Despite his frequent business reversals and his strenuous and consuming efforts to support his family, Brown never abandoned his intense desire to free enslaved Negroes from bondage. His first opportunity to strike a blow at the institution he hated so much came in Kansas, where, following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” clashed brutally with anti-slavery “Jayhawkers” over the extension of slavery to Kansas and Nebraska Territories.
John Brown, Jr., the oldest of Brown’s sons, fought alongside his father in Kansas. The Pottawatomie murders, in which he took no part, caused him to suffer a mental collapse from which he never fully recovered. Nevertheless, in 1859 he was entrusted with forwarding the weapons for the attack on Harpers Ferry from Ohio to Chambersburg, Pa.
Five of Brown’s sons—Owen, Jason, Frederick, Salmon, and John, Jr.—had emigrated to Kansas and joined the free-soil cause. When they appealed to their father for help in May 1855, Brown, another son Oliver, and son-in-law Henry Thompson rushed to Kansas and plunged into the conflict with a fury. As captain of the “Liberty Guards,” a quasi-militia company that he himself formed, Brown shortly gained national notoriety as a bold and ruthless leader.
For the next several years, murders, bushwhackings, lynchings, and burnings were common occurrences, and the territory was aptly named “Bleeding Kansas.” Atrocity matched atrocity. When pro-slavery forces sacked and burned the town of Lawrence in May 1856, Brown was outraged. Proclaiming himself an instrument of God’s will, he, with four of his sons and three others, deliberately and brutally murdered five pro-slavery men along the banks of Pottawatomie Creek. In the months that followed, Brown terrorized the Missouri-Kansas border by a series of bloody guerrilla attacks that brought him to the attention of the Nation’s abolitionist faction. In late August 1856, about a month before he left Kansas, Brown and his men clashed with pro-slavery Missourians at the small settlement of Osawatomie. That action earned him the nickname “Osawatomie” and cost him the life of his son Frederick. It also hardened his stand against slavery. “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die,” he said, “and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory. I will carry this war into Africa.”
Three of John Brown’s most trusted lieutenants in the Harpers Ferry raid:
John E. Cook
Aaron D. Stevens