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Iowa and the Martyrdom of John Brown j J 7 The History of John Brown in Iowa John Brown, perhaps the most famous white opponent of slavery, was closely connected with Iowa’s antislavery communities, as his stay in Tabor in 1856 revealed (see chapter 5). He relied heavily on these connections between 1857 and 1859, as he planned an ambitious national assault on the institution of slavery. Probably the first Iowa antislavery guerrilla to get to know Brown was Charles Lenhart , since they met briefly after the Black Jack fight in 1856. But the first Iowans to join Brown’s militia in 1857–1858 were Charles W. Moffett (a Montour, Iowa, man who had captained a Topeka detachment of James Lane’s militia in 1856), George B. Gill, and Stewart Taylor. Of the three, Gill is better known to history because in his later years he wrote about his association with Brown. Back in 1856 he was a twenty-four-year-old freethinker from West Liberty, Iowa, who traveled with a wagon train crossing the state on the overland trail to Kansas. There he joined a free-state militia and participated in the August 30, 1856, battle at Osawatomie that Brown helped to lead. This experience is probably why Brown recognized Gill when in March 1858 he and Stewart Taylor approached the Old Captain, as Brown was known, in Springdale about joining his forces. After the fight at Osawatomie, Gill had returned to West Liberty , where he met Taylor, who had lived there since 1853 and was working as a wagonmaker in a blacksmith shop. By early October 1856 the Old Captain, sick with the ague (malarial fever and dysentery ), had retreated north to Tabor in two wagons driven by his three sons—John Jr., Jason, and Owen—and carrying a runaway 138 :: chapter seven and some weapons. After storing the arms in town, John Jr. and Jason continued east, while Owen and the fugitive stayed to work among Tabor’s antislavery activists. After spending eight days recuperating , John Brown departed by stage for Chicago and the East to raise money for the war in Kansas. Brown Sr. and Owen returned to Tabor nine months later, in August 1857, to pick up a shipment of two hundred revolvers sent by the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee. In December of that year, the Old Captain also took two hundred Sharps rifles that had been provided by a Kansas aid organization and delivered to Tabor by the Dickey and Root wagon train in the fall of 1856. While in Tabor during the summer of 1857 the Browns lived at Jonas Jones’s house, awaiting the arrival of Hugh Forbes, who drifted in on August 9. John Brown had hired this English adventurer and author of the Manual for the Patriotic ­ Volunteer—­ a textbook on guerrilla­ warfare—­ to instruct the recruits he expected to join him in armed action in Kansas. Although the constantly needy, vainly arrogant Forbes grated on Brown’s nerves, the three men cleaned up the Sharps rifles and practiced shooting them in fields outside the village . The abolitionist leader grew ever more mistrustful of Forbes, though, and they came to disagree about everything, including Brown’s latest plan: an attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the aim of raising the area’s enslaved population in rebellion and founding a black-run republic. By November 2, Forbes left Brown’s company.1 Despite his continual ill heath, Brown quietly went back to Kansas in search of volunteers for his upcoming ventures. After touching base in Lawrence, he rode to Topeka and visited with John E. Cook, a sharpshooting friend of Charles Lenhart whom Brown had met after the Black Jack fight. Brown spoke in general terms about his plan to gather a group for military training to curb proslavery aggression along the Missouri line or elsewhere. Cook showed interest and put him in touch with three others who might also be willing to participate, and they in turn connected him to still more men. By December, from long personal talks with some of them Iowa and the Martyrdom of John Brown :: 139 and the word-of-mouth invitations of friends to friends, Brown brought together in Tabor nine men in addition to his son Owen. The nine recruits, unmarried men nearly all in their twenties, were impressed by Brown’s quiet but persuasive opposition to slavery , which he expressed in a low-key manner. What he...

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