Free Soil for Free (White) Men
“I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not now introduce it. . . . I surely will not blame them [Southerners] for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [slavery]. . . . When they [Southerners] remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly, and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not, in their stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery. . . . But all this, to my judgment furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our . . . free territory than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.”1
Abraham Lincoln spoke these enormously important words in Peoria, Illinois, not long after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They simultaneously declared his disagreement with the abolitionists’ gospel of hate and vituperation and his commitment to preventing slavery from becoming legal in any new states formed from the western territories. This stance seemed to him a political compromise that would preserve the Union and put slavery on the path to eventual elimination. From a distance of 150 years, we can see its seeming reasonableness—and its potentially fatal flaw. The refusal to permit Southerners to take slaves into the territories not only insulted and infuriated them, it also meant that they were left to confront the growing density of their slave population, which was rapidly approaching four million—almost 40 percent of the whites’ numbers.
• • •
The quarrel over the extension of slavery had moved the issue to the center of the political debate in a new and dangerous way. The Whig Party collapsed as it became apparent that there was no longer any agreement between northern and southern members. Another political party, the Know-Nothings, had a brief ascent. As their name suggests, they operated as a semisecret society. When asked about the party’s inner workings, a member was supposed to respond, “I know nothing.”
The Know-Nothings were devoted to arousing the nation to the supposed menace of the recent flood of mostly Catholic German and Irish immigrants. For a few years they seized a large share of the northern public mind, electing governors and congressmen. But the Know-Nothings crumbled when it became apparent that they could not agree on slavery, no matter how much they all hated the “Popish” newcomers.
Out of the wreckage of the Whigs and Know-Nothings rose a new political party, the Republicans. The name was an ironic revival of Thomas Jefferson’s 1790s party, which had opposed the supposedly aristocratic, potentially tyrannical Federalists, followers of George Washington and John Adams. The name Republican still had some of its old populist aura, even though most of the Jeffersonian Republicans’ political descendants were now members of the only national party left somewhat united, the Democrats.
The Republicans concocted a slogan: “Free Soil for Free Men.” This banner helped them attract the small Free Soil Party, which had begun as a protest movement against compromises backed by both Whigs and Democrats. The slogan also echoed the demand of the Kansas antislavery settlers—a state without blacks, either enslaved or free. By not explicitly saying “free white men,” the Republicans managed to attract abolitionist-leaning voters in the Midwest and New England who were committed to opposing the mythical machinations of The Slave Power.
Ex-Whig Abraham Lincoln joined the Republicans warily at first, but soon found himself a convinced convert. The party’s opposition to the extension of slavery made it a congenial political home for the prairie lawyer, who detested the peculiar institution. It also supported other Whig policies Lincoln liked, such as the creation of a transcontinental railroad. Unfortunately, the new party’s appeal to Southerners was close to zero, and southern Democrats reinforced this disadvantage by nicknaming them “Black Republicans.”2
• • •
In the U.S. Senate, the furor over Kansas had raised tempers to a white-hot level. A new antislavery champion had risen there: Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Six feet two and as handsome as he was arrogant, he made no secret of his contempt for the South and things southern. In mid-May 1856, when South Carolina’s aging Senator Andrew P. Butler tried to defend the South’s right to take slaves into Kansas, Sumner replied with a political and personal denunciation that matched in dark ferocity anything produced by Cotton Mather and other New England preachers of the seventeenth century.
Sumner described Butler as a man who had chosen a mistress who was ugly to others, but was “always lovely to him—I mean the harlot, slavery.” Butler had a speech impediment, which caused him to speak haltingly, especially when excited. Sumner sneered at the way the senator “with incoherent phrases, discharged the loose expectoration of his speech” on the people of Kansas. “He cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.” Sumner proceeded to climax this performance by imitating Butler for several minutes.
If the Southerners had asked northern fellow senators to disown this abuse, Sumner’s congressional career might have been over. But southern anger was by this time as difficult to control as abolitionist moral superiority. Three days later, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Senator Butler, strolled into the Senate and smashed Sumner over the head with a gutta-percha cane until it broke. The beating inflicted near-fatal injuries that left Sumner an invalid for the next four years.
