 At 11 a.m. on May 8th, 1856, California congressman Philemon Herbert, the Democrat actually from John Fremont's district, and a friend of his popped into the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., hoping to get a late breakfast. But it was nearly lunchtime, so his breakfast expectations were not ones the kitchen at the hotel restaurant was necessarily prepared for. The waiter was a young Irish immigrant. Now keep in mind that it hadn't even been a full decade since the U.S. saw a flood of Irish immigrants in response to the potato famine, and anti-Irish cinnamon in the north, compounded by the anti-Catholic views of the time, rivaled the racism against black in many areas of the country. The majority of Hillbilly, for instance, was originally an epithet directed at Scottish and Irish settlers in the Appalachian region. So the Irish waiter was named Riordan, and when Congressman Herbert demanded a breakfast, the waiter said he would have to check with the kitchen to see if the order could be accommodated. Herbert was incensed. He ordered Riordan to quote, Get my breakfast damned quick, his voice raised, and this brought over an older waiter, also Irish, named Thomas Keating, to intercede. I don't know exactly how the conversation went down. Maybe the young waiter was being rude, maybe Herbert was just enraged at the presence of yet another Irish immigrant. But at one point he yelled at Riordan, clear out you Irish son of a bitch, and then he turned to Keating and screamed, and you, you damned Irish son of a bitch, clear out, too. Riordan ran to accommodate the angry congressman's demands, but Keating stayed, and he said something to Congressman Herbert, what was said we don't know, but it incensed Herbert enough that he got out of his seat, pulled out his pistol, and struck Keating in the back of the neck with it. Now Keating circled around a different table to obstruct the congressman's path to him, and he picked up a plate, which he feigned as if he was going to throw it a couple times, though these were just box. So Herbert picks up a chair and hurls it at the waiter. Now at this point Keating did throw the plate, and then the pair closed in on each other around the other side of the table where they tussled, breaking several dishes. The exact details of the confrontation are not fully clear. With Thomas Keating's brother, Pat worked in the kitchen, and he heard the ruckus, so he came out to investigate. When he got on the scene, Herbert had his pistol drawn, so Pat immediately grabbed it, and he and Herbert struggled for control of the firearm. Finally, Herbert's companion, who had thus far not joined in the fray, stepped in to grab Pat, and broke his grip on the gun. Thomas Keating threw his hands up to try to yield to the congressman before any more harm was done, but it was too late. Herbert fired off his shot, point-blank, into the waiter, and he fell to the floor where he bled to death. A congressman had just killed a waiter in a Washington, D.C., hotel. When this happened you would expect it to be big news, and it was for a moment. But by the time Herbert stood trial it was almost forgotten. Just to close out the story by the way, Herbert turned himself in after the killing, and he was tried in July. His prosecutor was actually a personal friend of his, and you can imagine the ethical implications of that. And the judge presiding over the case chatted with lawyers with an easy ear shot of the jurors to argue that he personally felt the case was clearly self-defense. So the trial was farce, clearly in my view, and it was fixed to support one of Washington's own. But I only mention that because I think it's interesting. The bigger point is that by the time the trial was taking place, not many people were concerned about the story of a congressman killing an Irish waiter. Even other tumultuous events fell to garner much attention. Less than a week after the killing of Thomas Keating, a newspaper editor named James King was murdered in San Francisco for exposing a small-scale scandal in the city's customs house. At this point the city government seemed to be felling to uphold justice by many San Franciscans, and citizens were forming vigilance committees to carry out their own vigilante justice. They apprehended King's killer in the subject of his exposition, James Casey, as well as another man who, several months prior, had killed a U.S. marshal but was acquitted by a jury. So the vigilance committee hanged both men, but these actions enerved a lot of San Franciscans who saw them as acting outside the law. Some people didn't like the vigilante justice, so the Law and Order Association was formed by many people to support the official law of the city government. And one of the primary members of this association was one William Tecumseh Sherman. What many San Franciscans saw the Law and Order Association is even more dangerous. One supporter of the vigilance committee said, quote, Many can neither eat nor sleep. They say the Law and Order people will plunder the city, end quote. But others felt differently. Parents in the city used exaggerated reports of the vigilance committee to scare their children into behaving, or else the vigilantes might come and take them away. The reality appears to be far more banal than newspaper records and citizen perceptions, as is often the case. Sensationalizing the news is not exactly a new phenomenon, but the perceptions of violence and chaos were real, even if poorly