 Early in 1832, newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy resigned from his position as editor of the St. Louis Times. He spent the next two years studying theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. Like many people in the 1830s, Lovejoy was part of the Second Great Awakening, and this religious movement helped convert him to abolitionism. After he left the seminary, he was recruited by some businessmen to start a new paper in St. Louis called The St. Louis Observer. This new paper was unapologetically abolitionist, but in a slave state like Missouri, Lovejoy and his paper were an unwelcome presence. Even anti-slavery Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who I talked about in the California Gold Rush episode, said that free speech did not include anti-slavery speech. This was a common position, as people feared that anti-slavery speech would cause slave rebellion, so it was seen as legitimately dangerous. As Lovejoy's editorials became more popular, threats against him from pro-slavery mobs became more severe. By 1837, he was openly advocating immediate emancipation, which prior to the 1830s was effectively an unheard of position, until radicals like William Lloyd Garrison started expounding the idea. Lovejoy's presses had already been destroyed by rioting mobs on more than one occasion, so he decided to move his family across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois. In November of 1837, his new press was being unloaded from the steed boat Missouri Fulton when an alcohol-fueled mob raided his warehouse and set fire to the building where it had only just been put into storage. By this time, much to the criticism of the nonviolent Garrison, Lovejoy had already started arming himself to defend against pro-slavery violence. During the riot, Lovejoy tried to stop the arsonist, and somebody in the mob fired off their gun, killing him. Lovejoy's murder caused a stir in the North. Keep in mind that this was still more than a decade prior to the compromise of 1850, so abolitionists by and large were seen as a nuisance even in the free states. But mob violence from pro-slavery Southerners always served to move more Northerners to anti-slavery positions, and this was no exception. Protest meetings took place throughout the New England states to rebuke the actions of the Missouri mob. It was in such a meeting, which took place at the Hudson Congregational Church, where John Brown, quoting from a testimony given later, arose, and in his calm, emphatic ways, says, I pledge myself with God's help that I will devote my life to increasing hostility towards slavery." John Brown was raised to be an abolitionist, but as far as the records indicate, this was his first public declaration of his dedication to the anti-slavery clause. For the next two decades, John Brown would devote himself to helping former slaves in peaceful ways, such as teaching them how to farm and land donated to former slaves by Garrett Smith in North Elba, New York, and helping them form resistance groups such as the League of the Gileadites. But in 1855, when John Brown received word from his sons that his help was needed in Kansas, he would begin the journey that would radicalize him, and ultimately lead to his failed attempt to overthrow slavery by force of arms. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the last two episodes, we covered the events in Kansas leading up to the significant episodes that took place at the end of May of 1856. But before we pick up there, I want to back up a little bit to give some background about John Brown in Kansas to better understand the context of his actions. Let me say before I get into the content of this episode that John Brown is not just a controversial figure. He's an incredibly enigmatic one. Some people defend him because of the righteousness of his cause, and other people condemn him because of the consequences of his actions. I'm going to do my best not to make any particular defense or condemnation of Brown. I'll let other people sort that out. My goal here to the best of my limited ability is to detail the events as accurately as we can understand them so we can try to understand Brown as best we can. With so many of the primary sources about these events being colored by the biases of the anti and pro John Brown people of the time, this is not an easy task, and there will always be some uncertainty surrounding John Brown. So I think it's worth understanding the incredible complexities of the history surrounding these events. In his younger years, Brown seems to have shared the pacifist beliefs with William Lloyd Garrison. He went so far as to pay fines to avoid the mandatory malicious service required by his state. The murderer of Elijah Lovejoy was my opening anecdote because this seems to be a turning point in Brown's thinking that pacifism may not be the best approach. Brown's father Owen Brown, referred to as Squire Owen, was also an abolitionist going through a transition in the 1830s. He left his own church, which was a conservative congregation, to join an abolitionist church, and he became a trustee of Oberlin College, which was