CHAPTER 10
From New York to Bleeding Kansas
We are not one people, we are two people. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.
—Horace Greeley
In 1854, Stephen Douglas shepherded new legislation through Congress, which was dominated by Democrats as the Whig Party fell apart. The ostensible issue was where to lay the tracks for the first transcontinental railroad west from the Mississippi. At stake were all the federal subsidies and real estate opportunities that would come with the project. Illinois senator Douglas wanted a northern route, which required organizing the territory of Nebraska for statehood. Southern Democrats balked, since the old Missouri Compromise mandated that Nebraska be admitted as another free state, the last thing they wanted. Douglas needed their support, so he proposed nullifying the Missouri Compromise and splitting the sparsely settled region into two territories, Nebraska and Kansas. The residents of each would decide for themselves whether to go slave or free, a principle he gave the eminently democratic-sounding name “popular sovereignty.” The presumption was that the more northern Nebraska would probably go free-soil, but Kansas, next door to Missouri with its ninety thousand slaves, might well go slave. Southern Democrats, who’d never expected to see any slavery introduced north of the 1820 demarcation, were delighted by this new opportunity for expansion and agreed.
As the debate went on in Congress in early 1854, protest rallies flared up throughout the North. Greeley railed against the plan as “measureless treachery and infamy” and “infernal rascality.” In the Times, Henry Raymond predicted that passage of the bill would promote “a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred” of slavery in the North “which will crush its political power, at all hazards, and at any cost.” In the Herald, Bennett supported the bill, scoffing that it was sophistry to distinguish between black slavery and “white slavery”—a popular term for wage labor—except that in his estimation black slaves were treated better than white ones.
The bill made it through the Senate in March. That month, by no coincidence, the Republican Party, started by abolitionists and free-soilers, was born in the ashes of the Whigs. Greeley named it. When Seward, Weed, and Raymond also came over, Greeley’s personal rivalries with them would often get the better of his politics, shaping his stormy, on-and-off relationship with the party.
Franklin Pierce signed the act into law in May. Kansas became the first actual battleground between pro- and antislavery forces. Only about a thousand settlers lived there when the act became law. Some twelve hundred abolitionists, mostly from New England, headed to Kansas as settlers in 1855, intent on voting to keep it free-soil. Thousands of pro-slavery Missourians flooded across the border to oppose them. The pro-slavers, dubbed “border ruffians” by the Northern press, came armed and angry. The free-soilers armed themselves as well. Bloodshed was inevitable.
New York abolitionists and antislavers couldn’t resist getting involved. In March 1855, Henry Ward Beecher went up to Hartford’s North Church to speak at a rally for a contingent of abolitionist colonists headed to Kansas. He was now preaching that when it came to ending slavery there was “more moral power” in a rifle or sword “than in a hundred Bibles.” As he worked the crowd into a froth, many of them Yale students and faculty, a professor stood up and pledged to buy the colonists a Sharps rifle, renowned for its large bore and accuracy. Beecher went into auction mode and raised twenty-five pledges. One was from a man named Killam, which struck Beecher as funny. Returning to Brooklyn, Beecher raised funds for another twenty-five rifles from the Plymouth congregation. The young men of the colony, each armed with a shiny new weapon, dubbed themselves the Beecher Bible and Rifle Company. In New York, the papers leaped on the story, calling Sharps rifles “Beecher’s Bibles” and Plymouth “the Church of the Holy Rifles.”
Charles Dana, Horace Greeley’s managing editor at the Tribune, also raised money to send rifles; New Yorkers even purchased an old howitzer and shipped it. In the paper, Dana kept up such a fierce barrage of editorials supporting the free-soilers and denouncing the border ruffians that Greeley privately begged him to cool his rhetoric. Greeley had appointed himself the paper’s Washington correspondent, and Washington was effectively a Southern city. Greeley knew that Tribune readers around the country assumed that Uncle Horace wrote all the editorials. His antislavery opinions had already made him a hated figure in the South. Now he feared for his life on the streets of the nation’s capital.
Dana did not relent. In 1855 he sent an idealistic young correspondent named James Redpath to Kansas. Redpath went not just to cover the conflict, but to get involved. Born in 1833, he came as a teen with his family from Scotland to America in the late 1840s. They settled in Michigan. He was nineteen when Horace Greeley saw his writing in a Detroit paper and brought him to New York in 1852. Brilliant, restless, the ginger-haired young Scotsman—“Red” to friends—was taking the first steps in an amazing career with many surprising turns. He soon chafed at toiling in the bowels of the Tribune as an anonymous cub reporter and decided that Greeley, off gamboling in the fields of politics, was a “sham.”
