Daughter of the Sword (49 page)

Instead of being filled with supporting hosts, the armory was attacked the next morning by citizens who forced Brown's men and his prisoners into the engine-house.

Two of Brown's sons were killed, but he didn't harm his prisoners. The siege lasted all day. During the night Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived with government troops and sent J. E. B. Stuart, his aide, to ask Brown to surrender. Brown refused that night and again the next morning.

Amidst firing, the troops battered in the door. A marine lieutenant hacked Brown to the floor and struck him repeatedly across the head with his sword. Brought to trial October 27, Brown claimed throughout the next six days that he intended only to free slaves, not foment rebellion.

Twelve of the men with Brown had helped him in Kansas. Most were young zealots. Though conservative Free-Staters denounced Brown, Jim Lane and Dan Anthony praised him. Money was raised for a Doy-style rescue, but Montgomery, the dour jayhawker, traveled out to Virginia and declared this impossible.

North and South, the press blazed for and against the grim old man. Greeley, in the
New York Herald Tribune,
blamed Brown—and Kansas—on ex-President Franklin Pierce and Senator Douglas for supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.

John Brown is a natural production, born on the soil of Kansas, out of the germinating heats the great contest on the soil of that Territory engendered. Before the day of Kansas outrages and oppression, no such person as Osawatomie Brown existed.… Kansas deeds, Kansas experiences, and Kansas discipline created John Brown as entirely and completely as the French Revolution created Napoleon Bonaparte. He is as much the fruit of Kansas as Washington was the fruit of our own revolution.

“He'll hang tomorrow,” Johnny said, returning from voting for the Territorial legislature on December 1. “Won't plead insanity. By dyin' he'll do more to free the slaves than ever he could alive. Old fox knows that.”

Except for him, Thos might have been alive. There was that bloody work on Pottawatomie Creek. But the man had stepped across the line that made monsters and martyrs. Judith bowed her head and wept.

“He's the sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” she said when pride in the man triumphed over grief. “His soul can't die. It'll never die!”

Abraham Lincoln, hoping for nomination in 1860, came on a five-day speaking tour of northeastern Kansas. He spoke in pro-slave Atchison, condemning Brown's methods, on December 2, when John Brown was hanged in Virginia.

Brown wasn't accompanied by a minister; he'd said he couldn't pray with Southern preachers who supported slavery. But on the way to the scaffold, he kissed his jailer's child.

xxi

January customers at the smithy brought a running account of the overwhelmingly Republican Territorial legislature's refusal to hold session in Lecompton. Meeting there, they moved to adjourn to Lawrence, the governor vetoed their resolution, they passed it over his veto, and they moved to Lawrence.

Governor Medary and his secretary wouldn't go or send necessary records. The legislature passed a resolution to adjourn since the secretary wouldn't provide these documents. Governor Medary immediately issued a proclamation for them to meet the next day at Lecompton. The legislature did so, again resolved to go to Lawrence, were again vetoed by the governor, and again passed the resolution over his veto.

At that point the governor gave up, though he did veto their February 11 abolition of slavery within the Territory. They overrode his veto and went on to pass Kansas's first fencing legislation, ordering that when the property of two claimants adjoined, each must build half the dividing fence.

“Hate to see fences,” rumbled Johnny. “Plumb ruins the country!” He grinned reminiscently. “Sometimes I think that Shoshoni, Washakie, was right about what he told the agent who wanted him to farm. ‘God damn a potato!,' he said.”

“That's wicked talk,” Sara reproved. “The buffalo are gone, from here, anyway, and we need potatoes and gardens to eat.”

Johnny sobered. “We sure need rain. Precious little snow this year. But it's bound to rain in the spring.”

But it didn't. A severe late freeze added to the misery. There was a ripple of excitement in April when Russell, Majors, and Waddell started the Pony Express mail run from St. Joseph to California, but as that pitiless summer wore on, Kansans thought of little but the weather.

Johnny's wheat shot up but quickly withered, and the wheat sowed that spring didn't come up at all, though corn down by the river produced about two-thirds of the usual crop. The members of the household at the smithy were lucky to be near the Kaw. By hauling water from the river, they kept the garden alive, but settlers at a distance from water saw all their food die in scorching blasts from the south.

