THE SITUATION IN KANSAS

As John Brown left for Kansas, he turned to his wife and the remaining members of his family and said: “If it is so painful for us to part with the hope of meeting again, how must it be with the poor slaves, who have no hope?”

John Brown was always sanguine in his ventures; but the events before him would have tried the hope of a superman; they were to be bloody, exacting, terrible. It was what he needed, however, for John Brown went to Kansas with a greater project in his mind, the attack on Virginia and the South, and Kansas was to be for him the rough, harsh school in which he could train himself for that supreme effort.

With his youngest son, Oliver, then about eighteen years old, and a son-in-law, Henry Thompson, John Brown left Chicago in August. The party had a heavily loaded wagon drawn by a “nice, stout young horse,” that was stricken with distemper when they reached Missouri, and could barely drag himself along. Their progress was therefore slow; a scant seven or eight miles a day. But it gave them an opportunity to see and hear things in Missouri, then fiercely pro-slavery, and the reservoir from which were drawn most of the Border Ruffians who were raiding Kansas, and trying to force it into the phalanx of slavery states.

Companies of armed men were constantly passing and re-passing on the route to Kansas, and they were continually boasting “of what deeds of patriotism and chivalry they had performed there, and of the still more mighty deeds they were yet to do.” As Brown wrote home in a letter, “No man of them would blush when telling of their cruel treading down and terrifying of defenceless Free State men; seemed to take peculiar satisfaction in telling of the fine horses and mules they had killed in their numerous expeditions against the damned Abolitionists.”

John Brown was roused by all this; already he was changing from the peaceful patriarch to the fearless warrior in the field. One incident illustrates this. When the little party reached the Missouri River at Brunswick, Missouri, they sat themselves down to wait for the ferry. There came to them an old man, frankly Missourian, frankly inquisitive after the manner of the frontier. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To Kansas,” replied John Brown. “Where from?” asked the old man. “From New York,” answered John Brown.

“You won’t live to get there,” the old Missourian said, grimly.

“We are prepared,” John Brown answered, “not to die alone.” Before that spirit and that eagle eye the old Missourian quailed; he turned and left.

It was in October, after an arduous trip, that John Brown and his party reached the family settlement at Osawatomie. They arrived weary and all but destitute, with about sixty cents between them. And they found the settlement in great distress; all of the Browns, except the wife of John, Jr., were completely prostrated with fever and ague, gotten from the rough conditions. They were living in a tent exposed to the chill winds, and were shivering over little fires on the bare ground. All the food left was a small supply of milk from their cows, some corn and a few potatoes. It was an unusually cold winter that year; on October 26 John Brown saw the hardest freezing he had ever witnessed south of his bleak farm-house in the Adirondacks; and all the Kansas pioneers suffered in it as did the Browns.

Nobody in Kansas that first winter knew what comforts were. While the Browns paid the penalty for living on low ground in a ravine and in tents, their bitter experience with sickness and hunger was not as bad as that of many other Northern families. Starvation and death looked in at many a door where parents lay helpless, while famished children crawled about the dirt floors crying for food, and shrieking with fear if any footstep approached, lest the comer be a Border Ruffian, (as the Southerners were called) instead of a friend. For pure misery and heart-breaking suffering these pioneer tales of Kansas are not surpassed by any in the whole history of the winning of the West.

But old John Brown was indomitable; he put new life and energy into his six sons; by November two shanties were well advanced, and the food problem had been lightened. They were getting into good shape for the winter, and preparing to take up their share in the settling of Kansas, when the hot breath of war scorched all these plans, as it did many another Northern settler’s.

There would be little time for growing corn for the Browns thereafter, or for the other settlers; the slavery question demanded an answer first.

One dread that had worried the Browns before leaving home proved unnecessary. It was their fear of the Indians. The Browns were terrified when the first big band of Sacs and Foxes in war-paint surrounded their tent, whooping and yelling, but they had the good sense to ground their arms, and the Indians did likewise. Thereafter both sides were great friends. John, Jr., went often to visit their old chief; once, when in the following summer, the Indians came to call again, they were “fought” with gifts of melons and green corn. “That,” said Jason Brown, “was the nicest party I ever saw.”

John Brown, Jr., used to ask the old chief questions, as, “Why do you Sacs and Foxes not build houses and barns like the Ottawas and the Chippewas? Why do you not have schools and churches like the Delawares and Shawnees? Why do you have no preachers and teachers?” And the chief replied in a staccato which summed up wonderfully the bitter, century-long experience of his people: “We want no houses and barns. We want no schools and churches. We want no preachers and teachers. We bad enough now.”

No, the Indians were friends. The men really to be feared were not long in putting in their appearance. One night six or seven heavily-armed Missourians rode up to the door, and asked whether any stray cattle had been seen. The Browns replied in the negative; and then, as newcomers, they were asked, in the border slang, how they were “on the goose.”

“We are Free State,” was the answer, “and what is more, we are Abolitionists.”

The men rode away, but from that moment the Browns were marked for destruction. They did not shrink from danger, however. They nailed their flag to the mast; armed themselves, and plunged into the thick of all the political battles then raging. In a short time their settlement was to become known as a center of fearless, and if necessary, violent resistance to all who wished to see human slavery introduced into the Territory. John Brown’s life work had begun.