The eight men were well armed with rifles and revolvers. But before heading off to the enemy encampment, they used a grindstone to sharpen the short, heavy broadswords that Brown had acquired in Ohio. “There was a signal understood,” his son Owen later said. “When my father was to raise a sword—then we were to begin.”
THOUGH BROWN NEEDED NO further spur to carry out his Gideon-like mission, the pillaging of Lawrence coincided with another shocking assault by the proslavery camp. Earlier that week, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered a five-hour diatribe about Kansas, accusing the “Slave Power” of perpetrating “the rape of a Virgin Territory” by “hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” Sumner also heaped invective on Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, whom he mocked for making great claims to chivalry while taking as his mistress “the harlot, Slavery.”
Butler was ill and absent from the chamber. But a kinsman from South Carolina, Congressman Preston Brooks, accosted Sumner on the floor of the Senate on May 22, as Lawrence smoldered. Brooks told Sumner his speech was “a libel on South Carolina and against my relative Senator Butler.” Then he beat the Massachusetts senator hard enough to splinter the gold-headed cane he used to do it. Sumner fell to the floor, bloodied and unconscious, so badly hurt that he did not return to the Senate for
three years. Brooks, meanwhile, became an instant southern celebrity, hailed for having “lashed into submission” the Senate’s most vocal abolitionist.
Salmon Brown, one of the sons who joined his father’s secret mission to the Pottawatomie, later stated that news of Sumner’s brutal beating reached the war party as it was en route to its destination. “The men went crazy—crazy,” he recalled. “It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.”
Salmon’s memory may have been clouded. Brooks’s attack occurred just a day before Brown set off for the Pottawatomie. It’s doubtful that news from the nation’s capital could have reached frontier Kansas that quickly. But the two events, the “sack of Lawrence” and the beating of Sumner, were strikingly parallel in their symbolism. Southerners, in both Kansas and the Capitol Building, could bully and beat with impunity, like plantation slave drivers.
Something
must
be done. And it must be done
now.
AT ABOUT ELEVEN P.M. on the brightly moonlit night of May 24, 1856, James Doyle, his wife, Mahala, and their five children were in bed when they heard a noise in the yard. Then came a rap at the door of their cabin on Mosquito Creek, a tributary of the Pottawatomie. A voice outside asked the way to a neighbor’s home. When Doyle opened the door, several men burst in, armed with pistols and large knives. They said they were from the “Northern army” and had come to take Doyle and three of his sons prisoner.
The Doyles, a poor family from Tennessee, owned no slaves. But since moving to Kansas the preceding autumn, James and his two oldest sons had joined a proslavery party and strongly supported the southern cause. Two of the Doyles had served on the court convened the month before at Dutch Henry’s Crossing, a mile along the creek.
Mahala Doyle pleaded tearfully with the intruders to release their youngest captive, her sixteen-year-old son, John. They let him go and then led the others out of the cabin and into the night. “My husband and two boys, my sons, did not come back,” Mahala later testified.
She and her son John didn’t know the identity of the men who came to their door, but they’d glimpsed their faces in the candlelight. “An old
man commanded the party,” John Doyle testified; “his face was slim.” He added: “These men talked exactly like eastern men and northern men talk.”
Before leaving, the strangers asked the Doyles about a neighbor, Allen Wilkinson, who lived about half a mile away with his wife, Louisa Jane, and two children. Like the Doyles, they had come from Tennessee and owned no slaves. Unlike them, Wilkinson could read and write. He was a member of Kansas’s proslavery legislature, and his cabin served as the local post office.
After midnight, Louisa Jane, who was sick with measles, heard a barking dog and woke her husband. He said it was nothing and went back to sleep. Then the dog began barking furiously and Louisa Jane heard footsteps and a knock. She woke her husband again; he called out, asking who was there.
“I want you to tell me the way to Dutch Henry’s,” a voice replied.
