by Herb Karl
If any of those clasping hands on that warm, humid evening were capable of detaching from the old man’s thrall, it was Owen. “Father sometimes bends the Lord’s words to suit his purposes,” he muttered under his breath. But even Owen succumbed to his father’s incantation.
Though none of Brown’s sons shared his rigid brand of Christianity, they’d absorbed his belief that it was the responsibility of each one of them to recognize evil and do everything possible to defeat it. They came to respect and admire their father’s cause, the sacrifices he made as a conductor and stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, the constant stream of runaway slaves that passed through their home, his grand ambition to free the nation from the curse of human bondage. They were proud to be part of a family of abolitionists. Now, along with their sister’s husband Henry Thompson, the storekeeper Theodore Weiner, and the reluctant housepainter James Townsley, they were on the verge of committing acts of horrific proportions.
Brown broke the circle first, stooping to pick up one of the broadswords. He approached Owen and seemed to embrace him as he reached around his son’s waist and buckled on the leather belt from which hung the sheathed sword. Brown repeated the ritual with each man. They stood motionless in the quickening darkness, surrendering to his will.
The hour was late, almost ten o’clock, when Brown told the men to follow him to Townsley’s wagon. He rolled back a canvas tarpaulin, under which lay a collection of firearms. He distributed the .36 caliber Colt revolvers, one for each man, the last for himself. He checked to make sure the cylinders were loaded and capped, then slid the pistol under his belt. The others did likewise.
“We are now soldiers in the Northern Army,” he said. “As your captain I expect each of you to do his duty.”
He turned to young Oliver and ordered him to stay in camp and stand watch over the horses and wagon. Then he lifted a tattered straw hat from the wagon’s bed. Limp and misshapen, it clashed wildly with his black leather cravat, a staple of his attire, worn over the high collar of a white muslin shirt now fouled with sweat. He reached inside his coat and pulled out a slip of paper. In the mist-enshrouded darkness it was impossible to read, but he knew what it said. He waved it in the air and announced:
“The Doyles first. Then Wilkinson. Then the Shermans.”
Before setting out for the timbered bank of Pottawatomie Creek, Brown cautioned his soldiers to remain silent. Townsley took the lead. He knew the dwellings of the men Brown named.
By eleven o’clock, they reached Mosquito Creek, a shallow stream that emptied into the Pottawatomie and ran through the claim of James Doyle.
Doyle was a hardscrabble Tennessee farmer who migrated to Kansas Territory to escape the disadvantages of subsistence farming in a slaveholding state. In Tennessee he supplemented his meager income by hunting fugitive slaves. When he settled in the territory he brought along two bloodhounds that had served him well tracking down runaways. With his wife Mahala and their four children—among them twenty-two-year-old William and twenty-year-old Drury—he staked out a claim on Mosquito Creek. However, he was unable to free himself from deeply held racial prejudices and soon aligned himself with his proslavery neighbors. He and sons William and Drury fell under the influence of the Sherman brothers. Together they drank whiskey at the Shermans’ tavern, then amused themselves by intimidating Free State settlers. James Doyle sat on Judge Cato’s grand jury—the one seeking to indict the Browns—while son William served as bailiff.
Brown and his men were nearing the Doyles’ log cabin when the bloodhounds came bounding out of the mist. Townsley drew his sword and with a single stroke sent one of the dogs to the ground in a crumpled heap. The other fled yelping into the night.
Brown jabbed at the lifeless body with his boot. He heard muffled voices coming from the cabin. He chose Owen, Salmon, and Henry to accompany him to the cabin’s front door. Townsley, Weiner, and Frederick would remain behind—unless called on for help. The old man made his way along a worn path to the crude, low-walled cabin. He pounded on the door and called out:
“We are lost and need directions to the Wilkinsons’.”
A woman’s voice responded, begging her husband to ignore the request. Brown heard the scraping of a wooden bar being lifted from metal brackets. He thrust his shoulder against the door and burst into the cabin. Owen, Salmon, and Henry were on his heels. A single candle flickered in the otherwise dark interior.
