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

to severe headaches and “spells” of wildness that his father had taken him to an alienist. The treatment didn’t work; a year before going to Kansas, Frederick “subjected himself to a most dreadful Surgical operation (his taking away of the greater part of the———),” Brown wrote: the reference is apparently to self-castration.
    Frederick’s older brothers, John junior and Jason, weren’t quite so conspicuously unstable, but both had brittle psyches that began to crack in the wake of Pottawatomie. Though Jason hadn’t been present at the massacre, hearing that his beloved father and brothers were implicated in the brutal killings was “the most terrible shock” of his life, he said, and “nearly deprived me of my reason.” John junior broke down completely in the days after the massacre. Anxious, exhausted, and unable to sleep, “he became quite insane,” his father wrote.
    John junior’s condition made him easy prey for a proslavery posse that went in search of the Browns. He was quickly captured (as was Jason), and then beaten, chained, and held for three months on treason and other charges. A proslavery militia also burned the Browns’ dwellings and drove off their livestock, reducing a year of labor and most of the family’s possessions to weeds and ashes.
    The clan’s women and children were forced to take refuge in the one-room cabin of Brown’s half sister, Florella, and her husband, Samuel Adair, who disapproved of the killings and felt badly exposed by his family’s ties to Pottawatomie. “You cannot easily imagine our situation when it is known all abroad that our relatives have a hand in this affair,” he wrote.
    Brown, meanwhile, took to the woods and ravines of eastern Kansas with his remaining sons and other allies to plot his next move. He also launched a publicity campaign, in concert with a young Scottish-born correspondent, James Redpath. The line between journalist and partisan in Kansas was extremely thin, and Redpath, who wrote for antislavery papers in the East, made little secret of his ardent abolitionism. A week after Pottawatomie, he managed to find his way to Brown’s creekside bivouac.
    “Never before had I met such a band of men,” Redpath wrote, describing a rustic encampment of “fine-looking” youths in coarse blue shirts,with pistols and bowie knives stuck in their belts, their horses saddled and ready. “Old Brown,” sleeves rolled up and toes protruding from his boots, was cooking a pig.
    “Give me men of good principles,” Redpath quoted Brown as saying, a dozen “God-fearing men,” and he would fight a hundred southern “ruffians.” As for the “Pottawatomie affair,” Brown declined to comment and Redpath obligingly drew a veil over the massacre, except to later write that the abolitionist had no hand in it. Many other northern correspondents followed his lead, leaving their readers in the dark about what had happened.
    Instead, Redpath drew Brown as a selfless freedom fighter, “acting in obedience to the will of the Lord” in combating the Slave Power. “I left this sacred spot with a far higher respect for the Great Struggle than ever I had felt before,” Redpath later wrote of his hour-long stay in Brown’s camp. “I had seen the predestined leader of the second and holier American Revolution.”
     
     
    IN EARLY JUNE 1856, ten days after Pottawatomie, Brown struck again, joining his band with other free-state fighters in a bold dawn attack on a much larger force of proslavery men. This marked the first open-field combat in Kansas, and the first instance of organized units of white men fighting over slavery, five years before the Civil War. The Battle of Black Jack, as it became known, was a confused half-day clash involving about a hundred combatants. It ended with the surrender of the proslavery men, who were fooled into believing they were outnumbered. “I went to take Old Brown, and Old Brown took me,” the proslavery commander