When Wilkinson began to give directions, the man said, “Come out and show us.” His wife wouldn’t let him. The stranger then asked if Wilkinson was an opponent of the free-state cause. “I am,” he said.
“You are our prisoner,” came the reply. Four armed men poured into the cabin, took Wilkinson’s gun, and told him to get dressed. Louisa Jane begged the men to let her husband stay: she was sick and helpless, with two small children.
“You have neighbors?” asked an older man who appeared to be in command. He wore soiled clothes and a straw hat pulled down over his narrow face. Louisa Jane told him she had neighbors, but couldn’t go for them. “It matters not,” he said. Unshod, her husband was led outside. Louisa Jane thought she heard her husband’s voice a moment later “in complaint,” but then all was still.
DUTCH HENRY’S CROSSING WAS named for Henry Sherman, a German immigrant who had settled the ford on the Pottawatomie. He traded cattle to westward pioneers and ran a tavern and store that served as a gathering place for proslavery men. He and his brother, William, were feared by free-state families for their drunken and threatening behavior.
On the night of the Northern army’s visit to the Pottawatomie, Dutch
Henry was out on the prairie looking for stray cattle. But one of his employees who lived at the crossing, James Harris, was asleep with his wife and child when men burst in carrying swords and revolvers. They demanded the surrender of Harris and three other men who were spending the night in his one-room cabin. Two were travelers who had come to buy a cow; the third was Dutch Henry’s brother, William.
Harris and the two travelers were questioned individually outside the cabin, and then returned inside, having been found innocent of aiding the proslavery cause. Then William Sherman was escorted from the cabin. About fifteen minutes later, Harris heard a pistol shot; the men who had been guarding the cabin left, having taken a horse, a saddle, and weapons.
It was now Sunday morning, about two or three A.M. The terrified settlers along the Pottawatomie waited until dawn to venture outside. At the Doyles’, the first house visited in the night, sixteen-year-old John found his father, James, and his oldest brother, twenty-two-year-old William, lying dead in the road about two hundred yards from their cabin. Both men had multiple wounds; William’s head was cut open and his jaw and side slashed. John found his other brother, twenty-year-old Drury, lying dead nearby.
“His fingers were cut off; and his arms were cut off,” John said in an affidavit. “His head was cut open; there was a hole in his breast.” Mahala Doyle, having glanced at the bodies of her husband and older son, could not look at Drury. “I was so much overcome that I went to the house,” she said.
Down the creek, locals who went to the Wilkinsons’ cabin to collect their mail found Louisa Jane Wilkinson in tears. She had heard about the Doyles and could not bring herself to go outside, for fear of what she might find. Neighbors discovered Allen Wilkinson lying dead in brush about a hundred and fifty yards from the cabin, his head and side gashed, his throat cut.
At Dutch Henry’s Crossing, James Harris had also gone looking for his overnight guest, William Sherman. He found him lying in the creek. “Sherman’s skull was split open in two places and some of his brains was washed out by the water,” Harris testified. “A large hole was cut in his breast, and his left hand was cut off except a little piece of skin on one side.”
NEWS OF THE MURDERS along the Pottawatomie spread quickly through the district. A day after the killings, when John Brown and his party rejoined the free-state force they’d left three days before, he was immediately confronted by his son Jason. A gentle man known as the “tenderfoot” of the Brown clan, Jason had stayed behind with his brother John junior while the others headed to Dutch Henry’s.
“Did you have anything to do with the killing of those men on the Pottawatomie?” Jason demanded of his father.
“I did not do it, but I approved of it,” Brown answered.
“I think it was an uncalled for, wicked act,” Jason said.
“God is my judge,” his father replied. “We were justified under the circumstances.”
