February 2020
I was already a little fidgety before I turned off U.S. Highway 169 to head west toward the tiny town of Lane, Kansas. I had just heard the radio announcement of a tornado warning in Franklin and neighboring Osage, Douglas, and Miami counties, and this native Southern Californian was feeling that adolescent surge of emotion that can be described only as a mixture of terror and “Oh, Man, this is so cool.”
Lane, population 225, was dead quiet on this Tuesday morning in early March. There was still snow on the ground from a storm the week before, and I didn’t see a soul as I parked and got out to read the historical marker that bears witness to one of the most consequential acts of political violence in American history.
I had come to Lane to walk the ground along Pottawatomie Creek where, on the night of May 24, 1856, abolitionist John Brown had four of his sons drag five proslavery men from their cabins at gunpoint and then hack them to pieces with broadswords.
Not surprisingly, the marker, put up by the Franklin County Historical Society, doesn’t do justice to either that night’s violence or its meaning. “This massacre in ‘Bleeding Kansas,’” it reads, “was one of the most famous events running up to the Civil War.” I didn’t get the feeling that the town received—or even wanted—many visitors.
As the sign suggests, the incident along the Pottawatomie wasn’t the only act of violence committed in the region in the years leading up to the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 mandated that white residents of the new territories would decide whether slavery would be legal within an emerging state’s borders. Inevitably, this sparked a struggle between proslavery and antislavery settlers, both of whom flooded into the territory hoping to shape not just the state, but America’s future. Between 1854 and 1861, political violence was endemic to the area, eventually descending into guerrilla warfare. Thus the bleeding.
More than his ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, it was these murders—as the historical marker calls them—that led critics to cast John Brown as insane, a characterization that was particularly popular in high school textbooks between 1890 and 1970.
Brown moved to Kansas in the fall of 1855, just as the proslavery and free-state activists began to view the political stakes as all or nothing. If Kansas entered the Union a slave state, abolitionists feared, all other new territories in the West would likely follow suit. Southerners, of course, feared the opposite.
The log cabin Brown lived in during his twenty months in Kansas is now a museum and memorial park ten miles north in Osawatomie, a town founded in 1854 by abolitionist members of the New England Emigrant Aid Society. There, the museum’s curator, Grady Atwater, walked me through the exhibit and took great pains to paint a sympathetic portrait of Brown. He argued that the incident at Pottawatomie Creek was more an act of self-defense—of both family and community—than it was an offensive raid. Furthermore, Atwater said, “It wasn’t just the events of that night that made people call Brown crazy,” he said. “It was also because he believed blacks were the equal of whites. So then he had to be insane.”
An old yellow tourism poster on the museum window calls Osawatomie, not without some reason, the place “where the Civil War started.” Outside on the grounds, a striking, life-size bronze statue of Brown, a rifle slung over his right shoulder, stands guard.
What distinguished Brown from his fellow abolitionists was his belief that violence was necessary to rid the nation of the sin of slavery. If slavery was a state of cons- tant war against blacks, he figured, it should be met in kind. Brown had no patience for the pacifism of his fellow abolitionists, who thought they could change the world through eloquent speeches. While he had believed in the need to mount a war against slavery before he arrived in Kansas, he had not yet acted. Historian and Brown biographer David S. Reynolds calls the Pottawatomie Massacre “an impetuous expression of long-delayed retaliation for years of Southern violence against Abolitionists and against blacks.” It was there, he explains, that John Brown “gave the South some of its own medicine.”1
It’s no secret that the antebellum South was a particularly violent place. That, in part, explains why proslavery partisans committed significantly more acts of violence than did free-staters. Between 1855 and 1858, for example, thirty-six people were murdered in Kansas in the struggle over slavery; twenty-eight of those were free-state settlers. Of the eight proslavery people murdered, five were killed that May night along Pottawatomie Creek.
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I wanted to drive up to Topeka in time to take in the Kansas Museum of History before it closed. The tornado warnings had expired, and the sky was blue. On the drive, I tried to recall all that I thought I knew about John Brown. He led a racially mixed group of men in an attack on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in the hopes that it would inspire a mass slave revolt. The failed attempt is widely considered one of the primary precipitators of the Civil War. His hanging in Charles Town, West Virginia, transformed him into a martyr for the abolitionist cause, a posthumous reputation for which he longed.
My favorite item in the history museum wound up be- ing this fabulous diorama of a buffalo on the prairie, a calm brown beast in a vast field of tall, dry grass and yellow wildflowers. But around the corner was the display I came to see. It was low-tech and interactive, placed at a height presumably to engage schoolchildren with the question it posed in silly game-show democracy style. “John Brown: Hero or Terrorist? You Decide.” I was relieved to see that the black sliding pegs were all hovering closer to the hero side.
It says a lot about America that, in a country in which no fewer than twelve presidents actually owned human men, women, and children, it’s the likes of a John Brown who is labeled “controversial.” George Washington, for example, came into possession of his first ten human beings when he was only eleven years old, and while the museum at his home in Mount Vernon goes to great lengths to educate the public on the people the nation’s first president kept in forced servitude, it does not ask visitors to decide whether he was a hero or not.
Given that John Brown gained his national infamy here, Kansas has had a particularly difficult time wrestling with his memory. In 1937 native son and nationally known artist John Steuart Curry was asked to paint murals on the walls of the state capitol in Topeka. What he painted was an enormous wild image of John Brown called “Tragic Prelude.” Brown’s eyes are ablaze. There is blood on his hands. He has a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other. A tornado is creeping up behind him.
The local reaction to the mural was fierce. The Kansas Council of Women issued a statement insisting that the “murals do not portray the true Kansas. Rather than revealing a law-abiding progressive state, the artist has emphasized the freaks in its history—the tornadoes, and John Brown, who did not follow legal procedure.”2 Hurt by the rejection from his home state, Curry never finished the series of murals and left Kansas.
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The victims at Pottawatomie Creek were not chosen indiscriminately, but their murders were intended to instill terror. And they did, far beyond what anyone could have imagined. Shrieking newspaper headlines spread news of the incident throughout the country. Southerners misinterpreted the incident to cast all abolitionists as lawless assassins intent on killing any law-abiding citizen who fought to preserve slavery. Before Pottawatomie, abolitionists were dismissed as cowards who’d avoid violent conflict at all costs. After it, the specter of a wild- eyed John Brown inspired fear among the defenders of slavery. The ensuing manhunt of Brown on charges of murder also set the stage for his becoming a hero in the North.
Without using some sort of counterfactual theory to argue that slavery would have eventually collapsed after so many years, it’s hard to say that history didn’t vindicate John Brown. Bloodshed was, indeed, necessary to end slavery in America. Brown’s legend lived on in popular verse and song to inspire Union soldiers as they fought the Confederacy. His personal battle to end slavery, for which he ultimately gave his life, should be remembered today not in terms of a binary choice—Brown was both a terrorist and a hero—but as an example of moral complexity, the need to understand the difference between legality and morality, and as the story of a great American who started the war that ended a system that made human beings the property of others.
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1. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 159.
2. M. Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 131.
