Free Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price by Tony Horwitz

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 fathertook 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