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2 THE FINAL ARBITER Bleeding Kansas and the Creation of the Old Hero As John Brown made his way across Pennsylvania and Ohio in September 1855, he was a man still searching for his calling. Life in Timbucto had validated his beliefs in racial equality, but the experience had not offered much in the way of leadership. Brown had long maintained that liberty for all was impossible without intervention and benevolent guidance. “Forcible separation of the connection between master and slave,” Brown argued, would be “necessary to fit the blacks for self-government.” Brown told those willing to listen “that when the time came to fight against slavery” he would happily lead this forcible separation. Kansas provided more than a mere signal for that fight; the territorial conflict made Brown a new man.1 Less than two years later, Brown fled Kansas under threat of arrest. Suddenly infamous for his galvanizing role in what came to be known as Bleeding Kansas—the pressure-valve prelude to the Civil War—Brown provided an alternative to mainstream abolitionists in New England. He was a man of action, a man willing to fight for the principles of antislavery. The writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of many charmed when Brown came east to raise money and enlist support. Emerson wrote in his diary that Brown was “the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own.” While Brown’s ‘by-ends’ did include personally leading the new revolution, Emerson ignored such details to emphasize Brown’s transformation in the Kansas territory. “He joins that perfect Puritan faith which brought his ancestor to Plymouth Rock,” Emerson wrote, “with his grandfather’s ardor in the Revolution. He believes in two articles—two instruments, shall I say— the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this exIt is better that ten guilty proslavery men should die, than that one Free-State settler should be driven out. —John Brown to Henry Townsley, 1856 18 The Final Arbiter pression in conversation here concerning them: ‘Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this country.’”2 Emerson struck on the overriding question of Bleeding Kansas: How did John Brown, a man searching for meaning and purpose in 1855, become a revolutionary Puritan by 1856? John Brown used the territorial contest to redeem himself, to craft an image, and to harness the symbolism of a chaotic conflict just as he came to embody it. While the very real mayhem of Kansas’s internecine civil war over slavery has complicated Brown’s story, there is no doubt that his adventures in Kansas transformed him and changed the conflict as well.3 Brown’s evolution into a symbol during Bleeding Kansas is central to understanding his changing shape in American memory.4 Brown’s embrace of violence in 1856 to further the cause of racial equality and his willingness to be the agent of that change must be understood in the context of the actual conflict in Kansas.5 Indeed, Brown’s actions, excusable and deplorable , only begin to make sense amid the increasingly haphazard violence of Bleeding Kansas, not solely at the vanguard of a sequentially coherent narrative .6 For Brown, and for countless others consumed by the political contests of the 1850s, the recently designated territory represented much more than a new home, it was a battleground for the most important issue of the day: slavery. Brown’s son Jason was the first Brown to arrive in Kansas. Writing to the family in July 1855, Jason described the difficult journey to his new home in the crude hamlet of Osawatomie. Traveling through hostile proslavery territory powerfully confirmed to the Browns that slavery was truly “the sum of all villainies.”7 But despite the difficulties of emigration, which included the death of Jason’s infant son, hardships were taken in stride. The territory had transcended the quotidian; Kansas was a bellwether for the growing sectionalism consuming North and South, a barometer of the health of the nation’s founding documents, and the first violent test of America’s imperfect union. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s deliberate retooling of the Missouri Compromise exploited Americans’ eagerness for new land, economic opportunity , and a political proxy state, the nation’s conflicts over slavery were translated into a territorial contest. Even the earliest settlers in the future state...

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