James Doyle, wearing only a pair of trousers he held up with one hand, stepped back, a puzzled look on his face. His wife and two youngest children—a teenage boy and a little girl—sat close together on one of the three beds in the dirt-floored room. The two older boys, clad in soiled nightshirts, stood nearby.
Brown pressed his pistol into Doyle’s bare chest. “We are from the Northern Army,” he said, “and we have come to take you prisoner.”
The wife wept as she looked to her husband. “Haven’t I told you what you were going to get for the course you’ve been taking?”
“Hush, Mother, hush,” Doyle said. “I know this man.”
Brown pointed to Doyle. “Take him.” Then he waved his pistol at William and Drury. “And them as well.”
Henry, Owen, and Salmon, their pistols drawn, shoved Doyle and his two sons outside the cabin.
“Not this one, sir,” the wife sobbed, clinging to the boy sitting beside her. “Not this one, I beg you.”
Brown paused, glanced briefly at the woman and her two young children, then turned and exited the cabin, shutting the door behind him.
Outside, in the hazy glow of the moon, Henry guarded a shivering James Doyle. Owen and Salmon, their swords unsheathed, prodded William and Drury along a wagon trail. They disappeared into the mist.
Brown followed at some distance, stopping as the sounds reached him.
What he heard reminded him of the ax strokes delivered to the skinned carcasses of deer he butchered occasionally for his family. The ax would slam into flesh, sometimes finding bone—the bone snapping sharply as it split into fragments. Except the slain deer wouldn’t moan piteously, nor would there be the choking babble of curses drowning in blood-laced saliva.
When Brown next saw Owen and Salmon they were breathing heavily, their clothes sodden with blood and sweat. Blood dripped from their swords and hands. Blood merged with the sweat on their brows, producing pink rivulets—barely discernible in the soft glow of moonlight that clung to the mist.
“Finish it,” the old man said, gesturing in the direction of the cabin, where Henry waited with James Doyle. They headed back.
Doyle, still gripping his trousers, seemed dazed. Owen and Salmon marched him down the same trail traversed earlier by William and Drury. This time Brown stayed close.
It was Salmon who wrenched Doyle from Owen’s grasp, shoving the trembling man to the ground. With both hands clutching his sword as though it were an iron digging bar—one that might be used to break up hard clay in the farm country of Doyle’s native Tennessee—Salmon raised it above his head, then plunged the blade into Doyle’s abdomen, impaling him to the ground. Doyle’s hands flew from his side, wrapping around the blade, the finely honed edges slicing into his fingers. His knees jerked upward. A piercing shrill welled up from deep within his chest.
Salmon released his grip and turned away. He found himself staring into the face of his father. “There,” he rasped, his glazed eyes fixed on Brown. “You have your blood.”
Brown looked down at the writhing body, listened to the shuddering death rattle until he could bear it no longer, drew his pistol, placed the barrel to Doyle’s head and squeezed the trigger. The writhing ceased.
Owen withdrew the sword from the lifeless body.
The Sabbath had arrived, and the night of controlled frenzy hadn’t yet come to an end.
Brown sent an exhausted Salmon and Owen to the rear, then collected Henry, Weiner, Frederick, and Townsley. They resumed their march along the Pottawatomie.
The killing of Wilkinson a
nd the Shermans fell to Weiner and Henry. Brown, Townsley, and Frederick were witnesses.
Allen Wilkinson, a member of the proslavery legislature, was acting district attorney for Judge Cato’s grand jury. One of the few literate settlers in the Pottawatomie region, Wilkinson was rabidly proslavery. Hours earlier on this, the evening he was to die, he’d boasted to his wife, “In a few days the last of the Free State settlers will either be dead or out of the territory.”
The wife implored Brown to spare her husband’s life. Brown shrugged. Wilkinson’s death was no less violent than the Doyles’.