Northern outrage was universal. In the South, Brooks was inundated with congratulations and replacement canes. The story of the attack was flashed around the nation by telegraph and supposedly made John Brown decide to slaughter those unarmed Southerners on Pottawatomie Creek. Brown needed no such inspiration for those crimes.3
• • •
The atmosphere of escalating hatred was reflected in the nation’s newspapers. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the country’s largest paper, the New York Herald, blamed the abolitionists for the turmoil, and wrote editorials denouncing the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and other clergymen for “their scandalous political sermons.” Bennett was equally savage toward his fellow newspapermen. He called Horace Greeley, editor of the antislavery New York Tribune, “a nigger worshipper” and “Massa Greeley.”
The Tribune’s leader returned the compliment in kind, calling Bennett and the Herald a collection of “nigger drivers.” That repulsive word, now banned from civilized usage, was in circulation everywhere.
Both papers, along with many other dailies in New York and other cities, practiced a tradition that makes today’s editors and reporters wince to recall. The reporters saw themselves as entitled to embellish stories with imaginary facts and quotations. The custom was known as “faking it.” Although James Gordon Bennett insisted his paper was independent of any and all politicians and attacked members of both parties, he seldom questioned the facts in a story, as long as it made lively reading. Greeley’s antislavery Tribune was equally careless.
The champion in the faking game was the New York Sun. At one point the paper stood the metropolis on its ear by announcing the discovery of new planets and stars, supposedly reported from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. A new telescope had revealed these wonders; it was so powerful that astronomers could see the moon as clearly as if it were a hundred yards away. The stories continued for several days, while the Sun’s circulation soared to record heights. Only after a reporter told a drinking friend that the whole thing was a hoax did the Sun admit it had made up the story to divert the public mind from “that bitter apple of discord, slavery.”
The daily circulation of Greeley’s Tribune did not come close to matching Bennett’s Herald. But the Weekly Tribune had over 200,000 readers nationwide, making it the most influential paper in the nation. It was read throughout the Yankee Midwest, where Theodore Weld and his followers had left a legacy of antislavery sentiments. It was commonly said that the Tribune was second only to the Bible all through the West.
Greeley infuriated Bennett by sending reporters into the South to describe the worst aspects of slavery. One vivid story portrayed a dialogue between a slave and a would-be buyer at a slave auction. A male slave was trying to persuade the white man to buy him, his wife, and two children.
“Look at me, Masr. Am prime rice planter; sho you won’t find a better man den me . . . Do carpenter work too, a little. I be good servent, Masr. Molly, my wife, too . . . Fus rate rice hand. Mos’ as good as me. Stan’ out, Molly, let the gen’lemu see.”
Molly stepped out and her husband praised her. “Good arm, dat, mas’r. She do a heap of work mo. Let good Mas’er see your teeth. All reg’lar.” He ordered his seven-year-old son, Israel, to step out and “show the gen’lman how spry you be.”
Next he displayed his three-year-old daughter, Vandy. “Make prime girl by and by. Better buy us, Mas’er. We fus’rate bargain.”
The story closed with the reporter’s acid words, “The benevolent gentleman . . . bought someone else.”
Along with stories that had the ring of probable truth in them, such as this one, the Tribune subscribed totally to the myth of The Slave Power: It pictured southern plantations as nothing less than “Negro harems.” It claimed there was scarcely one southern president who “has failed to leave . . . mulatto children.” Southerners regularly hired blacks from slave owners “for purposes of prostitution.” In a typical southern city, every night “ebony hued divinities” strolled to “the office of a colonel on one street, a doctor in another, a lawyer in another.” Such obsessive dissipation redoubled the average Southerners scorn of daily labor. The South had fewer religious people and fewer churches than the North. In every conceivable way, the region was a thousand years behind the North in respect to civilization. It was a barrier to America’s progress in every imaginable way, morally, economically, politically.4
Soon it became dangerous to read the Tribune publicly in the South. The Herald, on the other hand, was read everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line. A reporter for the Springfield Republican, one of the many lesser papers that followed the Tribune’s Slave Power lead, claimed to be amused by the way the Herald was “devoured at its earliest arrival here . . . and what is worse, to see the simplicity of these southern fellows, who seem to pin their whole faith in it.”
