The pro-slavery party, however, was quick to see the weakness of this program and they took the first opportunity to force the free state men into collision with the authorities. A characteristic occasion soon arose: a peaceful free state settler was brutally killed and instead of arresting the murderer, the pro-slavery sheriff arrested the chief witness against him. A few of the bolder free state neighbors released the prisoner and took him to Lawrence. Immediately the sheriff gathered an army of 1,500 deputies from Missouri, and surrounded 500 free state men in Lawrence just after John Brown arrived in Kansas. Things looked serious enough even to the drunken governor, and with the aid of some artifice, liquor and stormy weather, the threatened clash was temporarily averted. The wild and ice-bound winter that fell on Kansas gave a moment’s pause, but with the opening spring the pro-slavery forces gathered themselves for a last crushing blow. Armed bands came out of the South with flying banners, the Missouri River was blockaded to Northern immigrants, and the border ruffians rode unhindered over the Missouri line. The free state men, alarmed, appealed to the East and immigrants were hurried forward; but slavery “with the chief justice, the tamed and domesticated chief justice who waited on him like a familiar spirit,” declared the passive resistance movement “constructive treason” and the pro-slavery marshal arrested the free state leaders from the governor down, and clapped them into prison. Two thousand Missourians then surrounded Lawrence and while the hesitating free state men were striving to keep the peace, sacked and half burned the town on the day before Brooks broke Sumner’s head in the Senate chamber, for telling the truth about Kansas.

The deed was done. Kansas was a slave territory. The free state program had been repudiated by the United States government and had broken like a reed before the assaults of the pro-slavery party. There were mutterings in the East but the cause of freedom was at its lowest ebb. Then suddenly there came the flash of an awful stroke—a deed of retaliation from the free state side so bloody, relentless and cruel that it sent a shudder through all Kansas and Missouri, and aroused the nation. In one black night, John Brown, four of his sons, a son-in-law and two others, the chosen executors of the boldest free state leaders, seized and killed five of the worst of the border ruffians who were harrying the free state settlers, and practically swept out of existence the “Dutch Henry” pro-slavery settlement in the Swamp of the Swan. The rank and file of the free state men themselves recoiled at first in consternation and loudly, then faintly, disclaimed the deed. Suddenly they saw and laid the lie aside, and seized their Sharps rifles. There was war in Kansas—a quick sweeping change from the passive appeal to law and justice which did not respond, to the appeal to force and blood. The deed did not make Kansas free—no one, least of all John Brown, dreamed that it would. But it brought to the fore in free state councils the men who were determined to fight for freedom, and it meant the end of passive resistance. The carnival of crime and rapine that ensued was a disgrace to civilization but it was the cost of freedom, and it was less than the price of repression. There were pitched battles, the building and besieging of forts, the burning of homes, stealing of property, raping of women and murder of men, until the scared governor signed a truce, exchanged prisoners and fled for his life. The wildest pro-slavery elements, now loosed from all restraint, planned a last desperate blow. Nearly 3,000 men were mustered in Missouri. The new governor, whose cortège barely escaped highway robbery, found “desolation and ruin” on every hand; “homes and firesides were deserted; the smoke of burning dwellings darkened the atmosphere; women and children, driven from their habitations, wandered over the prairies and among the woodlands, or sought refuge and protection even among the Indian tribes; the highways were infested with numerous predatory bands, and the towns were fortified and garrisoned by armies of conflicting partisans, each excited almost to frenzy, and determined upon mutual extermination.” Not only that, but the territorial “treasury was bankrupt, there were no pecuniary resources within herself to meet the exigencies of the time; the Congressional appropriations intended to defray the expenses of a year, were insufficient to meet the demands of a fortnight; the laws were null, the courts virtually suspended and the civil arm of the government almost entirely powerless.”[[92]]

Governor Geary came in the nick of time and he came with peremptory orders from the frightened government at Washington, who saw that they must either check the whirlwind they had raised, or lose the presidential election of 1856. For not only was there “hell in Kansas” but the North was aflame—the very thing which John Brown and Lane and their fellows designed. A great convention met at Buffalo and mass-meetings were held everywhere. Clothes, money, arms, and men began to pour out of the North. It was no longer a program of peaceful voting; it was fight. The Southern party was certain to be swamped by an army of men, who, though most of them had few convictions as to slavery, did not propose to settle among slaves. The wilder pro-slavery men did not heed. When Shannon ran away and before Geary came, they planned to strike their blow at the free state forces. An army of nearly three thousand was collected; one wing sacked Osawatomie and the main body was to capture and destroy Lawrence. No sooner was this done than the force of the United States army was to be called in to keep the conquered down. The success of the plan at this juncture might have precipitated Civil War in 1856 instead of 1861, and Geary hurried breathlessly to ward off the mad blow. He succeeded, and by strenuous exertions he was able with some truth to report in Washington before election time: “Peace now reigns in Kansas.”