founded for the purpose of educating blacks and women who could not be admitted to most colleges in the country at the time. John Brown's half sister Florella was one of the first female graduates of Oberlin, in fact. John Brown actually broke with his own church on racial grounds. At the time, it was common for churches, even anti-slavery churches, to segregate their congregation by seating blacks in the so-called Negro Pew in the back. This angered John Brown enough that one day, during a revival, he personally escorted the few black members of the congregation up to his own pew to sit with his family. The church deacons reprimanded him for this, and he decided to worship elsewhere. John Brown first met Frederick Douglas in the winter of 1847 and 48. It was then that he first revealed his early plans to use the Allegheny Mountains as natural forts for runaway slaves to try to incite rebellions, like Nat Turner's infamous revolt in 1831. Douglas found Brown's ambitions to be far-fetched, but he still spoke highly of Brown, who he said was, quote, in sympathy a black man and is deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery. It was around the same time that he first met Garrett Smith, the only member of the future Secret Six, not from Boston. Smith was a wealthy philanthropist who backed many causes, including vegetarianism, for example, but was predominantly concerned with abolitionism. Smith had actually donated a ton of land in North Elba to freed slaves, or escaped slaves, so they could start their own farms, and this was partly done, in fact, to enfranchise the blacks who settled there, who could legally vote as long as they owned land. So John Brown asked Smith if he could settle there to help educate the black settlers in North Elba, and Smith would not agree to just give Brown any land outright, but he offered to sell him 244 acres of land for only $1 per acre, and he told Brown that he didn't have to pay him until he had the money. So Brown moved his family to North Elba, New York. Now, during all this time, Brown's charity towards blacks was a secondary matter, and this is due largely to the fact that he had his own giant family to take care of. He fathered 20 children between two wives, his second one he married within a year of the death of his first wife, and 11 of these children lived to see adulthood, so he was pretty busy struggling to provide for his family, which was made difficult by his many business failures, which were significant enough that historians such as Alan Nevins have actually theorized that his later radicalization was psychologically driven by frustration about his personal failures, though this interpretation seems weak. I think Robert McGlone has done a good job of dismantling the failure thesis, as he calls it. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed, Brown inched closer to radicalism by helping to form a self-defense group he called the United States League of the Gileadites, a reference to the allies of the biblical Gideon who crossed the Jordan River to slay the Midianites. In his so-called words of advice to the Gileadites, which consisted of 40 members who were probably all blacks other than Brown himself, Brown instructed, quote, let the first blow be the signal for all to engage, and when engaged, do not work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies. So we can see that by 1850, John Brown had at least rhetorically rejected the pacifist ideology of the Quakers. Predicting his own eventual demise, Brown also wrote in his words of advice, the instructions to quote, Stand by one another and buy your friends while a drop of blood remains and be hanged if you must, but tell no tales out of school. After the Kansas Nebraska Act was passed, John Brown's oldest son, John Brown Jr. wrote to his father telling him that he decided to move to the new territory. Although only one of John Brown's children, his daughter Ruth, would accept Brown's Calvinist religious beliefs, all of his children accepted their father's abolitionist views. In responding to a son, Brown complimented any of his family members, quote, disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions, end quote. I emphasize Satan because John Brown in that letter wrote it in all capitals. By the fall of 1854, five of Brown's sons had moved to Kansas. They wanted their father to join them, but he was reluctant because he felt obligated to the blacks in North Elba to whom he had already committed. In May of 1855, John Jr. wrote to his father again saying, quote, every slave holding state is furnishing men and money to fasten slavery upon this glorious land by means no matter how foul. This, of course, was a reference to the fraudulent elections. I talked about a couple of episodes ago. In another letter that reached John Brown in early June, John Jr. wrote his father, quote, I tell you the truth when I say that while the interests of despotism has secured to its cause hundreds of thousands of the meanest and most desperate of men armed to the teeth with revolvers, bowie knives, rivals and cannon. While they are not only thoroughly organized but under pay from slaveholders, the