founded. All of this took place in the first half of May 1856, but it's largely forgotten. And that's because of what occurred in the second half of the same month which monopolized national attention. On May 19th and 20th, Senator Charles Sumner gave a lengthy speech on the floor of the Senate called The Crime Against Kansas. On May 21st, pro-slavery settlers in Kansas sacked the effective headquarters of the Free State settlers in Lawrence, Kansas. And the next day, Representative Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate. Two days after that, John Brown and a small group of Kansas free-staters hacked five pro-slavery Kansans to death with broadswords. These events all related in occurring in rapid succession dominated national attention. The killing of Keating was weak-sold news that was incidental to the national controversy over territorial slavery and the fugitive slave law. And San Francisco, in the years prior to the Transcontinental Railroad, may as well have been on another continent for most Americans. Kansas was the battleground for the sectional divide in the mid-1850s. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. I won't be getting to the events that took place in May of 1856 today because I think it's important to look at Kansas and the years prior to understand the events that led up to one of the most significant few days in American history. To do this, we need to start with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Coming into the 1850s, there was no Kansas territory. The unorganized remainder of the Louisiana purchase included the area that would become Kansas. In 1853, an Iowa senator named Augustus Dodge introduced a bill that sought to reorganize the Nebraska territory, which would include what would eventually become both Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. This bill would have left the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in place, which would have precluded slave owners from bringing slaves into the new territory. Obviously, this meant that the bill faced democratic opposition, especially from southern Democrats. Stephen Douglas, being a northern Democrat, tried to bridge the division by amending the bill by inserting popular sovereignty. This was effectively an alternative to the Missouri Compromise rule, but it did not directly address or repeal the Missouri Compromise, and that wasn't enough for southern slaveholders who would not feel comfortable migrating to any territory in which they did not have legal recognition of their slaves. So Southerners wanted more concrete guarantees protecting slavery. Southerners wanted explicit protection of slavery in the territories. Instead, Douglas tried again to meet them halfway. So on January 23rd, he introduced a new bill that had two significant changes. First, it organized two territories, with the northern part being Nebraska, which at the time still included the modern Dakotas, and the southern part being Kansas, named after the Kansas Indians. The second change was that the new bill directly addressed the Missouri Compromise. The bill called the Missouri Compromise, quote, inoperative and void. But it wasn't actually repealing the Missouri Compromise, it was effectively claiming that the Compromise of 1850 had already voided the Missouri Compromise, which was a dubious claim, but it was a tactical one. Any attempt to explicitly repeal the Compromise would be blocked by the north, and any legislation that didn't throw out the Compromise would be blocked by the south. So by wording the Kansas-Nebraska Act the way it did, it was expected that the Missouri Compromise question, which many people, such as President Franklin Pierce, believed to be unconstitutional anyway, would be handled by the Supreme Court. So this was clear political maneuvering. The division of Nebraska to create Kansas was important because Kansas shared a border with Missouri, a slave state. Were that territory to become a free state, Missouri would be surrounded on three sides by free states. So Missouri slaves would have numerous havens when running away. If the territory were organized as the large Nebraska territory, it would be easier for Northerners to populate it and vote out slavery under popular sovereignty. But by splitting up the territory, Nebraska could be surrendered to the north while Kansas could be potentially populated by enough supporters of slavery to make it a slave state through popular sovereignty. The new bill was remarkably controversial in the north. One famous protest was published as The Appeal of the Independent Democrats by Lincoln's future Treasury Secretary and later Supreme Court Justice Sam and Pete Chase. The appeal accused Douglas of violating the sacred pledge of the Missouri Compromise. Senator Charles Sumner also gave a speech denouncing the bill, unlike many wigs, this controversy would compel him to switch to the Republican Party. It's also interesting to note here that in the face of arguments about the morality of slavery from members of the clergy protesting the bill, Stephen Douglas, in arguing in favor of the Democratic principle of popular sovereignty, said that the people, when voting on laws, determined morality, which is of course typical political logic. But the current president, Franklin Pierce, was a Democrat and he urged Northern Democrats to show party unity by supporting the bill and the Kansas-Nebraska Act was pushed through, which Pierce signed into law on May 