About the time that Redpath came to New York, Frederick Law Olmsted began a series of long tours of the cotton South, writing dispatches for Raymond’s new New York Times. Although he’s remembered today as the codesigner of Central Park, a project that would begin in 1858, Olmsted made his first impact through these Times articles on slavery and the South, collected in several bound volumes that were widely read in the years leading up to the war.
Bored with his office job, Redpath decided to follow in Olmsted’s footsteps. He traveled extensively in the South beginning in 1854. Warned that Southern whites might react hostilely and even violently to the presence of a “Greeley spy” among them, he traveled under assumed names and mailed his dispatches to friends in the North, who relayed them to Dana at the Tribune and to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the weekly organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1859 the New York abolitionist publisher A. B. Burdick would collect Redpath’s articles as The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States.
Redpath’s personal, epistolary writing is sometimes witty and sarcastic—he had fun reporting Southerners’ very low opinions of the “d——d rascal” Greeley—other times angry. He surreptitiously interviewed slaves, poor whites, plantation owners. He saw slave auctions in New Orleans, caught services in both white and black churches, and toured Charleston’s infamous slave pen the Sugar House, where slaveholders too squeamish or just lazy to whip their slaves themselves could pay a small fee to have it done for them. Whites, he reported, almost uniformly insisted that their slaves were happy and content. The slaves themselves consistently told him otherwise. What Redpath saw and heard in the South converted him not just to abolitionism but to the conviction that with the right incentives slaves could easily be roused to armed insurrection.
Now he headed west with Dana’s blessings to put his convictions into practice on the Missouri-Kansas border. That’s where he met the grand old man of armed slave revolt, John Brown. Brown was born in 1800 into a Congregationalist and abolitionist household in Connecticut and raised on the frontier in Connecticut’s Western Reserve (northeast Ohio). He was one of the rare white men of his time, even among abolitionists, who sincerely believed that blacks and Native Americans were his equals. In 1849 he and his wife moved to North Elba, New York, to be near Timbucto, the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s ultimately failed experiment to establish a farming colony for free blacks. Meanwhile, his son John Jr. moved to New York City to work for the abolitionist publisher Fowler & Wells, which had offices on Nassau Street and a shop on Broadway.
By the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Brown was formulating a plan to lead a guerrilla army into the South and encourage slaves to armed revolt. First, though, there was Bleeding Kansas. In 1854 four of Brown’s grown sons moved their families to a small community of free-soilers there. John Jr. was soon writing Brown, asking him to bring weapons. He arrived in 1855 with rifles, swords, and other supplies. Pro-slavers from Missouri were by then crossing the border in armed guerrilla squads and executing raids on free-soil settlements. A particularly fearsome posse who called themselves the Kickapoo Rangers burned the free-soil town of Lawrence on May 21, 1856.
The next day a Democratic congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, sought out the venerable Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. Sumner had delivered a thundering speech denouncing the “Crime Against Kansas,” in which he vilified Stephen Douglas as a “noisome, squat and nameless animal” and also mocked South Carolina senator Andrew Butler for taking up with “the harlot, Slavery.” Brooks, who was related to Butler, found Sumner at his desk and beat him about the head and back with a cane of gutta-percha. Although it was a light cane used for whipping dogs and slaves, he so severely whaled on Sumner, as colleagues stood and watched, that the senator was permanently impaired.
Reactions in the North and South showed how far apart they had grown. The Tribune observed that a young Southerner “trained to knock down his human chattels for ‘insolence’—that is, for any sort of resistance to his good pleasure—will thereafter knock down and beat other human beings who thwart his wishes… and human society becomes a state of war, diversified by interludes of fitful and hollow truce.” As he had predicted, Greeley was assaulted in Washington for these sentiments. A drunken congressman from Arkansas accosted him on the street and gave him a beating, then followed him to his hotel room and beat him up some more.
Preston Brooks was lionized in South Carolina, presented with several silver-tipped canes, and promptly reelected. The future Mississippi senator and Supreme Court justice Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II would argue that the fault was all Sumner’s—that if Sumner “had stood on his manhood… and struck back,” the “blow need not have been the opening skirmish of the war.… We are men, not women.”
The sack of Lawrence on May 21 and the caning of Sumner on May 22 drove John Brown “crazy—crazy,” according to his son Salmon. Brown decided it was time to fight terrorism with terrorism. On May 24, he led seven others, including three of his sons (but not John Jr.), on a retaliatory raid, dragging five pro-slavers from their cabins and brutally hacking them to death in what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre.
Brown and his small band then went into hiding to evade federal troops and Missouri vigilantes. On June 2 they surprised a vigilante squad, killing four and taking two dozen prisoners. Brown’s name was now on every lip in Kansas and Missouri. To pro-slavers he was a feared and hated bogeyman. Most Kansans, including John Jr., were appalled by Pottawatomie and terrified of pro-slavery reprisals, while a few others saw Brown as a righteous avenger.
