AFTER POTTAWATOMIE

John Brown, Jr., and Jason Brown, two of the fighter’s sons, were captured by Missourians and suffered incredible tortures after the Pottawatomie affair. Both men were burning with fever, but they were dragged at the ends of ropes for two or three days, beaten, hung up and then let down, and then chained to oxcarts in the wind and rain. John Jr., always of a nervous temperament, went temporarily insane under this treatment, but his captors had no mercy. Though he shrieked wildly, and though his brother Jason begged that the Southerns have pity, their hearts were hard as flint.

The following scene is described by Jason:

“Captain Wood said to me: ‘Keep that man still.’ ‘I can’t keep an insane man still,’ said I. ‘He is no more insane than you are. If you don’t keep him still, we’ll do it for you.’ I tried my best, but John had not a glimmer of reason and could not understand anything. He went on yelling. Three troopers came in. One struck him a terrible blow on the jaw with his fist, throwing him on his side. A second knelt on him and pounded him with his fist. The third stood off and kicked him with all his force in the back of the neck. ‘Don’t kill a crazy man!’ cried I. ‘No more crazy than you are, but we’ll fetch it out of him.’ After that John lay unconscious for three or four hours. We camped about one and a half miles southeast of the Adairs. There we stayed about two weeks. Then we were ordered to move again. They drove us on foot, all the prisoners, chained two and two. At Ottawa ford young Kilbourne dropped of a sun-stroke.”

The men were later released, for they had done nothing that could be prosecuted in the court where the pro-slavery government “troops” had driven them. This was the sort of thing John Brown was fighting; it was life and death, and no mercy could be expected from the Southerners. Mr. Villard and other timorous friends of John Brown do not seem to understand the nature of the battle; and they do not understand what giant faith and courage it must have taken for an old farmer of fifty-five to continue fighting in such an atmosphere.

John Brown did not flinch. Another son, Frederick, was shot down in cold blood on the steps of the family home at Osawatomie, but the old fighter, shedding a silent tear for the loss, for he deeply loved his children, went on his stern path.

The spuriously-elected slavery governor offered a reward of $3,000 for John Brown, and the President of the United States a reward of $250. Federal troops scoured the territory for him. For months he and his men slept out in the fields, flitting from place to place, and fighting in many battles.

With only nine men he fought off a troop of twenty-three Southerners at the “battle of Black Jack,” and forced them to surrender. In August, 250 men moved on Osawatomie, to destroy it as they had destroyed Lawrence. John Brown gathered about forty men to resist the Southerners, and a hot battle was fought, in which, of course, Brown had to retreat. The town was thoroughly wiped out, and also granted “Southern rights.”

There were many other skirmishes; the name of Captain John Brown, old Brown of Osawatomie, became a legend in Kansas. He became a sort of Pancho Villa figure to the South; a hundred times he was reported dead or captured; a hundred times he was blamed for wild deeds he had never done.

Here are two contemporary pictures of John Brown in the field. The first is written by August Bondi, a brave and able young Austrian Jew, who put himself under Brown’s leadership after the Pottawatomie affair:

“We stayed here up to the morning of Sunday, June 1st, and during those few days I fully succeeded in understanding the exalted character of my old friend, John Brown. He exhibited at all times the most affectionate care for each of us. He also attended to the cooking. We had two meals daily, consisting of bread, baked in skillets; this was washed down with creek water, mixed with a little ginger and a spoon of molasses to each pint. Nevertheless, we kept in excellent spirits; we considered ourselves as one family, allied to one another by the consciousness that it was our duty to undergo all these privations for the good cause. We were determined to share any danger with one another, that victory or death might find us together; and we were united, as a band of brothers, by the love and affection toward the man who with tender words and wise counsel, in the depth of the wilderness of Ottawa creek, prepared a handful of young men for the work of laying the foundation of a free commonwealth.

“His words have ever remained firmly engraved in my mind. Many and various were the instructions he gave during the days of our compulsory leisure in this camp. He expressed himself to us that we should never allow ourselves to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws and institutions to exist if our conscience and reason condemned them.

“He admonished us not to care whether a majority, no matter how large, opposed our principles and opinions. The largest majorities were sometimes only organized mobs, whose howlings never changed black to white or night into day. A minority convinced of its rights, based on moral principles, would, under a republican government, sooner or later become the majority.”

The other description is that of William A. Phillips, then a correspondent of the New York Tribune, and later a Colonel in the Civil War. Brown, still an outlaw, was on his way to Topeka, to be on hand at whatever crisis might arise at the opening of the legislature elected by the Free State settlers. Phillips met him on the way.

His account is important, for it shows that John Brown saw much farther than his own times. He knew that there were many other things wrong with the social system in America besides slavery. There are plain indications here, as in other accounts, that John Brown was one of those early American Socialists, such as Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, father of Arthur Brisbane, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, who felt that the abolition of slavery was only the first step toward a free America. Wendell Phillips, for instance, one of this abolitionist band, became after the Civil War one of the leading champions of the rights of workingmen in their battle against the capitalists.

But here is Colonel Phillips giving his charming picture, in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1879, of that night ride and the conversation he had with Brown as they lay bivouacking in the open beneath the stars:

“He seemed as little disposed to sleep as I was, and we talked; or rather, he did, for I said little. I found that he was a thorough astronomer; he pointed out the different constellations and their movements. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is midnight,’ as he pointed to the finger marks of his great clock in the sky. The whispering of the wind in the prairies was full of voices to him, and the stars as they shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him. ‘How admirable is the symmetry of the heavens; how grand and beautiful! Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor creatures. If one star is more brilliant than others, it is continually shooting in some erratic way into space.’

“He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he said that slavery besotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse; nor did the Free State men escape his sharp censure. He said we had many true and noble men, but too many broken down politicians from the older states, who would rather pass resolutions than act, and who criticized all who did real work.

“A professional politician, he went on, you could never trust; for even if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage.

“One of the most interesting things in Captain Brown’s conversation that night, and one that marked him as a thinker, was his treatment of our forms of social and political life. He thought society ought to be reorganized on a less selfish basis; for while material interests gained by competition for bread, men and women lost much by it. He condemned the sale of land as a chattel, and thought there was an infinite number of wrongs to right before society would be what it should be, but that in our country slavery was the sum of all villainies, and its abolition the first essential work.”