friends of freedom are not one fourth of them half armed. And as to military organization among them, it nowhere exists in this territory unless they have recently done something in Lawrence. The result of this is that the people here exhibit the most abject and cowardly spirit whenever their dearest rights are invaded and trampled down by the lawless band of miscreants, which Missouri has ready at a moment's call to pour in upon them. This is the general effect upon the people here so far as I have noticed. There are a few and but a few exceptions. Now the remedy we propose is that the anti slavery portion of the inhabitants should immediately thoroughly arm and organize themselves in military companies. In order to affect this, some persons must begin and lead off in the matter. Every day strengthens my belief that the sword, that final arbiter of all the great questions that have stirred mankind will soon be called on to give its verdict. End quote. This was enough for old John Brown, who finally decided he needed to join his sons on the battlefield in Kansas. Before heading to Kansas, John Brown took his son's letters to a group of abolitionists in Syracuse on June 28th in order to entice them to help him. Garrett Smith read John Brown Junior's letter to the group. Then John Brown made his own speech to the crowd. Frederick Douglas was present and endorsed Brown as well. In the end, a hat was passed around to collect donations, but the group only raised $60, most of which was used to provide for John Brown's family in North Elba before his departure. Brown took his fundraising efforts to abolitionists in Massachusetts and Ohio as well. Some historians claim that Brown's trip to Kansas was a calculated precursor to Harpers Ferry, but this seems to be the product of hindsight. At the time of his departure, Brown was clearly considering actually settling in Kansas and moving Mary and the rest of his young children out there. Brown's son-in-law, Henry Thompson, revealed as much in a letter to his wife, Ruth. So at this point, it seems that Brown is arming to defend his sons. John Brown also stopped to see his father, Owen, who was 84 at the time. Owen was also an abolitionist, the product of the Second Great Awakening, and he gave his son $40. This would be the last time John Brown would ever see his father alive. Although he didn't know it at the time, Brown's father also sold some property later in the weeks at a heavy loss in order to raise funds to support John Brown's family in North Elba. On his way to Kansas, Brown also took the time to dig up the body of his four-year-old grandson, Austin, who had died on his own trip to Kansas. More of it, as it may seem, Brown did this because he believed it would, quote, afford some relief to the broken-hearted father and mother, being Brown's second oldest son, Jason, and his wife, Ellen, who had been forced to bury their son on the way to their new settlement. John Brown finally arrived in Kansas in October of 1855, shortly before the Waukarusa War that I talked about in the previous episode. In addition to the body of his grandson, John Brown brought with him a wagonload of weapons. On October 9th, John Brown accompanied his sons to the precinct in Potawatomi to vote for the Free State Delegate to Congress for the Topeka Constitution. John Brown himself did not vote, as he had only just arrived, but his sons did. John Brown was just there, armed with a gun and a saber, in case trouble broke out. The Brown family were not settled at Lawrence, so they were late to the party during the Waukarusa War. They left for Lawrence on December 6th, the same day that Thomas Barber was killed, and they arrived on the 7th. John Brown drove the wagon, which was full of rifles, revolvers, knives, and ammo. Polls, tipped with bayonets, were set upwards around the wagon, giving it a menacing appearance, with the weapons pointed upward around the edge of the wagon. On the way to Lawrence, the Browns ran into a group of Missourians on a bridge. They aimed their rifles at the group, and the Missourians let them pass without incident. Once they reached Lawrence, they were greeted by a man named George Washington Brown, another Kansas Brown who was not related to John Brown. George Brown was editor of the Herald of Freedom, and he already knew John Jr., who introduced the man to his father and brothers. George Brown quickly decided he was not a fan of the senior, John Brown. So John Brown showed up to the Free State Hotel during the peace negotiations between Charles Robinson and Governor Shannon. Robinson made Brown captain in the first brigade of Kansas volunteers. In later years, John Brown preferred to be referred to as Captain John Brown. I don't know if that's because of this title that he was given here, or because of his grandfather who had fought in the Revolutionary War, who was also a captain named John Brown. But he wasn't officially a captain of anything, but John Brown in Kansas. This was just the Free State title that he was given. But he did like to be called Captain John Brown later on when he was leading men in Harper's Ferry. But Brown wasn't much of a captain, at least