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or rifle, he reckoned that he had weakened the insurrectionists so much. Many ridiculous incidents marked the tipsy Governor's search for arms.

The Committee of Investigation having completed their work at Lawrence soon after the troubles began, adjourned to Leavenworth City. They had evinced a determination to perform their mission impartially, to expose fraud and injustice, and the monstrous iniquities practiced upon the people of Kansas. On this account pro-slavery men desired its sittings broken up, the evidences it had accumulated against them destroyed, the Committee compelled to abandon their undertaking and retire from the Territory. To attain this object, it was thought, had given rise in some measure to the demonstrations upon Lawrence. After the sack of this place many of the dispersed posse repaired to Leavenworth and resumed their efforts to disturb the Committee.

The following notice was one morning found posted on the door of the Committee room:

"Messrs. HoWARD and SHERMAN:

"MAY 26.

"SIRS: With feelings of surprise and disgust we have been noticing the unjust manner in which you have been conducting this investigation, we wish to inform you can no longer sit in this place.

"We therefore request you to alter your obnoxious course, in order to avoid consequences which may otherwise follow. "CAPTAIN HEMP,

"LEAVENWORTH CITY, 1856."

"In behalf of the citizens.

The ruffians from their first entrance into town daily grew more bold and warlike. All persons in any way affected with anti-slavery sympathies were either notified to leave the Territory or threatened with death by the rope or the rifie. On the morning of the 28th of May the "Leavenworth Herald" issued a reprint of the "war extra" from

the Westport paper. The account of the Pottowattomie murders was published, which served to exasperate the ruffians. A pro-slavery meeting was immediately held in which Stringfellow and Richardson took a prominent part. They passed a resolution requiring all active free state men to leave the Territory and resolved themselves into a Vigilance Committee to enforce it. A list of the most obnoxious freesoilers was drawn up, presented to the officer of the day-Warren D. Wilkes, of South Carolina. This gentleman, at the head of a body of Southerners and Kickapoo Rangers, armed with United States muskets and bayonets, paraded the streets, and placed guards in various portions of the town to prevent the escape of fugitives. The mob then proceeded to make arrests. Mr. Sherman of the Congressional Committee seeing Mr. Conway, who had been acting as clerk for the same, among the persons thus held prisoners, inquired of Mr. Wilkes "if he had arrested one of the clerks of the Committee on any legal process." This official replied "he had not, but, at all hazards would arrest those whose names he had on his list." Thus they continued their work until they held thirty free state men prisoners. These were guarded in a frame building until dark, when many were permitted to escape on promising to leave the Territory. These violent demonstrations lasted for some time, and did not entirely subside until the last of October.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

"OLD BROWN'S" WARFARE.

It was at this stage of affairs that Captain John Brown, Sen., began to figure in the stirring events of the times. He was a man of characteristic ancestry, being sixth in descent from Peter Brown, one of the Puritans who fled from the intolerance of England in the Mayflower, and landed at Plymouth Rock on the 22d of December, 1620. His grandfather and namesake was Captain of the West Sunsbury train band, and as such joined the Continental army at New York in the spring of 1776. After two months' service he was seized with camp fever, and died in a barn a few miles north of the city.

Captain John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, on the 9th of May, 1800. His mother was the daughter of Gideon Mills, who served in the Revolutionary war, and attained the rank of Lieutenant. His father, Owen Brown, when John was but five years old, emigrated to Hudson, Ohio, and during the war of 1812 furnished beef cattle to the American army. John, then fourteen years of age, accompanied his father as cattle driver. In this capacity he witnessed the movements of the army, and Hull's surrender at Detroit. He became so disgusted with what he saw of military life that when he attained a suitable age, he refused to take part in the militia drills, and either paid his fine or furnished a substitute.

In his early days he enjoyed few advantages for mental

acquirements, from which cause he knew little even of the primary branches of school education. At the At the age of eight, he suffered the loss of his mother, which he lamented for years afterwards. When sixteen years of age, he joined the Congregational Church, and from fifteen to twenty learned the tanner and currier's trade. At the age of twenty he went East, with a view of acquiring a liberal education in some good college, and preparing himself for the ministry. Having nearly fitted himself for college under the instructions of Rev. Moses Hallock, he was suddenly seized with the inflammation of the eyes, which compelled him to quit school. He returned to Ohio, where he married his first wife, by whom he had seven children. She, dying in 1832, he shortly afterwards married a second time, from which union were born thirteen children, of whom three sons were with him at Harper's Ferry, two of whom lost their lives and the third escaped.

From 1821 to 1826, he spent his time in Ohio at tanning and farming, and then moved to Crawford County, Pennsylvania, where he continued in the same vocation. In 1835 he returned to Ohio, Portage County, where, besides carrying on his trade, he speculated in real estate, which resulted in financial loss. In 1840 he engaged in the wool business, and in 1846 removed to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he sold wool extensively on commission for growers along the shore of Lake Erie. Here he undertook to dictate the prices of wool to the New England manufacturers, who, forming a league against him, forced him to send his wool to Europe for a market. He shipped two hundred thousand pounds to England, where he sold it for one-half its value, and returned bankrupt. In 1849 he removed to Essex County, New York, upon a piece of land given him by Gerret Smith. This was located among the Adirondack Mountains, rugged, cold and bleak. Here the same benevolent philanthropist had granted lands to negroes, who had formed a small settlement upon them. In 1851, Brown re

turned to Ohio and engaged in the wool traffic again, but in 1855, on starting to Kansas, he removed his family to their former home at North Elba, in New York, where they still reside, and where his grave was afterwards made.

As early as 1839 Brown conceived the design of liberating the slaves in the South, although from his boyhood he had been a "determined abolitionist." The character of his reading, his travels in Europe, and his residence among the blacks in New York, all tended to fit and prepare him for the great object of his life. When Kansas was thrown open to settlement, his four elder sons determined to emigrate thither, which they did, and settled in the spring of 1855, about eight miles from Ossawattomie, on Pottowattomie Creek. They came with the view of assisting in making Kansas a free State, and of securing to themselves comfortable homes. Troubles soon breaking out in the Territory, and they themselves being harrassed and threatened, they wrote back to their father for arms, with which they might protect themselves. These the father procured through the generosity of his friends, and instead of sending, went with them to Kansas.

He came here, therefore, unlike free state men generally, not to settle and make a home, but to fight in the battles of freedom, and, when the conflict was over, to return. Still, while here, when not engaged with the enemy, he was industriously employed upon his claim, building a house, laying out his fields and attending to stock. The part which he took in the Kansas troubles will appear in connection with the events. In the fall of 1856, after the demonstration upon Lawrence, he left with his four sons for the East, by way of Nebraska. In November he appeared before the National Kansas Committee, soliciting aid, but without much success; in January he appeared before the Massachusetts Legislature, to whom he made a speech detailing his experience in Kansas. While East he contracted for the pikes which he afterwards used at Harper's Ferry, and labored

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