Great cracks split the earth. Ponds, wells, creeks, and streams dried up. Thirty thousand settlers, about one-third of the Territory's population, begged or borrowed their way back east or farther west. Of those remaining, half would have gone had they been able. The others, like those at Chaudoin's, managed to raise enough food for their own use and shared what they had.

The creek by Friedental never went completely dry, nor did the deep wells. Several times that summer Deborah took fugitive slaves to Friedental to let them rest from their flight; then Challoner would take them on to Topeka and Amos Blakeman. Each time she visited Conrad's grave on the hill and watered the wild roses that Ansjie ordinarily tended. It seemed impossible that he'd been dead almost a year. In her heart, she still heard his voice.

“God has given us the grace of water,” Elder Goerz told Deborah during one of her visits. “The council has voted to give all the food we can spare to those in need. Will you see to the distribution, Fräulein Whitlaw?”

So with Ansjie and Challoner, Deborah visited parched farms. Often what they brought was the only food in the house except for a little corn. Doc, a big, gruff but incredibly gentle man, delivered babies, set broken legs and arms, and did whatever else he could.

“But there's not enough food,” he said, looking gaunt and drawn himself. “These malnourished children and frail women—men whose hurts won't heal because they're run down! Food's the medicine they need, and there's just not enough of the right kind.”

He and Ansjie, like the people at the smithy, ate abstemiously in order to share with the virtually starving.

Prairie chickens, usually so plentiful, were scarce, and even when one could be shot, it was tough and leathery. Where grass had once grown waist-high, it reached only a few stunted inches, except along the river and creeks.

In Washington the debate on admitting Kansas was fiery on both sides. Senator Wigfall of Texas railed against Massachusetts for “subverting” the Territory through the New England Emigrant Aid Society. He charged they had filled it up with “vagabondism of the North; not only the vagabondism of the North, but that of Europe also has been drained in order to get emigrants to send into that country.” And he went on to say: “The inhabitants of that so-called state are outlaws and land pirates … a set of Black Republicans, and traitors, and murderers, and thieves.”

To which Eli Thayer, founder of the Society, blamed Southerners for the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, recounted the terrorism of the Border Ruffians, and said, the Free-Staters had quite rightly resisted a fraudulent legislature.

As fall came without rain, Johnny closed down the smithy and, with Challoner, Maccabee, and Laddie, took a wagon several days' journey west till they found buffalo, gaunt from the drought but still good. Killing a dozen, they butchered and jerked the meat, and again Deborah and the Challoners made the far-scattered rounds of the hardest-pressed settlers.

The twins, now rapid crawlers and slow walkers, cut their first teeth on that jerky. Lettie's hair had stayed silky black, but Tom's was turning red. Both had warm brown eyes. It was a shock to realize on their first birthday that they'd never seen rain.

People would certainly have starved that fall and winter if easterners hadn't contributed, through a relief committee set up by Samuel Pomeroy, steamers and freight caravans of food and other supplies. Pomeroy became known as “Baked Beans” because New Englanders sent so many of them to Kansas. Illinois shared its corn.

Rain fell in November, but it wasn't till the snows of January that people began to dare hope the drought was broken.

Meanwhile, border troubles had heated up. A newcomer, Charles Jennison, stole so many horses that people said any good horse was “out of Missouri by Jennison.” Down at Fort Scott, pro-slave Judge Williams fled to Missouri, and without even his loaded justice, pro-slave men hanged two Free-Staters, and Free-Staters returned the compliment.

While the Missouri militia was called to the southwest part of the state to defend its borders, there was a peculiar raid on the rich plantation of Morgan Walker, seven miles from Independence. Walker was warned ahead of time by a man calling himself Charlie Hart. Hart said he'd be with the raiders but was betraying them because jay-hawkers had killed his brother.

Actually, the raiders were Quakers, dedicated abolitionists, whom Hart had recruited by claiming Walker's thirty slaves were thirsting to be set free.

When the Kansans knocked on Walker's door on the night of December 10, he invited them in. They told him they'd come for the slaves. Walker gave them directions to the quarters and the Kansans started out, except for Hart, who stayed in the house. Walker's hiding neighbors cut loose with shotguns. One man was killed and a wounded one was dragged off by a companion to be tracked down and killed a few days later.

