Elizabeth

Excerpt from A Free Woman of Color in Bleeding Kansas
By Mrs. Elizabeth Newberry
Vol. II, pp. 76-79. Pub. Thayer and Eldridge, Boston, 1867

 

In February of ’55, the big blizzard killed our milk cow leaving my grandbabies with nothing but salt to put on their porridge. Before the snow melted, bushwhackers began streaming across the border again to vote in the spring election. As soon as they got on Kansas soil, they loaded up their wagons with whiskey, guns, and more ammunition than it took to win the Mexican War. Some flew black flags decorated with skulls and crossbones; others taunted us with hemp hangmen’s nooses.

A thousand or more headed straight to Lawrence, but enough came to Osawatomie that those of us who had black skin kept out of sight. We might proudly write F.W.C. and F.M.C. after our names to let the world know we were Free Men and Women of Color (and have the papers to prove it in court), but we knew from bitter experience that the slavers would not hesitate to kidnap us and sell us south.

When the voting was over, those “permanent residents of the territory” piled back in their wagons and left so fast you would have thought they had itching powder in their pants. They said they would hang Governor Reeder if he refused to declare the election valid, never mind that more people had voted than lived in all of Kansas.

Once they got back to Missouri, they traded in their ox teams for horses and the raids began in earnest. There had been raids all along, of course, but now the bushwhackers came at us in packs, burning cabins and shooting down men in cold blood. The worst gang was led by Henry Clark, a pretty, baby-faced boy who enjoyed killing the way a baby enjoys sucking a sugar tit.

In late spring, when my son Prosser drove me up to Lawrence to get some cough medicine for my grandbabies, I found William Saylor and the other men fortifying the town with earthworks. Carrie Vinton took me over to see a new hotel called the Free State, built out of concrete with loopholes on the roof so you could take aim without making yourself into a target.

Carrie was still thin from the fever she’d had after she gave birth to her son, Teddy, but even so, she told me she had been teaching some of the women how to shoot those Sharps rifles they were secretly getting from New England. When I left, she embraced me as if she feared she would never see me again. “Take care of yourself, Elizabeth,” she said. “Remember, you can always bring your family up to Lawrence to stay with us.”

For reasons I was not then at liberty to tell her, I was unable to leave Osawatomie, but she was right to worry. In July, the fraudulently elected pro-slave legislature met and passed a series of laws aimed at getting me and mine back into chains. Only pro-slavery men could hold office and sit on juries. Anyone who denied that white men had a God-given right to own slaves could to be sent to prison. If you said so much as a word that could be interpreted as supporting slave insurrection, they’d hang you. If a white man wanted to vote, he had to raise his right hand and swear on a Bible to uphold all these laws. As for black people, we knew what they had in mind for us. We’d seen those nooses they wore in their lapels.

It was then we began talking about arming ourselves in self-defense. I had always taught my sons that violence was something they should avoid if possible, but if we were going to remain in Kansas, we needed to be able to fight.

“We fled from the South,” Toussaint said. “Must we now flee from Osawatomie?”

“We have built our homes here, Mama,” Prosser said. “We have crops in the ground.”

“We will stay in Osawatomie,” I promised my boys, and then I told them about a plan I had conceived the previous November when I was on my way to Lawrence to rescue three fugitives who were about to be lynched. My plan was not for warfare. The bushwhackers outnumbered us a hundred times over and attacking them openly would have been suicide. It was a strategy for self-defense, and a good one if I do say so myself.

We already had the manpower, but what we did not have were the weapons. The day after we decided to stand our ground, I wrote to John Brown. (I had never met him in person, but as an Underground Railroad conductor I knew him by reputation, and his sons, who lived over on North Middle Creek, were our neighbors.)

“Come out to Kansas soon,” I told him. “There is a place you need to see.” I did not tell him what the place was called or why it would suit his plans. If you have been running slaves to freedom for twenty years as I have, you do not make the mistake of saying something like that in a letter that could be intercepted by your enemies. Still, just in case Mr. Brown did not take my meaning, I wrote the numbers 66- 13-10 under my name.

I knew that as soon as he saw those numbers, he would realize I had given him a piece of Bible code. Sixty-six is the sixty-sixth book of the Bible—in other words, the Book of Revelation—thirteen the chapter, ten the verse that reads: “He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.”

Imagine my surprise when he actually showed up in Osawatomie with broadswords. By now, everybody knows what John Brown used those swords for, but the first time I saw them, I thought: He damn well have better brought guns, too.