It was time to move on.
Tied to a hitching rail in back of the Shermans’ tavern were three horses, one of which Townsley identified as belonging to William Sherman. All three of the brothers were on Brown’s list, but on this night—as luck would have it—William was the only brother present, asleep in a back room. He was rousted from his bed, marched to the Pottawatomie, then ordered into the creek, where he found himself anchored in silt as though shackled in leg irons. He was an easy mark for the slashing blades of Weiner and Henry Thompson. Brown, Townsley, and Frederick stood on the high rim of the creek gazing through the mist at the dim spectacle below. The hulking William Sherman wouldn’t yield without trying to defend himself. In the end he toppled into the water like a felled tree.
It was shortly after two o’clock on Sunday morning and the work was finally done. Five men lay dead—victims of an execution designed to create fear among those claiming allegiance to slavery. Five men who, besides being proslavery, had the misfortune of living in close proximity to one another alongside a creek in Kansas Territory.
The executioners stripped to the waist, waded into the Pottawatomie, rinsed their bloody swords in the slow-moving waters, wrung the blood from their shirts. When they emerged from the creek, they dropped to the ground like dead weight.
Townsley stood motionless alongside an agitated Frederick.
Brown distanced himself from everyone. In the darkness, he was invisible in a stand of timber that bordered the creek.
None of the executioners spoke except Owen. “There will be no more such work as this,” he said.
Brown inspected the property he confiscated from the victims. Four horses pawed the dirt, uneasy among their captors. Stacked on the ground were six saddles, three rifles, a powder flask, and a bowie knife.
“We are at war,” the old man said. “We take from the enemy what we need.”
With the horses in tow, the soldiers of Brown’s Northern Army trudged back to the encampment between the two ravines. For the first time since the ordeal began, they were able to reflect on what they had done.
Brown walked to one side, his head bowed and thrust forward, immersed in thought. He had accomplished his mission. Now let the word go out. Let the slave power know the war on slavery had begun in earnest.
The horses whinnied and shook their manes. Brown could feel the moisture in the warm air being lifted up. A gust of wind caused his straw hat to flap against his head. Jagged bands of lightning rippled across the night sky, illuminating the men in ghostly poses.
Brown was confident the rain would come; it would bring new life to the parched prairie—just as the blood spilled along the Pottawatomie would bring new life to the struggle against slavery in Kansas.
There would be guerrilla warfare, skirmishes with border ruffians and proslavery territorial militia. Maybe even action against federal troops acting under orders from President Pierce and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.
Brown’s army would be small. But a few men of principle who respected themselves and feared God could accomplish great things. Besides, the old man had connections—abolitionists in the Northeast who would supply him with money and guns once they learned he was determined to bring freedom to Kansas Territory.
4
Eight Days Later
June 2, 1856
Kansas Territory
At first light Brown was on his belly clutching a Colt revolver and crawling through grass he could have sworn had grown a foot since the rains returned to the prairie. The grass was lush and wet and dotted with purple wildflowers that seemed to have sprung up overnight. The old man couldn’t avoid crushing them as he slithered upward toward the crest of a ridge, a vantage point from which he hoped to get a glimpse of the enemy.
The enemy was twenty-four-year-old Henry Clay Pate, a deputy US marshal and captain of a troop of Missouri militiamen hunting the Pottawatomie killers.
But now the hunters were the hunted.
News of the approaching Missourians had reached Brown at his encampment in the timber near the headwaters of Ottawa Creek, north of Ottawa Jones’s farm. He and his men were in hiding—awaiting the repercussions of Pottawatomie—when Samuel Shore, a Free State settler from the nearby hamlet of Palmyra, rode into camp and announced the Missourians had come and were seeking revenge. He told of cabins plundered and burned.
“The only thing that’s protected us so far,” Shore told Brown, “is the Missourians’ fear that you and your men are lying in ambush somewhere close by.”
