One of these companies was the Liberty Guards, as commander of which
John Brown first received his historic title of Captain. Besides four
of Brown’s stalwart sons, there were fourteen other Free State settlers
in the company, and they were present at the first attempted raid on
Lawrence, which had resulted in a compromise and an abortive “treaty.”
Captain John Brown had gathered his men, and was on the way to
Lawrence for the second time when they were informed by a messenger
that Lawrence had already been destroyed. The Border Ruffians had
captured the town without meeting any resistance, and had razed it to
the ground, the breathless courier reported. This startling news was
received in a bitter silence by the little company. They pushed on,
nevertheless, and encamped near Prairie City, hearing from passing
stragglers further reports of burnings, killings and drunken threats of
the Southern invaders.
It was a period of great excitement. The Kansans felt as if war had
commenced in earnest on them, and that they were to be wiped out. Some
of the men who lived on the Pottawatomie Creek, near Dutch’s Crossing,
heard reports that their women had been threatened by a group of the
toughest pro-slavery ruffians who lived there.
“We expect to be butchered, every Free State settler in our region,”
one of these men told John Brown.
Here was a story John Brown heard a few days before from the lips of a
pretty young girl named Mary Grant, a settler’s daughter in the region:
“Dutch Bill arrived at our house, horribly drunk, with a whisky bottle
with a corncob stopper, and an immense butcher knife in his belt. Mr.
Grant, my father, was sick in bed, but when they told him that Bill
Sherman was coming, he had a shotgun put by his side. ‘Old woman,’
said the ruffian to my mother, ‘you and I are pretty good friends, but
damn your daughter, I’ll drink her heart’s blood.’ My little brother
Charley succeeded in cajoling the drunken man away.”
An old settler named Morse was hung and let down again by this same
group of ruffians. Then they threatened to kill him with an axe, but
his little boys set up a terrible wailing, and begged for his life. The
ruffians spared him, but gave him until sundown to leave the community.
He wandered in the brush for two or three days with his children,
frightened to death, and finally died of the excitement.
There were other such tales, including one horrible story of a similar
attack on a woman in childbirth. The ruffians had also put up a notice,
advising every Free State settler to leave the community in thirty days
or have his throat cut.
John Brown and his men discussed this matter, and grimly decided to “do
something to show these barbarians we have some rights.” They moved
down that night on the Pottawatomie, and calling out the five men who
had done most of the killing, threatening, and burning down of houses
in the region, executed them as a measure of self-defense.
It was a bloody, stern act, but it proceeded out of the same inflamed
spirit with which the miners at Herrin recently shot down the armed
strikebreakers who had been brought into their section. Many, including
some sympathetic historians like Oswald Garrison Villard, have
condemned this brutal deed, and have called it a stain on John Brown’s
life. Murder is murder, and it cannot be defended on ethical or logical
grounds. But when a thug assails one with a gun, or threatens one’s
wife and children, is one to practice non-resistance on him? Is his
life more valuable than one’s own? In such moments men do not think,
they act as nature tells them to; even a Villard would refuse to yield
up his life to a thug; he would forget logic and ethics, and defend
himself. And that was what John Brown did; his act was a stern and
immediate answer to the long-continued murders and threats against the
Free State men of Kansas. It shook the Territory to its foundations,
and it made of John Brown a hunted outlaw. Thereafter he grew no
more corn and built no more cabins for his family; he was a guerrilla
captain in the field.