Kerry Altenbernd, a Lawrence-based reenactor, portrays the abolitionist John Brown. (Frank Barthell photo)
Part 3 of 8 of the Kansas Reflector series on the Border War
By Frank Barthell, special to the Kansas Reflector
Late in the evening of May 24, 1856, abolitionist John Brown, five of his sons, and three other Free State compatriots executed five pro-slavery men near Pottawatomie Creek in east central Kansas.
Brown’s first stop was the farmhouse of settler James Doyle. While his wife Mahalia begged for their lives, Brown brought Doyle and two sons outside. He shot the father in the head while Brown’s two sons hacked the boys to death with broadswords. Two more men in the area were then executed. The Pottawatomie Massacre was Brown’s first bloody strike against the pro-slavery population in Kansas.
John Brown recreator Kerry Altenbernd believes that Brown had discovered that Doyle and the other pro-slavery men he murdered were planning to kill Brown and his family. He wouldn’t expect slavery-supporting government officials in Kansas Territory to offer protection, so felt he had no recourse but to make a first strike.
If you want to make sense of Brown’s beliefs and his legacy, start at the John Brown Museum State Historical Site in Osawatomie. Listen to curator Grady Atwater explain.
“There’s a common misperception of John Brown,” he said. “He was not a lunatic. He was a cool head in the middle of hot-headed people. He was a Calvinist who believed God gave us the ability to solve our own problems.”
The museum is housed in the original cabin where Brown lived with his half-sister Florella and her husband, the Rev. Samuel Adair, on and off for three years. Walk in his footsteps, literally, as the floor is the original. The cabin is cramped, with two rooms downstairs and one bedroom upstairs. You wonder how this tiny house sequestered any freedom-seeking family on the Underground Railroad.
Here’s a clue. Brown was fearless. His last bold act in the border war began Dec. 19, 1858. Brown had heard that an enslaved man from across the border in Vernon County wished for his family and himself to be freed. Jim Daniels was convinced his new master would be selling family members, including his wife, Narcissa.
The next evening, Brown and his men helped four members of the Daniels family — plus seven additional enslaved people from three farms — to liberate themselves. One owner was killed when he attempted to interfere with the liberation. Brown instructed the freedom seekers to take livestock and supplies only in proportion to the wages they were denied in bondage. During a brutal winter, the group headed north, toward Lawrence, bypassing the Adair cabin in Osawatomie, traveling only at night.
They proceeded north to Chicago. With assistance of detective (and abolitionist) Alan Pinkerton, they rode a box car to Detroit. On March 12, 1859, Brown witnessed the 12 people cross the river to Windsor, Ontario, Canada. To freedom.
Lecompton reenactor Deb Powell portrays Mahalia Doyle, the widow of James Doyle, who was brutally killed by John Brown in the Pottawatomie Massacre. (Frank Barthell photo)
Six months later, John Brown was found guilty of treason and murder for leading the raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Mahalia Doyle, whose husband John and two boys were massacred by Brown, wrote this in a letter while he was imprisoned, referencing her only remaining child. “My son John whose life I begged of (you) is grown up and is very desirous to be at Charlestown on the day of your execution, would certainly be there if his means would permit it, that he might adjust the rope around your neck.”
Brown’s last words were written on a scrap of paper, handed to his prison guard, on the way to his hanging on Dec. 2, 1859.
“I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood. I had … vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”
Here in eastern Kansas, John Brown’s legacy is very much alive. Lawrence activist Altenbernd recreates John Brown in public presentations around the county, and every spring at the commemoration of the Battle of Black Jack.
On June 2, 1856, just days after the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown and his free state militia ambushed a pro-slavery force in a wooded ravine near Baldwin City. Brown himself called the action “the first regular battle between Free-State and proslavery forces in Kansas.”
Altenbernd identifies the battle as “the beginning of civil war combat in Kansas, where a growing number of historians agree that the American Civil War began.”
In her 1998 historical novel, “The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton,” author Jane Smiley writes this of events in the Kansas-Missouri Border War: “Most things were both true and false, and it depended on your circumstances how you chose among them.”
Frank Barthell is a former video producer at the University of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.