30th, 1854, four days after the infamous Anthony Burns affair that was already further inflaming sectional tensions throughout the country. The bill officially titled the Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas left the slavery question up to the popular vote of the territorial residents, but it did not specify when the voting could take place what constituted a valid resident or any other details that would be pertinent to the matter of popular sovereignty. By leaving these matters up to the interpretation of the settlers in the new territories, Stephen Douglas paved the way for bleeding Kansas. When the bill passed, Southerners took it for granted that the majority of the settlers in Kansas would be Missourians. In 1854, there were fewer than 800 settlers in Kansas, but within nine months there were more than 8,000, at least according to the first territorial census. What took Missourians by surprise was the number of New Englanders who migrated to Kansas. Many of these settlers were doing so for political reasons. Nearly half the settlers in Kansas were from Missouri, though some of the Missourians were white laborers who actually opposed slavery on protectionist grounds. They didn't want to compete with slave labor. In Northern states provided about a third of the settlers, many of whom were moving at least in part to try to establish Kansas as a free state with private philanthropists helping to fund such settlements. If you remember from the last episode after the Anthony Burns affair, Amos Lawrence, a wealthy New Englander, claimed to have become an abolitionist. Like many Northerners with abolitionist sympathies, he still held views regarding the racial superiority of whites, but he became active in working for not only the ending of slavery, but the rights of blacks as well. In fact, just as an aside, even among abolitionists, most people still held these kinds of racist views, which is another thing that would set John Brown apart because he was one of the few people that really treated blacks as equal to himself, impressing people like Frederick Douglass, but also bothering other abolitionists to some degree. But that's a bit off topic for the time. Anyway, Amos Lawrence funded the most famous of the immigrant aid societies, which were organizations that formed to help people settle in Kansas. His company was called the New England Immigrant Aid Company. The New England Immigrant Aid Company was actually founded by another philanthropist named Eli Thayer, but Amos Lawrence was one of its chief investors, and the city of Lawrence, Kansas would be named after him in August of 1854, when it was founded by the first group of settlers sent by the New England Immigrant Aid Company. Lawrence, Kansas became the base of the Free Soil Settlers, and it was where the newspaper Herald of Freedom was published, which was an anti-slavery publication, and would be used to inform the rest of the country about the goings on in Kansas. Within five years, roughly 300 fugitive slaves would pass through Lawrence on their way to Canada or Iowa, and the pro-slavery settlers would refer to it derisively as an abolition hole. The reality was that most of the Free Soil Settlers had no desire to abolish slavery, so accusing them of being abolitionists was not really true for more than a small handful of the Kansas settlers. But the Missourians, like other Southerners, genuinely believed that these people were abolitionists who wanted to end slavery entirely. That's an important point to keep in mind during the whole history of the Civil War and the lead up to it, actually. I think some people downplay the importance of slavery in the buildup to the Civil War by pointing to the fact that the North, for the most part, wasn't overly concerned with slavery, which is largely true even though things like the Fugitive Slave Act did push people towards abolitionism. But even then, most Northerners were more concerned with the so-called slave power, being the political power of the Southern states, than slavery itself. These people are correct in their assessment of Northern sentiment, but they forget or ignore the Southern perception that the North was full of abolitionists, and that belief drove Southern behavior in significant ways. And some people on a different side of the debate overstate the anti-slavery sentiments of people like Abraham Lincoln and other Northerners who were rather lukewarm on the issue of slavery. These people are pretty much just buying the Southern narrative about the North without actually looking into the facts. So we have two polarizing narratives about the Civil War that pretty much mutually depend on having at best a partial view of the historical context in which these events took place. So that's why I stress these things the way I do. But this perception that abolitionists were flooding in to take over the state is important. As long as Missourians believed that was the reality, it would affect their strategy in making Missouri a slave state. In response to the supposed nest of abolitionists, pro-slavery Missourians started organizing into pro-slavery groups with names like the Platt County Self-Defense Association, which was formed in the summer of 1854. Despite stressing that these groups were self-defense organizations, members of the group were openly hostile toward free blacks. Slaves who were allowed to hire out their own labor and whites who opposed the extension of slavery in the new