Redpath was already of the latter opinion when he rode out from Lawrence to find Brown. He discovered his band camped in a wooded creek bed, roasting a pig. Redpath came away from this first meeting convinced that Brown was “the predestined leader of the second and the holier American Revolution.”
A young man who had made his way from Brooklyn to Kansas also showed up at Brown’s camp in early June. John E. Cook was a slight, swaggering, irrepressible chatterbox who dressed flashily even in the wilderness. With his soft skin, long blond curls, and deep blue eyes, he radiated an erotic, androgynous magnetism that men found unsettlingly feminine and women found irresistible, to judge by his string of conquests wherever he went. Further confounding Brown’s men, for all his pretty looks Cook cursed like a heathen, told wild tales of his exploits as a hunter of buffalo, and augmented his fancy duds with a fourteen-inch bowie knife, a brace of shiny Colt pistols, and a hunting rifle, with which he was a crack shot.
Cook was born in 1829 in a prosperous Congregationalist household in the town of Haddam, Connecticut. After briefly studying law at Yale he moved in 1854 to Williamsburg, an independent township about to be incorporated into greater Brooklyn, to clerk for a law firm. He sometimes taught Sunday school at a Dutch Reformed church in Bushwick, and may well have attended some of Henry Ward Beecher’s antislavery sermons in Brooklyn Heights. He headed for Kansas in 1855.
In August 1856, when some three hundred Missourians burned the settlement of Ossawatomie, they shot and killed Brown’s son Frederick. “The shot that struck the child’s heart,” Henry Ward Beecher would later say, “crazed the father’s brain.” Brown led the defense in an all-out battle and killed some thirty of the attackers. He was known as “Ossawatomie Brown” from then on.
With both federal troops and Missouri vigilantes scouring Kansas for him, Brown slipped away. He traveled around the Northeast seeking help with his planned guerrilla incursion in the South. Both Redpath and Cook stayed in Kansas. Redpath went from writing about the armed abolitionists to fighting alongside them in several skirmishes with the pro-slavers. On Brown’s orders, Cook led a small band who called themselves the Freestate Marauders on night raids across the border in Missouri, dragging slave-owning families out of their beds and threatening to hang them if they didn’t leave the area. When Brown sent Cook to scout out Harpers Ferry, Cook impregnated and married the daughter of the woman who ran his boardinghouse.
The Tribune was by now a virtual nest of Brown sympathizers and co-conspirators. Along with Redpath the staff included Richard Hinton, an English journalist and abolitionist who had met and befriended Redpath and Brown in Kansas. Another Englishman, Hugh Forbes, worked for the Tribune as a translator of European news items. Forbes boasted a swashbuckling record as a mercenary who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy and spent some time in an Austrian prison before coming to New York. He was also a quarrelsome and untrustworthy alcoholic. Brown hired him to train his guerrilla army, and Greeley kicked in some funds. Forbes never trained a soul. He merely tried to extort more money out of Brown by threatening to go public with the insurrection plans.
In Boston, Brown met with Samuel Gridley Howe, the physician who founded the Perkins School for the Blind. He was also a leader in prison reform and the antislavery movement. Today he’s probably better known as the husband of the writer and feminist Julia Ward Howe. She was born in New York City in 1819 and grew up in “a fine house on the Bowling Green, a region of high fashion in those days,” she would write in her 1899 Reminiscences. Her father, Samuel Ward, descended from Revolutionary patriots, was a partner in Prime, Ward & King, the largest private bank in the city. Ironically, considering Julia’s sympathies, it got that way financing the international cotton trade. As a young lady, Julia enjoyed teas and balls, rounds of visits to the Astors’ and other drawing rooms on holidays. She took Italian lessons from the younger Lorenzo Da Ponte and music lessons from European maestros. Howe, whom she married in 1843, was eighteen years her senior. It was not a happy union; for all his antislavery activism he was an authoritarian patriarch as a husband and tried to quash both her free spirit and her writing. So her first volume of poems, Passion Flowers, was anonymous. Despite her husband’s efforts she also wrote plays, a biography of Margaret Fuller, travelogues, and a number of pieces for Greeley and Dana at the Tribune.
In Reminiscences, Julia remembered the day John Brown came to their house. “He looked a Puritan of the Puritans,” she recalled, “forceful, concentrated, and self-contained.” Hearing his plans to raise an armed Negro insurrection, she wrote, “I confess that the whole scheme appeared to me wild and chimerical. None of us could exactly approve an act so revolutionary in its character, yet the great-hearted attempt enlisted our sympathies very strongly.”
Early in the war, she’d take a song sung for Brown and adapt it with new lyrics into one of the Union’s most popular anthems.