This was about as clear a statement as Brown would ever make about what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre. He spoke of it rarely, and then only in vague terms that suggested he was culpable without having personally shed any blood. His family hewed to this line. “Father never had any thing to do with the killing but he run the whole business,” said Salmon, the most talkative of the four sons present. “The work was so hot, & so absorbing, that I did not at the time know where each actor was, exactly, or exactly what each man was doing.”
The Browns and their allies cast the killings as an act of self-defense: a preemptive strike against proslavery zealots who had threatened their free-state neighbors and intended to harm them. The Browns’ defenders also denied any intent on their part to mutilate the Kansans. Broadswords had been used to avoid making noise and raising an alarm; the gruesome wounds resulted from the victims’ attempts to ward off sword blows.
But this version of events didn’t accord with evidence gathered after the killings. Mahala Doyle and James Harris both testified that they heard shots in the night. And “old man Doyle” was found with a bullet hole in his forehead, to go with a stab wound to his chest.
Years later, the wagon driver in Brown’s party, James Townsley, issued a confession in which he said John Brown had shot old man Doyle as the settler’s sons were being killed with swords. Salmon Brown, late in his life, admitted to a researcher that he’d lied in claiming that his father
took no active part in the bloodshed. But he insisted that Brown shot Doyle late in the night, when the settler was already stone dead. “For what purpose I never knew,” Salmon said, “but I always thought it was for a signal for all the crowd to get together and go to our camp.”
This absolved his father of actual killing, and among Brown’s defenders it became the accepted explanation of Doyle’s bullet wound. But it made little sense. If a signal shot was all Brown intended, he could have fired in the air, instead of shooting a dead man in the face. Other statements in Brown’s defense were likewise dubious. Broadswords, it was claimed, had been used for the sake of quiet, not with intent to mutilate. But if Brown wanted to avoid raising an alarm, why did witnesses report hearing gunshots, including the one that left a bullet in Doyle’s forehead?
The most plausible account of Brown’s actions that night came from a family member who wasn’t there: John junior. Though initially opposed to his father’s mission, he later wrote a lengthy defense of it. Until late May 1856, proslavery forces in Kansas had committed almost all the violence, killing six free-state men without reprisal. Lawrence’s sacking was the last straw. As the Browns and their free-state allies stewed in camp, John junior said, they realized the enemy needed shock treatment—“death for death.”
But the Pottawatomie attack wasn’t simply a matter of evening the score in Kansas. Those sentenced to die must be slain “in such manner as should be likely to cause a restraining fear,” John junior wrote. In other words, the killing should so terrorize the proslavery camp as to deter future violence.
In this light, the massacre made grisly sense. Like Nat Turner, the most haunting figure in the southern imagination, Brown’s “Northern army” came in the night and dragged whites from their beds, hacking open heads and lopping off limbs. The killers wore no masks, plainly stated their allegiance, and left maimed victims lying in the road or creek. Pottawatomie was, in essence, a public execution and the message it sent was chilling.
“I left for fear of my life,” Louisa Jane Wilkinson testified in Missouri, where she took refuge after her husband’s killing. The Doyles also fled a day after the slaughter. So did many of their neighbors. And news that five proslavery men had been “taken from their beds and almost litterly
heived to peices with broad swords” spread like prairie fire across Kansas.
“I never lie down without taking the precaution to fasten my door,” a settler from South Carolina wrote his sister soon after the killings. “I have my rifle, revolver, and old home-stocked pistol where I can lay my hand on them in an instant, besides a hatchet & axe. I take this precaution to guard against the midnight attacks of the Abolitionists, who never make an attack in open daylight.”
Pottawatomie had clearly succeeded in sowing terror. But it failed to produce the “restraining fear” that John junior believed to be its intent. Instead of deterring violence, the massacre incited it.
“LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR!” read the headline in a Missouri border paper, reporting on the deaths. Up to that point, the Kansas conflict had generated a great deal of heat but relatively little bloodshed. Now, in a single strike, Brown had almost doubled the body count and inflamed his already rabid foes, who needed little spur to violence.