territory, which were viewed as abolitionists regardless of what their actual views on slavery as a whole were. The Platt County Self-Defense Association was founded and led by a man named B.F. Stringfellow. And Stringfellow was determined to protect Kansas from quote, unquote, phelonious philanthropists who were supposedly luring slaves away from their owners. Shortly after the group was founded, for example, Stringfellow's organization accused a man of forging passages for slaves, and they convicted him of the crime of being an abolitionist. This all being extra-legal, essentially vigilante justice, of course. So in punishment, they shaved the head of this guy and told him he had 48 hours to get out of Kansas. Another man the group convicted of abolitionism was given 24 lashes with a whip as punishment for his criminal anti-slavery behavior, and then he was escorted to Iowa. Stringfellow even wrote a manifesto for his self-defensives entitled, Negro Slavery, No Evil, which obviously rejected the moral condemnation of slavery levied by some Northerners. The self-defensives also advocated free speech. So long as that speech wasn't anti-slavery speech because, as Stringfellow argued, quote, in a slave-holding community, the expression of such sentiments is a positive act, more criminal, more dangerous than killing the torch of the incendiary, mixing the poison of the assassin, end of quote. In other words, just to be clear on that, the pro-slavery factions of Kansas were opposed to speech that might incite violence, and using violence to suppress such speech was naturally self-defensive, not that this logic has any modern day parallels, of course. So in the New England Immigrant Aid Company was arming its settlers, it wasn't based on any kind of irrational fear. The first clashes between the pro-slavery border Ruffians, as they became known, and the Free State settlers took place over land disputes. New England settlers were purchasing contested land claims, and in response, Missourians would set fire to their cabins and destroy the tents the New Englanders were living in. So the Northern settlers started forming their own military groups to stand up to Missouri harassment. One of my favorite stories is of a California Gold Rush veteran who settled in Kansas, and when his land was disputed by Missourians, he started stripping off his coat and vest as if preparing to fight. So I can't help but imagine Skye taking off his shirt saying, come at me, bro, because this is effectively the 19th century version of that. And when some of the Missourians were ready to call his bluff and fight him, he shouted out for his friends to hold him back, which was also a bluff, as he had no friends inside the tents he was yelling at. But the bluff, at least in this case, worked and the Missourians backed off. Territorial elections started to take place in the fall of 1854. The first governor of Kansas, appointed by President Pierce, was Andrew H. Reader. He was a Northern Democrat and a supporter of popular sovereignty, much like Stephen Douglas. So he set the terms for the elections, specifying that voters must actually reside in the Kansas territory, among other things, but his instructions were virtually ignored and the actual election practices varied from one locality to another. Pro-slavery settlements, for instance, considered it the intention to settle in the territory sufficient to be allowed to vote. So he set the first election for territorial delegates to take place on November 29th, 1854. Despite stipulating the residency requirement for election participation, Missourians ignored the rules. At the convention in Leavenworth, which was effectively the pro-slavery headquarters in Kansas, most of the attendees were non-residents. The convention decided to support the quote unquote Southern Rights candidate, a man named J.W. Whitfield. Whitfield won the election by a landslide, but the landslide was what made the election so clearly dubious to observers. On the day of the election, Missourians flocked across the border to cast illegal votes in almost every district, pro-slavery Missourians to control of the polls, intimidated election judges, and drove off anybody they believed to be a free-soiler. One Kansas voter gave his testimony of the November 1854 election, quote, when I would try to get in, they would pull me by the coat, crowd me, and I could not succeed to get through the crowd. I then went round in hurrah for General Whitfield, and some of them who did not know me said, there's a good pro-slavery man, and lifted me up over their heads, and I crawled along over their heads and put in my vote. Then someone who saw my ticket cried out, he is a damned abolitionist, let him down, and they dropped me, end quote. One pro-slavery man even told John Wakefield, the free-soil candidate, that if he challenged voters, quote, you will be badly abused and probably killed. Now, a lot of what came out in the newspapers about the goings on in Kansas was greatly exaggerated, but the voter intimidation by the border ruffians appeared to be fully accurate. And it wasn't just voter intimidation in non-resident voting, but simply gross fraud that took place. Whitfield received 2,258 votes against Wakefield's 248, and one other candidate, Robert Flinikin's 305 votes. But an investigation into voter fraud would later find that more than 1,700 of the votes for Whitfield were fraudulent. But the fraud wasn't necessary, obviously, because Whitfield would have