• • •
In this atmosphere, the Republicans held their first national convention in Philadelphia. They bypassed Abraham Lincoln and a far more outspoken antislavery politician, Senator William Seward of New York. The party nominated John C. Fremont, an army officer who had won fame as an explorer of the West and had been a leader in the conquest of California during the War with Mexico. He was married to the daughter of former senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, one of the chief proponents of Manifest Destiny. The choice underscored the new party’s uneasiness about the abolitionists in their ranks. They wanted a standard-bearer who had little or no connection to these unpopular radicals.
The Democrats met a few weeks later and declined to renominate Franklin Pierce for a second term—the first time a sitting president suffered such a humiliation. They also declined to support Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The after-shocks of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had decimated northern Democrats in the 1854 congressional elections. The nominee was James Buchanan, who had been ambassador to Britain since 1853, leaving him unstained, in theory, by the sectional hatred raging in Kansas.
The election went to Buchanan, who polled 1,838,569 votes. The political unknown Fremont won 1,345, 264 ballots, almost all from nonslaveholding states. Ex-President Millard Fillmore, backed by remnants of the Know-Nothings and Whigs, won 874,354—evidence that a hefty portion of the electorate was confused and uncertain about the direction in which the United States should move. Buchanan was the first president since 1828 to win an election without carrying a majority of free states along with the slave states.
As the possibility of a purely sectional party explicitly hostile to slavery acquired flesh in the North, not a few politicians in many parts of the South began talking disunion. There were panicky rumors of slave insurrections. Whites feared that blacks who could read the newspapers or who overheard their worried masters’ conversations at dinner tables would see the possibility of freedom on the horizon and grow rebellious. Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare was still alive in the southern public mind.5
• • •
On December 2, 1856, a month after Buchanan’s election, lame duck President Franklin Pierce sent his last message to Congress. It featured a furious attack on the agitators who had ruined his first and now only term—the abolitionists. He saw the presidential election as a repudiation of their doctrines, and he characterized them as people who threatened the “liberty, peace and greatness of the Republic” by organizing “mere geographical parties” and “marshalling in hostile array the different sections of the country.” He declared “schemes of this nature” could not be popular in any part of America if they were not “disguised” and encouraged “by an excited state of the public mind.”
Under the shelter of America’s liberty, some individuals were “pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery,” Pierce continued. In reality they were “inflamed with the desire to change the domestic institutions of existing states.” To accomplish this, they were devoting themselves to “the odious task . . . of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of the particular states with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in their assaults upon the Constitution.”
The abolitionists’ object, Pierce insisted, was nothing less than “revolutionary.” They knew their attempt to change the relative condition of the white and the black races in the slave holding states could only be accomplished “through burning cities and ravaged fields and slaughtered populations . . . all that is most terrible in [a] civil and servile war.”6
• • •
Like most statements of outgoing presidents, this warning was largely ignored. One of the few readers who found it significant was far away from Washington, DC, on the plains of Texas. After three years as West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee had become second in command of a cavalry regiment, responsible for keeping peace between Indians and settlers in the wild country north of San Antonio. He missed his family at “dear Arlington.” As Christmas 1856 approached, he wrote a wistful letter to his wife. “Though absent, my heart will be in the midst of you.”
Colonel Lee welcomed James Buchanan’s election as president. “I hope he will be able to extinguish fanaticism north and south, cultivate love for the country and the Union, and restore harmony between the different sections,” he wrote. Not long after he mailed this letter, a package of newspapers arrived from his wife. In one of them was a copy of President Pierce’s message to Congress. Lee was stirred by his former commander in chief’s words. In another letter to his wife, he said the warning of a possible “Civil & Servile” war was “truthfully and faithfully expressed.”