in George Brown's views. He refused to take orders from anybody else, saying that he and God were the only commanders of his sons. While Charles Robinson was negotiating peace in the Wakerusa War before it even really began, John Brown was taking a different approach. He started making plans to take a small group of men at night to sneak into the pro-slavery camp to slaughter the men in their sleep. Robinson stopped him pointing out that so far the Free State Kansas were guilty of no atrocities. But Brown's plan would likely turn the rest of the North against them, which was undoubtedly true. So Brown's first would-be nighttime massacre was prevented, albeit with reluctance on the part of Brown himself. In the January elections John Brown supported Charles Robinson, and John Jr. was elected as a Free State delegate to represent the shadow government in Topeka. But it was during this election that Reese Brown was brutally murdered, which I also detailed in the last episode. To Brown and his family, this confirmed their fears about the murdering Missourians. But John Brown and his family had gone there to buy provisions for the harsh winner, and a blizzard delayed their return. By the time John Brown heard about Reese's murder, rumors about an attack on Lawrence were already spreading. Brown wrote to his wife, Mary, that quote, we may soon again be called upon to buckle on our armor, which by the help of God we will do. But Brown also said in the letter that he didn't expect to have any major episodes until the winter ended, which was pretty much true. In March the Topeka legislature, Brown took the oath of allegiance and demanded prosecution for Reese's murders. As brutal as Reese's killing was, the exaggerations of the press and local rumors only further fueled the fears. So I don't want to downplay the violence against Reese Brown, but it is worth keeping in mind that the press on both the pro and anti-slavery sides were grossly exaggerating the goings on in Kansas. And these exaggerations do persist into the modern day. If you've seen the Civil War documentary where 100 people were killed in the conflict, which is ridiculously inaccurate, during the 1850s the killings in Kansas amounted to a total of about 56 that can be tied to the political controversies, with the body count roughly even on both sides. But while it's important to understand the hyperbole of the press and even modern histories that are sometimes duped by the reports in the news of the time, the perception created by these exaggerations had a significant effect on the country and the people of the time, including John Brown and his family. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make in their misunderstanding of this history is to forget that false perceptions have real world consequences. So forgive me if I sound like I'm beating a dead horse about this, but I think it's really important. The actions of the Topeka legislature were even more meaningless by this time, though. In February, President Pierce denounced the Topeka government as revolutionary and borderline treasonous, and he also said that he would not let the federal troops at the disposal of Governor Shannon. Again, this is all just a bullet point review of the last episode for people who may have missed that one. But all of this background is vital. I know that some people are probably going to accuse me of defending Brown, but what I'm trying to do here is give a clear picture of what he and his family were facing directly prior to the Potawatomi Massacre. Up to this point, there had been murders of a few free state settlers in Kansas. In a clear case of election fraud, the only justice sought by this fraudulent government had attempted to apprehend free-soilers who were taking action against these perceived crimes. And now the president of the country was calling the free state settlers for all intents and purposes, traitors to the United States, which was effectively a death threat since treason was a capital crime. And sending federal troops to the territory, and keep in mind that this was a time in which the U.S. Army did not keep a regular entry, and the president's mobilization of troops was an incredibly serious action, which is part of the reason the final four Confederate states would succeed in 1861. So free state Kansans had very legitimate reasons to believe that justice was a farce, and their very lives were in danger by Missouri Raiders, who had shown exaggerated as the reports may have been to genuinely be willing to commit heinous acts of violence against free state settlers, and their crimes were effectively protected by the federal government now. With an understanding that justice seemed to be a joke to the free staters, there was the controversy at one of the territorial courts, headed by federal judge Sterling Cato of Alabama. Prior to the Potawatomi massacre, there had been zero attempts to bring the killers of Dow, Barber, Reese Brown, or the two other free state settlers who had been killed to justice. But the government did prosecute a free stater named Cole McCray, who was a self-defense when he killed a pro-state settler. Now I don't know