Brown’s eyes widened. Had Pottawatomie become the catalyst he hoped for? An event that would compel Free State settlers to abandon their fields and take up arms? Was it possible the war to end chattel slavery might begin in Kansas Territory?
Brown asked, “Mr. Shore, how many men can you furnish me?”
Shore hesitated. “My neighbors are afraid to leave their farms and families.”
Brown said, “I am not willing to sacrifice my men without the hope of accomplishing something.”
So Shore left, promising to return after he recruited enough volunteers to form—along with Brown’s small company—a combined force capable of taking on the Missourians.
Soon after Shore’s departure, a correspondent from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune stumbled onto the old man’s camp. James Redpath was only twenty-two; he’d joined Greeley’s newspaper intending to write about slavery. He spent a year traveling in three Southern states and witnessed enough depravity to convert him into an impassioned abolitionist. At the behest of Greeley, who openly opposed slavery, Redpath journeyed west to join the cadre of Tribune correspondents already reporting on the troubles in Kansas Territory.
Brown was pleasantly surprised when he learned the identity of his visitor. He knew of Redpath’s work and had read some of his reports in the Tribune. He also knew that to achieve his goals he needed a favorable press, especially in the Northeast, where his benefactors resided. Anyone who wrote dispatches for a radical abolitionist like Horace Greeley was a valuable asset.
It was midday when Redpath was escorted to a clearing in the stand of trees surrounding the camp. The air was saturated with the aroma of simmering pork. Brown stood beside a cooking fire, a fork in his hand, leaning over an iron pot suspended from a tripod. He turned to greet Redpath.
“They tell me you work for Greeley.”
“I do indeed, sir. And you, I trust, are Captain John Brown.”
The old man nodded. “Please join us for dinner.” He turned over the slab of meat; it sizzled and sent puffs of steam into the air. “This pig was liberated from its proslavery owner,” Brown said dryly. “Gave its life for the cause of freedom.”
Redpath hadn’t expected droll humor from a man suspected of brutally murdering proslavery settlers.
Brown invited Redpath to sit with him in the shade of a hickory tree—but not before asking the Lord’s blessing and seeing that his men were fed. With the addition of two new volunteers, the company had grown to ten.
As they ate, Brown and Redpath talked of the defeat of Lawrence, the timidity of the Free State settlers. Eventually the journalist broached the subject of Pottawatomie. He reached into his coat and pulled out a newspaper, unfolded it, handed it to the old man, and pointed to the banner headline:
WAR! WAR!
The story was printed on the front page of the Border Times, a proslavery weekly published in a to
wn near Kansas City.
Brown read without commenting, showed no emotion even though the story incorrectly claimed eight men—rather than five—had been killed. It concluded with a plea for volunteers and money to fight a civil war that had broken out in Kansas. The old man refolded the paper and handed it back to Redpath.
The story was reprinted in other papers, Redpath said, but hadn’t made its way out of Missouri. “I think Northern editors are too busy filling their pages with the destruction of Lawrence and the assault on Senator Sumner.”
If Brown wanted recognition for Pottawatomie—recognition that would reach New York and the rest of the Northeast—Redpath was offering him an opportunity.
“I have nothing to say on the matter of the killings,” Brown said, then added, “Nor do my men.” He wiped his mouth with a soiled rag. “If you want my opinion on what appears to be the beginning of civil warfare in Kansas, I welcome it.”
The old man’s penetrating gaze unnerved the correspondent. Redpath must have felt the conversation had taken an unpleasant turn; he didn’t want to alienate the one man he judged to be irrevocably committed to the abolition of slavery in Kansas. So he backed off. “I’ve seen what slavery has done to this country,” Redpath said, “and I fear if you don’t persevere all will be lost.”
“Frankly,” Brown said, slipping into a more genial mood, “my men and I feel as though we are the extreme outpost of the free North. We shall stay here and fight, young man. We shan’t disappoint our friends.”