The double-dealer was a young hanger-about Lawrence who had boarded for a time at the Whitney House and been nursed through a long illness by the Stones, who owned that hotel. He'd taught school briefly and followed the wagons to Pike's Peak. In Missouri he was pro-slave, in Kansas a Free-Stater. He had blue-gray eyes and pale gold hair.

His real name was William Clarke Quantrill. The Walker raid was the beginning of his known depredations, though from then on he would prey on Kansans and Unionists.

In January 1861 the last Territorial Legislature met at Lecompton, and, as usual, adjourned to Lawrence, where they waited for news of Kansas's admission to the Union.

Because President Buchanan and his party opposed Kansas's entry as a free state; admission had been stalled in the Senate till the 1860 elections were over and Kansas could have no part in them. As the Senate debated admission, six senators from seceding states left Washington for their homes.

Late on January 29, Dan Anthony strode into the Eldridge House after a hard ride from Leavenworth and told the legislators that Buchanan had that day signed the bill making Kansas the thirty-fourth state.

In spite of windy cold and snow, people poured to the hotel and public places to celebrate. “Old Sacramento,” the cannon captured from pro-slavers back in Lawrence's besieged summer of 1856, was hauled out and fired.

If Father could have been there!
Deborah thought as she listened to Johnny, tears springing to her eyes. She blinked them back and picked up little Tom, waltzing him in wide circles as his moccasined feet braced sturdily on her hip and he squealed with delight, red curls dancing.

“You're a citizen of the United States!” she told him, then plunked him down and gave Lettie a twirl. “As for you, honey, I may not see it, but the day's coming when you can vote! Why, you might even be a senator!”

“Cesli Tatanka!”
roared Johnny. “Her Indian blood should give her better sense than that!” But he got out a jug of wine and even the women got slightly tipsy that night.

After seven years and eight months, six governments and five governors, shifting the seat of government from Leavenworth to Shawnee Mission, to Lecompton, to Pawnee, back to Shawnee Mission, then to Minneola, and at last Topeka, the strife-born Territory was at last a state.

It entered a Union from which southern states were rapidly seceding. Lincoln was inaugurated in March and on April 12 Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter.

Jim Lane and “Baked Beans” Pomeroy had been elected as Kansas's senators late in March. At news of Fort Sumter, Lane hastily organized a Frontier Guard which bivouacked in the East Room of the Executive Mansion with Sharps rifles and cutlasses.

“Lane's back here raising a Kansas Brigade,” Johnny reported one noon. “Just shod a horse for one of his recruits. If I know Lane, it'll be a gang of thievin' jayhawkers who'll make Missourians wish they
had
seceded!”

Missouri had voted to stay in the Union, but loyalties were bitterly divided, and the raidings of Lane, Jennison, and Montgomery had done nothing to soothe those Missourians who lived near the border.

“But Lane's a senator!” Deborah objected. “How can he be getting up an army?”

“
Hin!
He and Governor Robinson, who've always hated each other's guts, are sort of arguin' that point. Robinson wants to appoint a replacement. Lane says he'll resign when he gets the brigadier general's commission he's been promised.” Johnny cleared his throat. His smoky eyes rested on Sara till she glanced up at him in alarm. “No doubt, though, that Kansas needs to muster every soldier she can, fast. Missouri could easily fall to the Confederates. If she does, Kansas is easy pickings.”

Almost-two-year-old Lettie was snuggled in Deborah's arms. With a rush of fear, Deborah held her closer so that the child's soft black hair brushed her cheek. “I thought Missouri wanted to be neutral!”

“That was what Claib Jackson, the governor, tried to bring off. Made an agreement with General Harney in May, but Lincoln booted Harney out and General Lyon—” Johnny chuckled.
“Tatanka wakan!
Lyon was stationed at Fort Riley during the worst Border Ruffian days. Hates slavery, claims to be infidel, and has been known to make a man who was beating a dog kneel down and beg the dog's pardon. Well, Lyon replaced Harney. He listened for about an hour to Jackson, General Price, and other big guns carry on about states' rights and Missouri's right to be neutral.”