The news, though it helped to elect Buchanan, was received but coldly in Washington, for the Southerners knew how high a price Geary had paid. So evidently was the governor out of favor that before the spring of 1857, the third governor fled in mad haste from his post because of the enmity of his own supporters. It was clear to Washington that Geary’s recognition of the free state cause, with the heavy immigration, had already destroyed the possibility of making Kansas a slave state. There were still, however, certain possibilities for finesse and political maneuvering. Slaves were already in Kansas and the Dred Scott Decision on March 6, 1857, legalized them there. Moreover, southeast Kansas, thanks to one of the most brutal raids in its history, in the fall of 1856, was still strongly pro-slavery. The constitutional convention was also in that party’s hands. By gracefully yielding the legislature therefore to the patent free state majority, it seemed possible that political manipulation might legalize the slaves already in the state. Once this was conceded, there was still a chance to make Kansas a slave state. The pro-slavery men, however, trained in the upheaval of 1856, were poor material to follow and support the astute Governor Walker. They itched for the law of the club, and made but bungling work of the Lecompton constitution. Then too the more determined spirits in the Territory, together with many naturally lawless elements, saw the pro-slavery danger in southeast Kansas, and proceeded to wage guerrilla warfare against the squatters on claims whence free state men had been driven. It was a cruel relentless battle on both sides with murder and rapine—the last expiring flame of the four years’ war dying down to sullen peace in the fall of 1858, after the English bill with its bribe of land for slaves had been killed in the spring.

So Kansas was free. In vain did the sullen Senate in Washington fume and threaten and keep the young state knocking for admission; the game had been played and lost and Kansas was free. Free because the slave barons played for an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development. Free because strong men had suffered and fought not against slavery but against slaves in Kansas. Above all, free because one man hated slavery and on a terrible night rode down with his sons among the shadows of the Swamp of the Swan—that long, low-winding and sombre stream “fringed everywhere with woods” and dark with bloody memory. Forty-eight hours they lingered there, and then of a pale May morning rode up to the world again. Behind them lay five twisted, red and mangled corpses. Behind them rose the stifled wailing of widows and little children. Behind them the fearful driver gazed and shuddered. But before them rode a man, tall, dark, grim-faced and awful. His hands were red and his name was John Brown. Such was the cost of freedom.

CHAPTER VII
THE SWAMP OF THE SWAN

“And his fellow answered and said, This is nothing else save the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel: for into his hands hath God delivered Midian, and all the host.”

“Did you go out under the auspices of the Emigrant Aid Society?” asked the Inquisition of John Brown in after years. He answered grimly: “No, sir, I went out under the auspices of John Brown.” In broad outline the story of his coming to Kansas has been told in the last chapter, but the picture needs now to be filled in with the details of his personal fortunes, and a more careful study of the development of his personal character in this critical period of his career. The place of his coming was storied and romantic. French-fathered Indians wheeling onward in their swift canoes saw stately birds in the reedy lowlands of eastern Kansas and called the marsh the Swamp of the Swan. Up from the dark sluggish rivers rose rolling goodly lands over which John Brown’s brother Edward had passed to California in 1849, and on which his brother-in-law had settled as early as 1854. Here, too, naturally had followed the five pioneering sons in April, 1855. They came hating slavery and yet peacefully, unarmed, and in all good faith, with cattle and horses and trees and vines to settle in a free land. In Missouri they met hatred and inhospitality, and in Kansas sickness and freezing weather. Nevertheless they were stout-hearted and hopeful, and went bravely to work until the political storm broke, when they wrote home hastily for arms to defend themselves. John Brown, as we have seen, brought the arms himself, taking his son Oliver and his son-in-law Henry with him. “We reached the place where the boys are located one week ago, late at night,” he wrote October 13, 1855. “We had between us all, sixty cents in cash when we arrived. We found our folks in a most uncomfortable situation, with no houses to shelter one of them, no hay or corn fodder of any account secured, shivering over their little fires, all exposed to the dreadful cutting winds, morning, evening and stormy days.” All went to work to build cabins and secure fodder, keeping at the same time a careful eye on the political developments. On free state election day, October 9th, “hearing that there was a prospect of difficulty, we all turned out most thoroughly armed,” but “no enemy appeared” and Brown was encouraged to think that the prospect of Kansas becoming free “is brightening every day.”

By November the settlers, he wrote, “have made but little progress, but we have made a little. We have got a shanty three logs high, chinked and mudded, and roofed with our tent, and a chimney so far advanced that we can keep a fire in it for Jason. John has his shanty a little better fixed than it was, but miserable enough now; and we have got their little crop of beans secured, which together with johnny cake, mush and milk, pumpkins and squashes, constitute our fare.” And he adds, “After all God’s tender mercies are not taken from us.... I feel more and more confident that slavery will soon die out here—and to God be the praise!”

On November 23d he writes: “We have got both families so sheltered that they need not suffer hereafter; have got part of the hay (which had been in cocks) secured; made some progress in preparation to build a house for John and Owen; and Salmon has caught a prairie wolf in a steel trap. We continue to have a good deal of stormy weather—rains with severe winds, and forming into ice as they fall, together with cold nights that freeze the ground considerably. Still God has not forsaken us!”[[93]]