Lee was no believer in slavery as a positive good. “In this enlightened age, there are few . . . but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country.” But he thought the blacks were “immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.” The Colonel admitted he did not expect slavery to disappear soon. “How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence . . . Although the Abolitionist must know this & must see he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means and suasion. . . . If he means well to the slave, he must not create angry feelings in the Master. . . . Still I fear he will persevere in his evil course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom, have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”7
• • •
Elsewhere in the nation, John Brown, that personification of a Puritan, if not a Pilgrim father (the Pilgrims were gentle, peace-loving souls—almost total opposites of the fierce, violent Puritans), was pursuing an ever more grandiose desire to attack and destroy slavery. Kansas had become pacified by Mississippi-born John A. Geary, a tough-minded territorial governor handpicked by President Pierce. Geary had disbanded armies on both sides and ordered guerilla troublemakers to leave the state. Brown had spent his final months in Kansas hiding out in the brush as a wanted man. Roaming squads of U.S. cavalry had a warrant for his arrest for the Pottawatomie murders.
Brown and his sons sensed their militant style was welcomed by neither side and prepared to depart. As a farewell gesture, they launched a raid into Missouri. They liberated eleven slaves, shot dead a slave owner who tried to resist them, stole horses and other property, and headed for Canada. With an effrontery that testified to the influence of the abolitionist campaign against The Slave Power, they travelled in daylight and Brown paused to give a speech in Cleveland, Ohio. They were confident that they were surrounded by Southern-hating allies who would manhandle any federal marshal foolish enough to pursue them.8
Returning from Canada to Tabor, Iowa, a town with a strong antislavery majority, Brown decided it was time to go east and tap into some of the money and guns that various emigrant aid societies had been sending to Kansas. He was especially stirred by news that an old friend, New York millionaire Gerrit Smith, had pledged ten thousand dollars to raise a thousand men to make sure Kansas became a free state.
Smith had rescued Brown and his family from destitution after the multiple failures of his business career. He had offered them land in New Elba, north of Lake Placid, where the millionaire had founded a colony for indigent free blacks. Smith had inherited a fortune from his father, a partner of John Jacob Astor. The son devoted himself to a bewildering range of good causes and good works. At various times he was in favor of colonization, then of abolitionism, and he had been a vice president of the American Peace Society.
Timbucto, as blacks called the New Elba colony, was a disastrous geographical choice for African Americans. After living for generations in warm climates, they were physically and mentally unprepared to endure northern New York’s brutally cold winters. They were even more unready to master the art and science of raising crops in the relatively unfertile soil. Nor were any of them adept at building houses. Within a year or two, most of the farms were abandoned. The Browns stayed, largely because they had no place else to go.
Smith evinced no interest in giving Brown a slice of his ten-thousand-dollar pledge, so the Captain headed for Boston, where the Massachusetts Kansas Committee reportedly was rolling in dollars. He found the committee operating from a small cluttered office in a garret peopled only by twenty-six-year-old Franklin Sanborn, the volunteer secretary. Nevertheless, Brown’s hopes rose when Sanborn recognized him as “Brown of Osawatomie”—the title antislavery journalists in Kansas had given him.
Brown was soon convinced that God had led him to Sanborn. The young Harvard graduate ran a college preparatory school in Concord and knew all the famous names of that community—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott. Sanborn listened with growing excitement as Brown told him that he needed twenty thousand dollars to buy guns and supplies for a hundred men to renew the armed struggle for Kansas. The territory was not by any means safe from the grasp of The Slave Power.
Revealing an unexpected ability to sell himself, Brown described his exploits in Kansas in heroic terms. In the “battle” of Black Jack, he and his followers had captured at gunpoint a squad of Missouri raiders. He omitted mentioning that a troop of U.S. cavalry had forced them to surrender the prisoners shortly afterward. He made his role sound even more heroic in his description of the struggle to defend the state’s antislavery headquarters at Osawatomie. In fact, the abolitionists had been routed and the town burned.
Captain Brown did not say a word about the killings on Pottawatomie Creek. When Sanborn mentioned a rumor of murders there, Brown assured him he had had nothing to do with such a ghastly crime. Soon Sanborn was seeing Brown as “of the unmixed Puritan breed”—the sort of hero who had fought and won the American Revolution. George Washington and other Americans south of New England were missing in this view of the history of 1776.
