Read Online Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price by Tony Horwitz - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tony Horwitz
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cautioned his father to “commit no rash act.” But four other sons—Owen, Frederick, Salmon, and Oliver—joined their father, as did their brother-in-law, Henry Thompson. Brown also recruited the two men he’d spoken to over breakfast. Theodore Weiner, a Polish Jew, ran a store near Dutch Henry’s and had been harassed by its inhabitants. James Townsley, a painter, knew the proslavery settlement well and offered to carry Brown’s band to the Pottawatomie in his two-horse wagon.
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 forthree 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
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 forthree 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
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