braced the entire country, and the chief victories at this stage were to be moral, political, and national."

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The Territorial authorities were bent on breaking down, if possible, the passive resistance of the Free-State men. Indictments were found, by a Federal grand jury, against a number of members of the Free-State government for constructive treason," and they were put under arrest. Indictments were also found against two printing offices in Lawrence, and the principal hotel in the town. A large force of Missourians, led by a United States marshal, advanced on the town. The inhabitants protested, but agreed to respect the United States authority. The hotel and the two printing offices were accordingly destroyed. A considerable amount of lawless pillaging was done, and Governor Robinson's house was burned. Then the force was withdrawn.

The Free-State leaders, as Robinson states, were in no wise cast down by the course of events. Their actual losses had not been great; the temporary confinement of a few of their men did not seriously disturb them; and they considered that by their self-restraint and non-resistance they had put their enemies thoroughly in the wrong, and gained a most valuable vantage-ground for the ensuing Presidential and congressional elections-an estimate which the result fully justified.

But in their party were some spirits to whom these peaceful tactics were distasteful. Chief in this number was John Brown-little known to the world at large till a later time. He and his family of sons had made their homes in Kansas, impelled partly by the hostility to slavery which in him was a master passion. He was a man personally upright and kindly, of only moderate interest and capacity for the ordinary practical affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes, and viewing them with a fanatic's.

narrowness and a fanatic's absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced by his reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. Of the modern State and the duties of the modern citizen he had no rational idea. Following the Old Testament analogy, he conceived of the slaveholders as the enemies of Godlike the Canaanites; and he came to imagine for himself a mission like one of the Hebrew leaders. His favorite hero seems to have been Gideon, and to assail and overcome the Midianites, a handful against a host, became his dream.

How the peaceful tactics of the Free-State party suited his temper may be easily guessed, and four days after the attack on Lawrence (which was May 20, 1856), he acted on a plan of his own. At the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottawatomie creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well-known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offense (according to Mr. Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist), was the driving from his home by violent threats an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses; took five men away from their wives and children; and deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords.

Mr. Sanborn's defense of this act is: "Brown long foresaw the deadly conflict with the slave power which culminated in the Civil War, and was eager to begin it, that it might be the sooner over." He begins his chapter on "The Pottawatomie Executions": "The story of John Brown will mean little to those who do not believe that God governs the world, and that he makes his will known in advance to certain chosen men and women,

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who perform it consciously or unconsciously. Of such prophetic heaven-appointed men, John Brown was the most conspicuous in our time, and his life must be construed in the light of that fact." He also declares that the execution" of these five men was an offset to the killing of five Free-State men by various persons during the preceding twelve-month, and that it was calculated to strike wholesome terror into evil-doers. The ethics, theology, and statesmanship of this defense are possible only to one bent on making Brown a hero at any cost.

The natural result of the Pottawatomie "executions,"in which John Brown's complicity was for a time concealed -was a series of retaliations on both sides, and a state of affairs far more anarchic than Kansas had known before. This lasted through the summer of 1856. The general impression on the country was to strengthen the opposition to the usurpation of the Territorial Legislature, and to the administration which sustained it. In September there came a crisis. Another and graver attack on Lawrence was threatened, and this time a vigorous resistance was probable. But a new and able governor, John W. Geary of Pennsylvania, had been dispatched by President Pierce, with imperative instructions to pacify the Territory, as a pressing political necessity. Geary met Robinson-the treason prisoners had already been released-and as the two men had been near each other in the California troubles and thus had the advantage of a mutual acquaintance, an understanding was soon reached; Geary called off the dogs of war, and a time of quiet followed.

CHAPTER XIV

"FREMONT AND FREEDOM"

THE Congress of 1855-6, divided between an administration Senate and an opposition House, accomplished little but talk. One chapter of this talk had a notable sequel. Charles Sumner, in an elaborate and powerful oration in the Senate, denounced slavery, "the sum of all villainies," and bitterly satirized one of its prominent defenders, Senator Butler of South Carolina. He compared Butler to Don Quixote, enamored of slavery as was the knight of his Dulcinea, and unconscious that instead of a peerless lady she was but a wanton. The response to the speech was made by a nephew of Senator Butler and member of the House, Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina. He entered the Senate chamber during a recess, accompanied and guarded by a friend and fellow member, Lawrence Keitt; approached Sumner as he sat writing at his desk, and without words felled him to the ground with a heavy cane, and beat him about the head till he was insensible. Sumner, a man of fine physique, was for a long time an invalid from the assault, and was unable for years to resume his place in the Senate.

It was not so much the individual act of Brooks as its treatment by his party and section that gave the deepest significance to the deed and produced the most lasting effect. A friendly magistrate sentenced Brooks to a nominal fine and so forestalled further prosecution. His party friends in Congress left all public rebuke of the deed to Republicans. A motion to expel Brooks and Keitt from

the House failed of the necessary two-thirds vote. They resigned, and were promptly and triumphantly re-elected. Noisy applause of the attack came from all parts of the South, with a stack of canes marked "Hit him again." That better class of Southerners by whom the assault was felt, as one of them expressed it long afterward, "like a blow in the face," made no demonstration. So far from losing caste, as a gentleman or a public man, Brooks not only kept his place in society, but was honored a few months later with a public banquet, at which such men as Butler and Toombs and Mason joined in the laudations, and gave a background to the scene by free threats of disunion if the Republicans elected their President.

This treatment of Brooks made an impression at the North far beyond the first hot indignation at his brutal outrage. The condonation and applause of that outrage was taken as sure evidence of a barbaric state of opinion, the natural accompaniment of slavery. What made the matter worse was that the assault had a technical justification under the code of honor which it was Brooks's pride as a Southern gentleman to observe. The code called on a man who had given offense by his words to meet the offended man in a duel, and if he refused, he was fairly subject to public disgrace or even physical chastisement. Such a theory and practice, and the sentiments associated with it, stamped slavery with a heavier condemnation than orator or novelist could frame.

This one week in May, 1856, was dark with omens of impending catastrophe. On May 20 Lawrence was devastated; on the 22d, Sumner was assaulted; and on the 24th took place the Pottawatomie massacre. A shadow as of impending doom was reflected in Mrs. Stowe's second anti-slavery novel, Dred, which appeared about this time. While lacking the inspiration and power of Uncle Tom's