Sanborn introduced Brown to other men who believed in armed resistance to The Slave Power. Theodore Parker was a minister whose views on Christianity and antislavery were so radical that he was barred from every church in Boston and preached to a congregation at the city’s Music Hall. Samuel Gridley Howe was a medical reformer who had launched a note-worthy school for the deaf and blind. In his youth he had gone to Europe to help the Greeks win their independence from the tyrannical Turks. He and Parker headed a “vigilance committee” to protect escaped slaves from federal marshals. The two persuaded the Kansas Committee to give Brown two hundred Sharps rifles that they had shipped to Tabor, Iowa, to renew the war for Kansas.
Sanborn introduced Brown to George Luther Stearns, a wealthy businessman who had raised almost $80,000 for the Kansas Committee. Stearns was so impressed with Brown’s fictitious version of his exploits in Kansas that he paid $1,300 for two hundred pistols from the Massachusetts Arms Company. Stearns and his wife gave a reception for the Kansas free soil fighter at their plush suburban mansion. In the course of the evening, Brown met William Lloyd Garrison, who told him that he disapproved of his policy of violent resistance to slavery. The two men exchanged conflicting quotes from the Bible; otherwise Brown concealed his contempt for all-talk-and-no-action Garrisonians.
Franklin Sanborn persuaded his Unitarian minister friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to hurry from Worcester to meet Brown. Higginson was a direct-action man on a par with the Kansas hero. He had already been dismissed by one congregation for his violent antislavery rhetoric. Although he vowed to help his cash-short fellow crusader, no money was forthcoming.
By now John Brown was growing more than a little frustrated by this lack of follow-through from most of his Boston well-wishers. Nevertheless, he allowed Sanborn to escort him to Concord, where he met Henry Thoreau at the house of his parents. The two men conversed over dinner and Thoreau declared he had “much confidence in the man—he would do right.” The following night Brown visited the Emersons and then spoke in the Concord Town Hall to a large turnout.
Brown denounced slavery, its defenders, and the U.S. government, but he insisted he was no lover of violence. The necessity for it was clearly the will of God. The Bible and the Declaration of Independence were the two most important documents in world history, and it was “better for a whole generation of men women and children should pass away by violent death than that a word of either be violated in this country.” The applause for this macabre nonsense was fervent but donations were few. Emerson gave only a few dollars, Thoreau “a trifle.”
This pattern persisted in almost every Massachusetts town in which Brown spoke. He seldom raised more than seventy or eighty dollars. Then came a flash of bad news from his son Jason, who was waiting for him in Iowa. A deputy U.S. marshal was on his way to Massachusetts with a warrant for his arrest for the Pottawatomie murders. Brown went into hiding in the home of Thomas B. Russell, an abolitionist who was a judge of the state’s supreme court. Brooding about his lack of cash, Brown barricaded himself in a third-floor bedroom and declared he would fight any and all U.S. marshals to the death. He frightened Mrs. Russell by brandishing a long bowie knife and several pistols.
At the Russell dinner table, consuming generous portions of well-cooked beef and fowl, Brown talked about the vile food he had been forced to eat while hiding out in Kansas— “joints and toes of creatures that surely no human being ever tasted,” Mrs. Russell recalled. He took pleasure in making his affluent hosts uncomfortable. Finally he read aloud to the shocked Russells a diatribe he intended to distribute all over Boston:
Old Browns Farewell: to the Plymouth Rocks, Bunker Hill Monuments, Charter Oaks and Uncle Toms Cabbins . . . He leaves the [New England] States with a DEEP FEELING OF SADNESS: that after having exhausted his own small means: and with his family and his BRAVE MEN: suffered nakedness, hunger, cold, sickness (and some of them imprisonment, with the most barbarous cruel treatment: wounds and death . . . after all this to sustain a cause for which every citizen of this “Glorious Republic” is under equal moral obligation to do: for the neglect of which he will be held accountable by God . . . he cannot secure, amidst all the wealth, luxury and extravagance of this ‘Heaven exalted’ people; even the necessary supplies of the common soldier. HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.