won even without the 1,700 fraudulent votes, so the pro-slavery faction probably shot themselves in the foot with the election practices because the unnecessary fraud only helped rally people against them, including some pro-slavery Democrats who at least believed in honest elections. The next election for the territorial legislature was to take place on March 30th, 1855, and this would demonstrate the dishonesty of the electoral practice by Missourians even more blatantly. In this case, some Southern slaveholders were paying Missourians to go into Kansas to vote for a pro-slavery legislature. And just to make clear the contrast, Amos Lawrence and other wealthy New Englanders were helping to fund settlements in Kansas, but the settlements were legitimate. The wealthy Southerners were just paying people to flood into Kansas, vote, and then leave. Some of these voters were tricking election officials by changing their clothing and voting multiple times. Armed Missourians also made camp outside of Lawrence, Kansas, to intimidate potential anti-slavery voters. In some cases, Lawrence residents actually had to climb onto the roof of the building where voting was taking place to sneak in and cast their votes. At another polling place, South of Lawrence, a pro-slavery activist named Samuel Jones, who became the sheriff a little bit later, and a band of border ruffians charged into the place, stole the ballot box full of votes, and told the judge there that he had five minutes to resign or be killed. The judge did resign, but he was able to smuggle out some of the election results as he fled. Other acts demonstrate the brazen opposition to a legitimate election. One Missouri paper called the Parkville Luminary denounced the election fraud taking place in Kansas, so a group of pro-slavery Missourians, more than 200 of them, threw the printing press into the river and ordered the publisher and editor out of the state. And another example, when a man named Party Butler, who had settled in Kansas, publicly voiced his intention to vote to keep slavery out of Kansas, another pro-slavery mob dragged him into the river, gave him a mock trial, debated on whether or not they should hang him, and finally put him on a raft and set him adrift with a sign that read Eastern Immigrant Aid Express, the Reverend Mr. Butler's agent for the Underground Railroad. Election fraud was so widespread that more than 6,000 votes were cast, nearly all of which were for the pro-slavery candidate, despite the fact that there were only about 2,500 legal voters in the entire territory. When a lawyer named William Phillips signed an affidavit attesting to the voter fraud, some border ruffians kidnapped him, shaved the side of his head, stripped him of his clothing, tarred and feathered him, and held a mock slave auction in which he was sold in Western Missouri, mock sold, of course, he was really just expelled out of the territory. So after the March election, the new pro-slavery legislature set to work ensuring the protection of slaveholders in Kansas, while the free soil settlers viewed the new government as a mockery of justice. And this meant that even many of the settlers who were more apathetic towards slavery actually moved toward abolitionism in response to this. James Montgomery is a great example of this. He moved to Kansas with no strong opinion on slavery, but he would eventually become an ally of John Brown and carry out raids against Missouri slave owners before and during the Civil War. By August, Governor Reader was fired by President Pierce and replaced with a second territorial governor, Wilson Shannon. Meanwhile, the new legislature passed a law called an act to punish offenses against slave property. This made aiding a slave rebellion, a crime punishable by death, regardless of the race of the offender, and the death penalty was also prescribed for people who spoke, wrote, or circulated any kind of statement that might incite a slave revolt. For general anti-slave speech, such as saying that holding people in bondage was immoral, people were to be sentenced to two years hard labor, and anybody who conscientiously objected to slavery was barred from jury duty. So the new slave code for Kansas pretty much made any kind of expressed opposition to slavery in any form a criminal offense punishable by either death or hard labor, and the trial was guaranteed to be held in front of a pro-slavery jury. So this is the environment that the anti-slavery settlers were dealing with in 1855 and 1856, and I think that context is vitally important to understand the goings on in 56. In opposition to the bogus legislature, as it was referred to by the free soilers, the free state settlers elected their own legislature at a convention held at Big Springs in August of 1855. The attendees organized a free state party, denounced the official legislature, and appointed the recently fired first governor of the territory, Andrew Reeder, as their delegate to Congress. They also planned another convention to be held in Topeka, another city founded by New England immigrant aid company settlers, to draft a free state constitution. On November 12th, the Topeka constitution was drafted and in its Bill of Rights, slavery was banned. Although there was a debate over the issue, another clause also excluded free blacks from the state as well in order to protect white labor. This is worth mentioning because as Kansas moves forward over the next few years, we can actually follow the