansas and vote. The inducements held out was to make Kansas a slave State. I did not go. I knew a number crossed the river. They said they were going over to vote. (my emphasis)
John Scott of Missouri was apparently fairly frank, or perhaps openly cynical, about his general approach to that election:
Prior to the election in Burr Oak precinct, in the fourteenth district on the 29th of November, 1854, I had been a resident of Missouri and I then determined, if I found it necessary, to become a resident of Kansas Territory. On the day previous to that election I settled up my board at my boarding-house in St. Joseph's, Missouri, and went over to the Territory and took boarding with Mr. Bryant, near whose house the polls were held the next day, for one month, so that I might have it in my power, by merely determining to do so, to become a resident of the Territory on the day of election. I was present at Mr. Harding's when the polls were held on the morning of election prior to and at the time the judges were appointed. When my name was suggested as a judge of the election, no such suggestion had been made to or in regard to me that I was aware of, until the hour of opening the polls had arrived, when, by the absence of two judges appointed by the governor, it became necessary to select others ia their places. When my name was proposed as a judge of election, objections were made by two persons only, so far I knew, Messrs. Harding and Larzelere, in regard to my want of residence in the Territory. I then publicly informed those present that I had a claim in the Territory; that I had taken board in the Territory for a month, and that I could at any moment become an actual resident and legal voter in the Territory, and that I would do so if I concluded at any time during the day that my vote would be necessary to carry that precinct in favor of the pro-slavery candidate for delegate to Congress, and that I knew of no law requiring a judge of that election selected by the voters to be a resident of the Territory. ... I did not during the day consider it necessary to become a resident of the Territory for the purpose mentioned, and did not vote or offer to vote at that election. (my emphasis)
And this guy was one of the judges presiding over the election in that district! On cross-examination, he said:
General Whitfield was regarded as the pro-slavery candidate, and had been selected as the pro-slavery candidate by the pro-slavery party. I regarded the the question of slavery as the primarily prominent issue at that election, and, so far as I know, all parties agreed in making that question the issue of that election. ... It is my intention, and the intention of a great many other Missourians, now resident in Missouri, whenever the slavery issue is to be determined upon by the people of this Territory in the adoption, of the State constitution, to remove to this Territory in time to acquire the right to become legal voters upon that question. The leading purpose of onr intended removal to the Territory is to determine the domestic institutions of this Territory when it comes to be a State, and we would not come but for that purpose, and would never think of coming here but for that purpose. I believe there are a great many in Missouri who are so situated. This is one of the means decided upon by Missourians to counteract the movements of the [Free State] Emigrant Aid Society to determine the character of the institutions of this Territory when it comes to be a State. (my emphasis)
The Committe report describes the 1854 election in the 16th district as follows:
The election in the 16th district was held at Leavenworth. It was then a small village of three or four houses, located on the Delaware reservation. There were but comparatively few settlers then in the district, but the number rapidly increased afterwards. On the day before, and on the day of the election, a great many citizens of Platte, Clay, and Bay counties, Missouri, crossed the river, most of them camping in tents and wagons about the town, "like a camp-meeting." They were in companies or messes of 10 to 15 in each, and numbered in all several hundred. They brought their own provision, and cooked it themselves, and were generally armed. Many of them were known by the witnesses, and their names are given, which are found upon the poll-books. Among them were several persons of influence where they resided in Missouri, and held, or had held, high official position in that State. They claimed to be residents of the Territory from the fact that they were there present, and insisted upon, the right to vote, and did vote. Their avowed purpose in doing so was to make Kansas a slave State. These strangers crowded around the polls, and it was with great difficulty that the settlers could get to the polls. One resident attempted to get to the polls in the afternoon, but was crowded and pulled back. He then went outside of the crowd, and hurrahed for Gen. Whitfield; and some of those who did not know him said, "There's a good pro-slavery man," and lifted him up over their heads, so that he crawled on their heads and put in his vote. A person who saw, from the color of his ticket, that it was not for Gen, Whitfleld, cried out, "He is a damned abolitionist - let him down;" and they dropped him. Others were passed to the polls In the same way, and others crowded up in the best way they conld. After this mockery of an election was over the non-residents returned to their homes in Missouri. Of the 312 votes cast, not 150 were by legal voters.
An important part of the pro-slavery "heritage" is crooked elections like these. The techniques used in that election would be employed again in 1855. And some of the election-stealing techniques employed by the Border Ruffians to keep legal voters from the polls would reappear during the mid-1870s during the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction governments.