if McCray had actually acted in defense or not, but it is a fact that justice was not being levied against pro-slavery settlers at all. There was the possibility that Cato's court was going to prosecute some of the free state settlers who were refusing to pay taxes to the bogus legislature. So some of the settlers in John Brown's area called a meeting on April 16th, and the settlers were divided on whether to obey or resist the territorial laws. Brown was determined to resist, unless militant settlers walked out of the meetings, some of whom joined the pro-slavery faction. The remaining settlers, including Brown's family, pledged forcible resistance. The minutes of this meeting were published in Kansas newspapers and sent to pro-slavery officials. Remember, too, the official territorial law would prohibit anti-slavery settler from serving on a jury. So when Cato's court opened on April 21st, the Brown family expected conflict. Some of the members of Cato's court were victims of the Potawatomi massacre, and some of the testimonies from survivors of the event point to Cato's court as the reason behind Brown's violence. This is Historian James Malan's interpretation of the account. Malan is one of the major historians of the Kansas Territory in John Brown. But this interpretation doesn't account for the members of Cato's court who Brown was not interested in, nor does it account for the victims of the massacre who were not part of Cato's court. A more common interpretation today is the eye for an eye theory that says that Brown wanted to kill five pro-slavery men as retribution for the five free-state men who had been killed prior to the massacre. This claim also seems dubious, as Brown quite clearly seemed to have wanted to kill more victims that were lucky enough not to be home during the attack. Nonetheless, this interpretation is common enough that James McPherson, one of the most imminent modern civil war historians, claimed that the massacre was an eye for an eye. Obviously, the idea that Brown was taking arms against slavery itself is common, and could be true. The victims of the massacre did not own slaves, as many people like to point out, but they were settlers actively agitating to make Kansas a slave state. I find a lot of people who seem to downplay the role of slavery in the sectional crisis by pointing out that most Southerners didn't own slaves, but it is quite clear that there were many non-slave holding Southerners who did want to preserve the institution for various reasons. Naturally, some people have just said that John Brown was crazy, and this is a really common interpretation as well. It's one that goes back all the way to when John Brown was alive. I'm not going to cover all those arguments here, but I do think they're interesting, and I have an article on Mises.org questioning this thesis, so there's disagreement among historians that's not a bad thing, of course, but a lot of people are familiar with the insanity thesis for John Brown. And there is reason to believe that he was insane, but modern scholarship has, I think, done a good job of refuting the claim that John Brown was truly insane, at least in a clinically diagnosable sense. Some of the testimonies from Brown's family members years later claimed that Brown was acting defensively because the victims of the massacre were actively threatening Brown's family members. Most historians have dismissed these accounts because they could not be corroborated, and there is an obvious motive for Brown's descendants to try to justify their father's actions. Although these historians were right to question the veracity of these testimonies, some recent records, those of John Brown's brother-in-law, who was in Kansas during the time, have corroborated some of these testimonies with documents dated only shortly after the raid took place. So even if it wasn't the primary motivation behind the violence, it is entirely plausible that Brown and the others believed they were making a preemptive strike to use the modern military excuse for waging continuous wars overseas. I'll write up a bibliographical essay at the end of this series, but for now it's worth mentioning one of the references I'm pulling from, from all this controversy, which is Robert McGlone's book, John Brown's War Against Slavery, which I think deals with the controversy surrounding John Brown, questions about his sanity, and the context for his actions better than anything else I've read, and I've read a respectable number of books on the subject. It's just a fantastic piece of scholarship, and it makes use of some of these recent documents that were just recently donated to the Kansas State Historical Society. But it's also true that after the raid, at least one of his sons, Jason, denounced his father's actions as wicked, though he would later defend them. And it is also true that Brown had planned such a massacre during the Wakerusa war and appeared to many observers at the time to be agitated by the peace. So the real reason behind the Potawatomi massacre will almost certainly never be fully determined, as we don't have access to John Brown's inner thoughts at the time. Whatever