Terrorism in America: 1856

John Brown, in a daguerreotype from around 1850.

(Library of Congress)

Exactly 150 years ago today, at 10 p.m. on May 24, 1856, John Brown set out to take revenge against residents of eastern Kansas who had been threatening antislavery settlers. Before the night was out, he and his men had committed a deadly atrocity that would thrust him into the national spotlight as an extremist champion of the antislavery cause—and edge the nation closer to civil war.

Up to this point, Brown’s actions—which would culminate in his attempted raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1860—had been nonviolent. He had long supported antislavery newspapers, given land to fugitive slaves, and aided the Underground Railroad. He held African-Americans to be his equals, an attitude rare even among abolitionists.

But he saw the pro-slavery power growing stronger during the 1850s. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened territories west of the Mississippi to slavery if a majority of residents approved. Tension mounted quickly as “border ruffians” from Missouri poured into Kansas and established a proslavery legislature in the territory. “The storm every day thickens,” John Brown, Jr., wrote to his father. “Give us the arms, and we are ready for the contest.”

John Brown was 55, and in his life he had failed as a farmer, a land speculator, and a wool trader. He, too, was ready. He raised money to purchase arms, including heavy broadswords, and headed west in August 1855. He joined his sons in a small settlement near Lawrence, Kansas, a center of antislavery sentiment.

The situation in Kansas was growing increasingly chaotic. President Franklin Pierce, elected in 1852, made concessions to the South that included recognizing the Kansas proslavery legislature and its draconian laws against antislavery activity. At an April 1856 meeting Brown rejected compromise, saying he’d rather see “the country drenched with blood.”

Intimidation of free-staters had been going on for some time. It reached a peak on May 21, 1856, when 750 drunken, heavily armed ruffians rode into Lawrence and took over the city while free-state forces fled without firing a shot. The invaders ransacked two antislavery newspaper offices and demolished the Free State Hotel with gunpowder and cannon fire. Hearing the news, John, Jr., marshaled his small rifle company and, along with his father, galloped toward Lawrence. They arrived too late.

The cowardice of the free-state faction infuriated the senior Brown. His ire was further inflamed when word reached the company that in Washington the antislavery Senator Charles Sumner, after making a speech about the Kansas situation, had been beaten nearly to death on the floor of the Senate by the Southerner Preston Brooks. “The men went crazy” at the news, Brown’s son Jason reported.

Though warned by John, Jr., against any “rash act,” Brown, four other sons, and three additional men set out in a lumber wagon toward a settlement of proslavery families on Pottawatomie Creek, not far from their own home. Their plan was “to strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people,” Brown declared. “Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights.”

James Doyle was awakened in the middle of the next night and taken from his home along with his two oldest sons. His wife’s pleading saved a younger boy. Brown’s men led the captives 200 yards down a lane, then fell on them with swords. John Brown himself shot Doyle in the head. They went on to two more houses, where they captured men notorious for their proslavery activities and hacked them to death, leaving their bodies mangled.

The mutilations helped plant in history the notion that Brown was a madman. That he was an extremist is beyond doubt. He was a fanatical Puritan and an uncompromising zealot when it came to slavery. Some of his plans were far-fetched. But his actions were rooted in moral principle. Even the savage slaughter that May night was not necessarily the act of a crazy person.

He carried out the “Pottawatomie massacre,” as it came to be known, in a climate of violence and anarchy. Of the 52 persons who died during the three years of “bleeding Kansas,” 36 were free-staters, many of them murdered in cold blood.

The ferocity of the murders directed by John Brown sent a sobering message to the South. He had “brought Southern tactics to the Northern side,” a newspaper noted. He had shown that antislavery forces would not passively accept the depredations of Southern hooligans.

The incident also made him famous. After hiding out in the Kansas wilds and fighting a pitched battle with proslavery forces, he returned to the East. By January 1857 he was being hailed in Boston as a hero. “He stands for Truth,” Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed. Though sometimes hounded by federal marshals, Brown traveled the lecture circuit, raising money to continue the struggle on the frontier. In the end, the Kansas conflict resolved itself without him. The settlers rejected slavery in 1858, paving the way for the territory to enter the Union as a free state.

Brown was by then intent on a plan he had long nourished, to invade the South and actively free slaves. Impressed by Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising, he thought that a small group of guerrillas making raids from the Appalachian Mountains could foment a rebellion among slaves. The linchpin of his plan would be an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in western Virginia. He carried out the operation with 21 men in October 1859. When it failed, Virginia authorities hanged him, turning him into a martyr.

The eulogies for him reflected the range of contemporary views and the paradoxical legacy he was to leave to history. Henry David Thoreau proclaimed Brown’s “transcendent moral greatness.” Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee called him “nothing more than a murderer, a robber, a thief, and a traitor.”

In time, one thing became clear: Brown, with his insistence that only violence would free the slaves, was a prophet. A year and a half after his death, Union soldiers sang out his name as they marched to the conflict that would leave the nation “drenched with blood.”

Brown’s life remains a prickly subject 150 years after the murders at Pottawatomie Creek. Was his brutality justified? Could slavery have been eliminated without bloodshed? Did his vision of racial equality make him a moral exemplar? Did his killing make him a monster? How, finally, are we to view those who embrace violence in the name of righteousness?

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).