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

night came from a family member who wasn’t there: John junior. Though initially opposed to his father’s mission, he later wrote a lengthy defense of it. Until late May 1856, proslavery forces in Kansas had committed almost all the violence, killing six free-state men without reprisal. Lawrence’s sacking was the last straw. As the Browns and their free-state allies stewed in camp, John junior said, they realized the enemy needed shock treatment—“death for death.”
    But the Pottawatomie attack wasn’t simply a matter of evening the score in Kansas. Those sentenced to die must be slain “in such manner as should be likely to cause a restraining fear,” John junior wrote. In other words, the killing should so terrorize the proslavery camp as to deter future violence.
    In this light, the massacre made grisly sense. Like Nat Turner, the most haunting figure in the southern imagination, Brown’s “Northern army” came in the night and dragged whites from their beds, hacking open heads and lopping off limbs. The killers wore no masks, plainly stated their allegiance, and left maimed victims lying in the road or creek. Pottawatomie was, in essence, a public execution and the message it sent was chilling.
    “I left for fear of my life,” Louisa Jane Wilkinson testified in Missouri, where she took refuge after her husband’s killing. The Doyles also fled a day after the slaughter. So did many of their neighbors. And news that five proslavery men had been “taken from their beds and almost litterlyheived to peices with broad swords” spread like prairie fire across Kansas.
    “I never lie down without taking the precaution to fasten my door,” a settler from South Carolina wrote his sister soon after the killings. “I have my rifle, revolver, and old home-stocked pistol where I can lay my hand on them in an instant, besides a hatchet & axe. I take this precaution to guard against the midnight attacks of the Abolitionists, who never make an attack in open daylight.”
    Pottawatomie had clearly succeeded in sowing terror. But it failed to produce the “restraining fear” that John junior believed to be its intent. Instead of deterring violence, the massacre incited it.
    “LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR!” read the headline in a Missouri border paper, reporting on the deaths. Up to that point, the Kansas conflict had generated a great deal of heat but relatively little bloodshed. Now, in a single strike, Brown had almost doubled the body count and inflamed his already rabid foes, who needed little spur to violence.
    Not for the last time, Brown acted as an accelerant, igniting a much broader and bloodier conflict than had flared before. “He wanted to hurry up the fight , always,” Salmon Brown observed of his father. “ We struck merely to begin the fight that we saw was being forced upon us.”
     
     
    IF IT WAS BROWN’S intent to bring on a full-fledged conflict, he got his wish. The number of killings escalated dramatically in the months that followed, earning the territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” But this widespread violence came at considerable cost to Brown’s family, beginning with the murders that May night along the Pottawatomie. The intimate butchering of five grown men, as if they were so much livestock, was traumatic for his sons. Owen Brown, the oldest son present, was initially opposed to taking part, but later said he was swayed by his father, who “thought it a matter of duty that there should be a little bloodletting.” After the massacre, Owen “felt terribly conscience stricken because he had killed one of the Doyles,” Salmon said. “He cried and took on at an agonizing rate.”
    The next oldest sibling at the scene, Frederick Brown, also wept, telling another brother: “When I came to see what manner of work it was, I could not do it.” Frederick, one of four sons from Brown’s first marriage, showed signs of having inherited his mother’s mental illness. He was so prone