"This mockery of an election" is a good description for the 1854 Kansas vote as a whole, as well as for the one in March, 1855.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
The election in the 15th district was held at Penseneau's, on Stranger creek, a few miles from Weston, Missouri. On the day of the election a large number'of citizens of Platte county, but chiefly from Westoa and Platte City, Missouri, came in small parties, in wagons and on horseback, to the polls. Among them were several leading citizens of that town; and the names of many of them are given by the witnesses. They generally insisted upon their right to vote, on the ground that every man having a claim in the Territory could vote, no matter where he lived. All voted who chose. No man was challenged or sworn. Some of the residents did not vote. The purpose of me strangers in voting was declared to be to make Kansas a slave State. Your committee find, by the poll-books, that 306 votes were cast; of these we find but 57 are on the census-rolls as legal voters in February following. Your committee are satisfied, from the testimony, that not over 100 of those who voted had any right so to do, leaving at least 208 illegal votes cast. (my emphasis)
John Landis, who became a resident in Kansas just after this election, testified:
I moved into the Territory in December, 1854, and into the Doniphan precinct, fourteenth district, and have resided there ever since. I cam from Buchanan county, Missouri. At the time of the first election [Nov. 1854] I was solicited there by some of my friends to go over into Kansas and vote. The inducements held out was to make Kansas a slave State. I did not go. I knew a number crossed the river. They said they were going over to vote. (my emphasis)
John Scott of Missouri was apparently fairly frank, or perhaps openly cynical, about his general approach to that election:
Prior to the election in Burr Oak precinct, in the fourteenth district on the 29th of November, 1854, I had been a resident of Missouri and I then determined, if I found it necessary, to become a resident of Kansas Territory. On the day previous to that election I settled up my board at my boarding-house in St. Joseph's, Missouri, and went over to the Territory and took boarding with Mr. Bryant, near whose house the polls were held the next day, for one month, so that I might have it in my power, by merely determining to do so, to become a resident of the Territory on the day of election. I was present at Mr. Harding's when the polls were held on the morning of election prior to and at the time the judges were appointed. When my name was suggested as a judge of the election, no such suggestion had been made to or in regard to me that I was aware of, until the hour of opening the polls had arrived, when, by the absence of two judges appointed by the governor, it became necessary to select others ia their places. When my name was proposed as a judge of election, objections were made by two persons only, so far I knew, Messrs. Harding and Larzelere, in regard to my want of residence in the Territory. I then publicly informed those present that I had a claim in the Territory; that I had taken board in the Territory for a month, and that I could at any moment become an actual resident and legal voter in the Territory, and that I would do so if I concluded at any time during the day that my vote would be necessary to carry that precinct in favor of the pro-slavery candidate for delegate to Congress, and that I knew of no law requiring a judge of that election selected by the voters to be a resident of the Territory. ... I did not during the day consider it necessary to become a resident of the Territory for the purpose mentioned, and did not vote or offer to vote at that election. (my emphasis)
And this guy was one of the judges presiding over the election in that district! On cross-examination, he said:
General Whitfield was regarded as the pro-slavery candidate, and had been selected as the pro-slavery candidate by the pro-slavery party. I regarded the the question of slavery as the primarily prominent issue at that election, and, so far as I know, all parties agreed in making that question the issue of that election. ... It is my intention, and the intention of a great many other Missourians, now resident in Missouri, whenever the slavery issue is to be determined upon by the people of this Territory in the adoption, of the State constitution, to remove to this Territory in time to acquire the right to become legal voters upon that question. The leading purpose of onr intended removal to the Territory is to determine the domestic institutions of this Territory when it comes to be a State, and we would not come but for that purpose, and would never think of coming here but for that purpose. I believe there are a great many in Missouri who are so situated. This is one of the means decided upon by Missourians to counteract the movements of the [Free State] Emigrant Aid Society to determine the character of the institutions of this Territory when it comes to be a State. (my emphasis)
The Committe report describes the 1854 election in the 16th district as follows:
The election in the 16th district was held at Leavenworth. It was then a small village of three or four houses, located on the Delaware reservation. There were but comparatively few settlers then in the district, but the number rapidly increased afterwards. On the day before, and on the day of the election, a great many citizens of Platte, Clay, and Bay counties, Missouri, crossed the river, most of them camping in tents and wagons about the town, "like a camp-meeting." They were in companies or messes of 10 to 15 in each, and numbered in all several hundred. They brought their own provision, and cooked it themselves, and were generally armed. Many of them were known by the witnesses, and their names are given, which are found upon the poll-books. Among them were several persons of influence where they resided in Missouri, and held, or had held, high official position in that State. They claimed to be residents of the Territory from the fact that they were there present, and insisted upon, the right to vote, and did vote. Their avowed purpose in doing so was to make Kansas a slave State. These strangers crowded around the polls, and it was with great difficulty that the settlers could get to the polls. One resident attempted to get to the polls in the afternoon, but was crowded and pulled back. He then went outside of the crowd, and hurrahed for Gen. Whitfield; and some of those who did not know him said, "There's a good pro-slavery man," and lifted him up over their heads, so that he crawled on their heads and put in his vote. A person who saw, from the color of his ticket, that it was not for Gen, Whitfleld, cried out, "He is a damned abolitionist - let him down;" and they dropped him. Others were passed to the polls In the same way, and others crowded up in the best way they conld. After this mockery of an election was over the non-residents returned to their homes in Missouri. Of the 312 votes cast, not 150 were by legal voters.
An important part of the pro-slavery "heritage" is crooked elections like these. The techniques used in that election would be employed again in 1855. And some of the election-stealing techniques employed by the Border Ruffians to keep legal voters from the polls would reappear during the mid-1870s during the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction governments.
"This mockery of an election" is a good description for the 1854 Kansas vote as a whole, as well as for the one in March, 1855.
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
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