anti-slavery shifts through their various constitutions as Kansans react to violence from the border ruffians by moving closer toward the abolitionist positions. So further constitutions would eventually protect the rights of free blacks, but the early free soil constitution would not allow free black immigration. The idea of the Topeka constitution is that the country would recognize the farce of the territorial elections and would back the free state legislature when admitting Kansas as a state. But President Pierce denounced the free state legislature in January of 1856 as being revolutionary and potentially treasonous. The president blamed the conflicts in Kansas entirely on the northern settlers. The free soil Kansans were on their own. Pierce's speech made it possible for the pro-slavery legislature to present to themselves as the party of law and order, but it also reinforced northern fears about the southern slave power. Preparing for war, the free soilers started referring to their sharps rifles as sharps revised statutes. They were prepared to fight back and private organizations in New England raised more than $43,000 to help arm the free state settlers in Kansas. The first casualty of the controversy in Kansas came about not over a dispute about slavery, but over a land dispute. A settler named Franklin Coleman was squatting on a plot of land abandoned by some settlers in Indiana who had sold their land to another Indiana named Jacob Branson. In 1854, Branson told Coleman that he had a legal claim to the land and tried to move into Coleman's house. But Coleman pulled a gun on him and held him off. So a group of men were brought in to arbitrate the dispute and they awarded part of the plot to Branson, but the boundaries between Branson's land and Coleman's were not perfectly defined. Now Branson was part of the free state militia and he wanted to use this affiliation to intimidate Coleman, so he brought in some more men. One of these men was an Ohioan named Charles Dow. This all took place over the course of a year or so. So in November 21st, 1855, Dow went to the Hickory Point blacksmith shop to get some work done on his wagon. While he was there, he got into an argument with one of Coleman's friends. Still nobody resorted to violence and Dow left, but as he was leaving, he passed Coleman who fired off his gun at him. When Dow turned around, Coleman unloaded a charge of buckshot into his chest, killing him on the spot. Coleman would actually claim self-defense here. He said that Dow raised his wagon scheme threateningly. A wagon scheme was a piece of iron about two foot long. So Coleman fled to Missouri because he didn't expect to be treated fairly by the free state settlers at Hickory Point. Now the land dispute was not clearly defined according to the factions in the slavery controversy. Some free staters had sided with Coleman's squatters rights and some pro-slavery men had actually backed Branson's title rights to the land, but Dow's death was made into a political issue that ignited the building tensions between the two groups. Five days after Dow's murder, a meeting was held at Branson's home on the disputed land in Hickory Point. The group formed a vigilance committee to capture Dow's murderer and bring him to justice. Other free state men had already burned down the houses of two pro-slavery settlers in the area and ordered the women in their homes to leave. The newly formed vigilante group then went and burned Coleman's home, which was empty at the time. A few hours later, Samuel Jones, who is now the pro-slavery government's sheriff and had warrants sworn out by the victims of the free state vigilantes, showed up with a posse to arrest Branson for disturbing the peace. Soon after arresting Branson, Jones and his posse ran into the 15 member vigilante group, though Jones would later exaggerate by claiming that there were between 30 and 40 of them. The party had quickly received word of Branson's arrest, so they got together to organize a defense. When they ran into Jones, they blocked the road. Then one of the free state men accidentally fired off his gun. The free state group called out to Branson to join them, but Branson refused because he was afraid that he would be shot by Jones and his men. One of the vigilantes, a lawyer named Essin Wood, responded by calling out, quote, let them shoot and be damned, we can shoot too. So Branson rode over to the free staters and Jones followed, telling them that he had a warrant for Branson's arrest, but he refused to show it to Wood who claimed that Branson was his client, which was news to Branson. This standoff would end anti-climatically as Jones would eventually back off. Branson was escorted to Lawrence where the citizens organized a committee of safety to protect him and the rest of the city. Their worries were justified as Sheriff Jones immediately notified the governor of the exaggeratedly large body of vigilante free staters. So Governor Shannon called on the territorial militia to back Jones up against this, quote, unquote, armed band of lawless men. Missourians heeded the governor's call and as many as a thousand men assembled in Kansas as H. Miles Moore described it, quote, all armed and determined to burn Lawrence. The death of Charles Dowd would turn out to have escalated the tensions in Kansas from election fraud to a small-scale civil war and we will cover the events that we'll follow in the next episode. For more content like this, visit mesus.org.