Brown sent copies of this rant to George Stearns and Theodore Parker. Mrs. Stearns became almost hysterical and urged her husband to bankrupt himself if necessary to get Brown the money he needed. Stearns pledged seven thousand dollars for “the defense of Kansas,” which Brown was free to use as he saw fit. But no actual cash materialized.
• • •
In his private journal, Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown after meeting him in Concord. It was fresh evidence of the way the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its enforcement in Massachusetts had tilted The Sage of Concord toward abolitionist extremism. The federal government was “treason,” Emerson now declared, and for a while preached that California’s vigilante justice was the best solution to the uproars created by attempts to capture runaway slaves. With every man armed with a knife and revolver, “perfect peace reigned” he claimed, betraying a total ignorance of the Golden State.9
John Brown’s religion of violence was even more appealing. Emerson saw him as part of nature’s law. He spoke of Brown as a sheep herder from Ohio, ignoring the fact that he had failed in this venture, as he had in all his other forays into earning a living. The Sage saw Brown as a man with a unique gift for making friends with his horse or his mule. He was equally friendly with the deer that wandered onto his Ohio farm. “He stands for Truth,” Emerson said. “And Truth & Nature help him . . . irresistibly.”
Henry David Thoreau had also been transformed by the Fugitive Slave Act. After the runaway Anthony Burns had been returned to Virginia, Thoreau publicly burned copies of the Act and the Constitution. “My thoughts are murder to the State and involuntarily go plotting against her,” Thoreau said. This was several dozen steps beyond the anti–tax-paying civil disobedience he had preached during his opposition to the Mexican War.
The more the two Concord philosophers discussed John Brown, the more convinced they became that he was a reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell. Even the New Englanders of 1776 had repudiated this infamous tyrant. After he defeated the royal army in the British civil war of the seventeenth century, Cromwell had beheaded King Charles I, dismissed Parliament, and ruled as a dictator for three decades. Cromwell was the bogeyman that New Englanders and others summoned when George Washington began acquiring an outsize reputation as the leader of the Revolution.
There was also the matter of Cromwell’s bloodsoaked invasion of Ireland, during which he slaughtered whole populations of towns that resisted his army. Like John Brown, Cromwell claimed that the murders had God’s approval. Henry Thoreau was soon saying that Brown’s denunciations of slavery were “like the speeches of Cromwell.” Brown’s Kansas soldiers, including the murderers of the unarmed men on Pottawatomie Creek, were “a perfect Cromwellian troop.” Franklin Sanborn and others who were part of the Concord world echoed this bizarre canonization.10
• • •
When John Brown reached Tabor, Iowa, in August 1857, he had only $25 in his pocket. He was expecting to find most if not all of the $7,000 that George Stearns had promised him available to help him muster another troop of Cromwellian followers. Instead the local agent for the Massachusetts Kansas Committee gave him $110 and said he had no idea where or when more money was likely to appear.
The nation had been struck by a financial panic. The stock market had plunged and banks were collapsing. Thousands of men were marching in northern cities with banners reading: “Hunger is a Sharp Thorn” and “We Want Work.” An oblivious Brown fired infuriated letters at Stearns and other Boston backers, claiming he needed $1,000 immediately for “secret service and no questions asked.”11
Events in Kansas made this demand seem dubious or worse to Stearns, who was struggling to avert bankruptcy. Another Southern-born territorial governor, appointed by President Buchanan, was continuing the evenhanded policies of his predecessor. Fighting between proslavery and antislavery settlers had dwindled to the vanishing point. Elections to a territorial legislature were held, and free-state voters won overwhelmingly. Peace of sorts seemed to dawn on the military front, though Kansas would soon provide more political shocks.
John Brown had lost interest in this minor war. As his depression caused by the failure of his fundraising campaign lessened, his manic faith in his destiny resumed its grip on his unstable mind. Over the next year and a half, Brown would reveal to Stearns, Sanborn, and four other Boston backers a far more ambitious plan. With their help he would assault The Slave Power in the proud state where it had been spawned—Virginia.