Brown's reasoning, the immediate events seem to be compelling enough to drive Brown to act rashly, especially given the larger context on May 2 when Major Jefferson Buford of Alabama, who actually sold some of his slaves in order to fund a Southern settlement of Kansas to make sure it was admitted as a slave state, Buford led about 400 armed men into Kansas near Osawatomi where Brown and his family resided. Brown's brother-in-law, Samuel LaDaire, wrote of the men, the Alabamians and Georgians are most of them hard cases, drunken, profane, reckless. They are encamped about in different places and companies of from 50 to 150, threatening to drive off free state men from their claims and take possession of them. In some places great insecurity is felt and much alarm." This letter was found in the Adair Family Papers, which was only relatively recently donated to the Kansas State Historical Societies, and the recent scholarship on Brown has been able to operate these papers to give us insights that were not available to previous Brown scholars. On May 16, Brown's sister Florella wrote a letter to their other sister, Martha, saying, quote, we are consistently exposed and we have almost no protection. So whatever John Brown's motivations and it's likely they were multifaceted, it seems from these new sources that Brown's family sincerely felt threatened by these settlers and as I mentioned earlier, some of the records in these new documents corroborate stories about the direct threats made against some of Brown's sons by the victims of the massacre. So it does seem to be plausible to argue that Brown genuinely felt that his family was in danger and his fears do seem to have been reasonable. Additionally, it wasn't a delusion that there was no legal system in place to protect the Brown family from the threats. This is the factual context of the situation prior to the Potawatomi massacre. Whether that justifies Brown's action is another question and one that I really care to tackle here. So feel free to come to your own conclusions on that matter. I'm not trying to defend Brown. I'm just trying to present the facts as accurately as I can. But the mood was unquestionably tense in the Brown camp when the sack of Lawrence took place. When word of the raid reached Potawatomi, John Brown was furious. Now something must be done. He said, something is going to be done now. This quote is pulled from an interview later given by Jason Brown. John Jr. urged his father to quote, commit no rash act. John Jr. and Jason, the two eldest sons, would not participate in the massacre. But Owen, Frederick, Salmon and Oliver were behind their father, as well as Brown's son in law, Henry Thompson. He was married to Ruth. The elder Brown also recruited two other settlers over breakfast, a man named Theodore Wiener, who was a Polish Jew who ran a store near Dutch Henry, where Buford's husband had settled and who had recently suffered harassment by these men, and another man named James Townsley, who offered to transport Brown's men to the settlement in his wagon. The raid was already planned when John Brown received word of the brutal caning of Charles Sumner. Salmon Brown, who joined his father on the raid, said that when his father heard the news while they were en route to the pro-slavery settlement, quote, the men went crazy, crazy. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive watch, end quote. I put this quote in here. If you read some of the histories in John Brown, a lot of times the historians cut out the words, the men, and just say John Brown, quote, went crazy. And that's probably true, but Salmon's letter actually says that the entire men in the group went crazy. So it wasn't just enraging John Brown. It was fueling the tensions of everybody in the group, apparently. And a lot of this is just singularly focused on John Brown, which is a slightly disingenuous representation of the history by some historians, I think. The men arrived at the home of the pro-slavery settler James Doyle about an hour before midnight on May 24th, 1856. Doyle lived there with his wife, Mahala, and their five children. Brown and his posse woke them up, making noise outside their cabin, so the family was already awake when they heard a knock on the door. Outside the cabin, Doyle heard a voice asking for directions to the home James Doyle opened the door and Brown's group of men shoved their way into the home. They were armed with pistols and broadswords donated by New England abolitionists. The Doyles were settlers from Tennessee. They were poor and they owned no slaves. However, they were ardent supporters of the pro-slavery government. Two of them had served on Cato's court, thus compelling some historians to view this as Brown's motivating element. The group said they were part of the Northern Army and they were here to take Doyle and his sons as their prisoner. Mahala started to cry and begged the intruders to spare her youngest son that they wanted to take, John, who was only 16 years old. Moved by the woman's tears, Brown consented and John Doyle was released joining his mother, his younger sister and his 14-year-old brother. James Doyle and