Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War

7. Raising the Stakes

7 Raising the Stakes I As numerous Free-State parties moved across Iowa toward Kansas in 1856, two young men from Springdale, Iowa, had joined the emigrants. George B. Gill and seventeen-year-old Barclay Coppoc climbed aboard the first major Kansas-bound wagon train from Iowa City led by Shalor Eldridge, trail coordinator for FreeState overland operations. A lean twenty-four-year-old of freethinking bent, Gill had already worked on a whaling ship in the Pacific and now was joining the Free-State cause in Kansas. In late August 1856 he and a friend happened to be in the vicinity of the Osawatomie battle and joined the fight against a large proslavery force of border Missourians that attacked, looted, and burned John Brown’s family’s home community. While Brown and some thirty men fought to stave off the attack, the day’s events cost the life of Brown’s son Frederick. Though at that time Gill had no acquaintance with John Brown, in less than two years he became one of Brown’s close comrades in arms. Gill’s reminiscences in his letters tell a good part of what is known about John Brown in Iowa and of his last trip through the state. Though only formally schooled to age ten, George had a gift for expression and was a quiet but sharp, independent observer of persons and events. Gill stayed in Kansas in Fig. 11. George B. Gill of West Liberty, Iowa, who rode with John Brown during 1858 and early 1859, wrote informative letters about Brown and his men in their Kansas and Iowa actions. Kansas State Historical Society. Raising the Stakes . . 107 1856, becoming part of a Kansas Free-State militia company for a time.1 None of the men who went with Brown to Harpers Ferry in 1859, apart from his sons, had fought with him in 1856, the year when Brown stepped up to resist proslavery intimidation. The men with Brown in 1856 had endured plenty of hard living, sleeping rough out in the brush. Brown had one son shot dead and another wounded and saw his eldest son driven to near insanity from imprisonment. For his tough actions, Brown himself became a reputed guerrilla chieftain although those who stood with him in Kansas did not remain. In fact, twelve of the twenty-one men who would join Brown at Harpers Ferry had been with him less than a year, and most of their experience together occurred in Iowa. The earliest of his followers helped make his reputation, and the later enlistees admired Brown for the reputed aggressive pursuit of his antislavery convictions. The Pottawatomie killings committed in late May 1856, however notorious, showed border proslavery invaders that they faced a determined and fearsome adversary. Salmon Brown later repeated a comment of his uncle Rev. Samuel Adair, who lived in the Osawatomie vicinity, that “he never did approve of the killing but admitted that it nearly cleared the country of border ruffians.”2 The events of 1856 soon made Brown, with his hard convictions and willingness to fight, a figure who was both dreaded and a target of proslavery hatred. Numerous bands of guerrillas on both sides roamed eastern Kansas in 1856, but Brown’s Pottawatomie killings followed quickly nine days later by his success at the Battle of Black Jack set him apart from the others. His willingness to embrace violence separated Brown and other radical Free Staters from the conservative Free-State men who wanted the movement’s actions kept defensive and lawful. More important, Brown and the territory’s other foremost guerrilla leader, James Montgomery (in southeast Kansas), aimed not simply to make Kansas a Free State but also actively to under- 108 . . Raising the Stakes mine acceptance of slavery and make its profitability insecure. Their hard-hitting methods attracted followers in Kansas, mainly young and adventurous unmarried men such as Charles Lenhart who were keen to join Free-State battles and spread hostility to slavery. The young enlistees of Brown’s and Montgomery’s had come from northern states—Ohio, Maine, Iowa—and gravitated to groups of Free-State partisans. William Henry Leeman, for instance, had come west in 1856 with Dr. Calvin Cutter’s party from Massachusetts. After proslavery forces turned them back at Lexington, Missouri, on the Missouri River, he joined Martin Stowell’s group from Massachusetts at Keokuk, Iowa, and made it across...