Category: Midwest

Porte Crayon (David Hunter Strother), En route for Harper’s Ferry, 1859, wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, Library of Congress.

The events that led up to the Civil War are a mess, which I guess is the way they should be, but their level of complication is greater than the level of my willingness to learn them. From the founding of the nation to the firing on Fort Sumner there’s all this complicated stuff that happened, dates, compromises, court decisions, slave revolts, expansions, and these then-famous people with now dimly remembered names like Taylor and Pierce and Webster and Calhoun and Clay. They made speeches and policy and enacted laws and whatnot, and all of what they did was overshadowed by the now inexplicable and then intransigent desire of Southerners to maintain a cruel and immoral institution. I have in the back of my mind the suspicion that notwithstanding the absence of any given incident, at the end of the day the War would have happened whatever came before, maybe sooner, maybe later, but the War was inevitable.

I’ve boiled the sequence of what happened down in my own pretty little head to a few things. It’s my litany, useful to me but simplified. In 1807, Congress, at the urging of President Jefferson, voted to ban the importation of new slaves. Congress, both North and South, voted for the ban. They believed that if they stopped African importation, slavery would collapse because it was economically unsustainable. Forty years later, that vote would have been impossible.

Two things intervened that would have made that vote impossible. The same year as the ban, Eli Whitney received a patent for a cotton gin, which made industrial agricultural cotton production profitable in the Deep South, Land of Cotton, not forgotten. Industrial agricultural production of cotton meant that slavery not only wouldn’t collapse, but that it was economically desirable, both for the Deep South, producing cotton, and the upper South, producing slaves through natural increase and selling them down South, and in Northern and European mills, weaving cotton. It is not an accident that for Jim in Huckleberry Finn, the threat of being sold down-river to New Orleans is both real and terrifying.

The second intervening event again involved Mr. Whitney. In 1801, Whitney demonstrated the value of interchangeable parts in firearm production, and after his death in 1825 his family fire arms company produced muskets with interchangeable parts. Interchangeable parts helped spur the North’s conversion from agriculture and artisan production to factory industry. Neither idea, the gin or the parts, was exactly new with Whitney, but there you are. In North America he gets the credit, and because of cotton and factories the North and South went different ways.

At the same time the economic engines were changing there was westward expansion. It’s hard now to imagine us as anything other than 50 states with amber waves of grain from sea to shining sea, but when Napoleon pawned off Louisiana in 1804, Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) weren’t yet states. Florida (1821) still belonged to the Spanish, or was it the English? In 1804 America the Beautiful was the original 13 Colonies, the Ohio Territory (1803), Kentucky (1791) and Tennessee (1796).

With the Louisiana Purchase things boomed. Texas was annexed in 1845 . The cession of Mexican lands after the Mexican-American War (which Northern progressives saw as a war of Southern aggression to expand slavery) added the Southwest, and treaties with England settled the northern boundary between the U.S. and Canada. Because of control of Congress, there was constant trauma over whether new territories would be slave or free.

Complicating the expansion there was the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Dred Scott held that regardless of where a black slave stood, North or South, state laws could not supersede the property rights of the slaveholder. The black man or woman was not a citizen but a slave, always, even in Ohio, even in Maine.

And there were the first battles, the first blood, in Kansas.

My father wasn’t a cussing man. At least around his family there was no profanity, no curses, but he did from time to time need an exclamation and his exclamation was usually John Brown! I suppose it was something he’d picked up in East Texas from his father, or his uncles, and we heard it so often that we never noticed it until my older sister married and her new husband made fun of it. It was fair game I guess, but still, it ruined John Brown!, and probably for that reason I never say it.

I guess because of my father’s mild expletive I always knew who John Brown was, or at least knew that he had led a raid on Harper’s Ferry to kick off the Civil War. I was fertile soil in college when I read Stephen Oates’ Brown biography, To Purge This Land with Blood. Still, it was a startling book. Brown was a violent zealot, the first modern terrorist. Brown was right, his opponents’ defense of slavery morally indefensible. Brown was charismatic, reasonably well educated, deeply religious, and a failure at most things he attempted. Oddly, he worked in a tannery with U.S. Grant’s father, and like Grant’s father for a time was a tanner. He farmed. He tried to broker wool. He was mad, or not, but certainly he was monomaniacally opposed to slavery. He believed in the equality of whites and blacks, and he believed that only blood could end slavery and bring about equality.

He was a murderer in Kansas. He was a murderer in a good cause. He was a murderer.

One of the events that led to the War was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It probably seemed a good idea at the time: Congress couldn’t agree on whether Kansas and Nebraska should be slave or free, so they took themselves off the hook by letting Kansans decide for themselves. It turned out it wasn’t a good idea: It was a really bad idea. For some, pro-slavery and abolitionists both, it became a matter of missionary zeal to go to Kansas, and that was how John Brown got there. He went to fight a war. The pro-slave side struck first, by sending pro-slave Ruffians–that was the shorthand for white Southern Thugs—across the border from Missouri to steal the local elections and pack the Kansas legislature. There was a resident pro-free state majority, but the pro-slave interlopers, with the support of President Franklin Pierce and his territorial governor, controlled the polls.

On May 21, 1856, the pro-slavery sheriff of Douglas County, Kansas, and his 100-strong pro-slavery posse raided Lawrence, Kansas, an anti-slavery stronghold founded and supported with New England abolitionist money. Only one person died (and him part of the posse and by accident), but Sheriff Jones’s posse burnt the Free State Hotel, trashed the newspapers, looted the town, and took three prisoners. On May 24 Captain Brown, Old Brown as he was known (he was 56 which on the frontier was ancient), led a band that included four of his sons against pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in eastern Kansas, not far from where Kansas City stands today. Brown’s party hacked five pro-slavery settlers to death. It was an execution, like something a radical jihadist would film for distribution via the internet. Brown did not participate in the hacking, he left that for his sons and the rest of the party, but he did shoot one settler through the forehead to make certain he was dead. The Pottawatomie Massacre was in retaliation for the raid on Lawrence. None of the murdered men had been on the Lawrence raid.

Lawrence would be raided once again in 1863 by Quantrill’s raiders, a quasi-military group of Confederate-sympathizing calvary. The Quantrill raid was The culmination of the Kansas guerrilla warfare that began with John Brown’s raid on Potawattomie Creek. You may recall that the hero of True Grit, Deputy Marshall Rooster Cogburn, rode with Quantrill, as did Jesse James. More than 180 civilians were murdered in the raid.

When I was thinking about John Brown and Kansas I went through the 1859 Harper’s Weeklies published immediately after the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Harper’s Weekly was the most widely circulated magazine of its day, and on its back page included amusing cartoons. It was so influential that it is largely responsible for the American adoration of Santa Claus and Christmas. Abolitionists called it Harper’s Weakly.

In an October issue, about two weeks after John Brown’s raid, I found a cartoon of a well-dressed man and woman seated across from each other at a table in a bright and draperied room. “I say, Peg,” says the man, “just give me two or three of your Eyelashes to finish off this Black Palmer; there’s a good Girl!” I hope Peg gave him the eyelashes, and I hope he traveled to the Catskills and caught brookies with that very Black Palmer. Even in the middle of it boys would be boys, and I hope he survived the War. I hope that six years later at the end of the horror he and Peg sat once again across that lovely table in that lovely room, and he tied Black Palmers and dreamed of Catskill streams.