his other two sons, named Drury and William, 20 and 22 respectively, were not so lucky. Brown took his prisoners out of sight from the other Doyles sitting nearby. There, he apparently ordered the execution of the three men who were hacked to death by broadswords. When they were found the next day their heads had been split open. Drury's arms were completely removed from his body and some of his fingers were also completely removed. The only action Brown took directly in the killings according to all of the testimonies of the events was to shoot Don Doyle in the head. His son, Sam, said this was done after Doyle was already dead but the truth is we really don't know what the need to shoot James Doyle. Next, the group moved on to the home of Alan Wilkinson, one of the Doyle's neighbors who lived a half-mile away. Wilkinson also had a wife and two children of his own and they were also non-slave-holding settlers from Tennessee. Wilkinson was literate, unlike the Doyle family and he served as a member of the pro-slavery legislature. When the Brown posse arrived the Wilkinson dog started barking alerting the family of the intruders. His wife, Louisa Jane, heard movement outside, followed by a knock on the door. She woke her husband and called out to ask who was there. The answer came, I want you to tell me the way to Dutch Henry's. Alan Wilkinson began to give the directions without opening the door. Come out and show us, a voice said. Louisa refused to let her husband open the door. The voice from outside asked if Wilkinson was an opponent of the Free State cause and Wilkinson replied, I am. On the other side of the door the voice said you are our prisoner. With that the door was forced open by four men who retrieved Wilkinson's gun and told him to put on some clothes. Louisa, like Mahala Doyle, begged the men not to take her husband. She was sick, she said, and helpless. She had two small children to take care of. The leader of the group asked her, you have neighbors? His clothes were filthy and he had a straw hat pulled down low over his face obscuring it with a shadow. Louisa told the man that she did have neighbors but she couldn't get help from them. The man replied coldly, it matters not. He then let his men and Alan Wilkinson outside. They stopped about 150 yards from Wilkinson's cabin where he was executed as well. When he was found the next morning neighbors found his head and his side cut open and his throat had been slashed. The final stop was Dutch Henry's crossing. They were looking for Dutch Henry. Real name was Henry Sherman. But he was out looking for missing cattle which would save his life. His brother William would be the unfortunate victim that Brown and his men would find instead. William was asleep in Henry's single room cabin along with one of Henry's employees, James Harris, his wife, and their child. Two other men were in the cabin, travelers who were there to purchase a cow. The armed group charged into the cabin and demanded their surrender. They decided that James Harris and the two travelers were innocent of helping the pro-slavery cause. William Sherman was not innocent though and he was escorted outside just as the other victims had been. The next day when James Harris went looking for his employer's brother, he found that, quote, Sherman's skull was split open in two places and some of his brains was washed out by the water. A large hole was cut in his breast and his left hand was cut off except a little piece of skin on one side, end quote. Sherman had been killed around two or three in the morning. That's a little bit of a story but I'm going to show you a little bit of it. We're going to talk about McGlone's scholarship on John Brown. McGlone probably gives the most favorable defensive Brown. I don't think he's actually defending Brown but he's presenting the context in a way that is probably most favorable to those who would want to defend Brown. With the new documents and detailed context demonstrating that Brown had legitimate reason to feel that his family and McGlone, in agreement with many other historians, argues that Brown is best understood as a terrorist psychologically and in terms of the effects of his actions. So this is also something that I mentioned in my article that I referenced on Mises.org for people that want to read a little bit more about it. After the Potawatomi massacre, one headline in Missouri read in all caps, Let's Slip the Dogs of War. Following the massacre, violence in Kansas and along the Kansas-Missouri border escalated and Brown was involved in his share of it over the course of the next few years. If Brown wanted to restrain the violence from the Missourians, the Potawatomi massacre had the opposite effect. If he wanted war, he was about to get one. I'll come back to Brown in a couple of episodes as I think he is one of the most fascinating and one of the most important characters in the antebellum controversies. But before we return to John Brown, we have two more events to look at. The election of 1856 and the Supreme Court ruling in what is probably the most infamous ruling of all time. The 1856 election will be the topic of our next episode.