and burnt the house, saving the life of Titus (August 16); yet, on the 12th of September, Governor Geary mustered Walker and his Bloomington Guards into the United States service, and afterward made Walker his deputy marshal to arrest and serve notices. Titus soon after left Kansas and went with a company of his men to join the filibustering Walker in Central America. John Brown continued to fight the invaders at Fort Saunders, Osawatomie, and elsewhere, but Governor Geary had no wish to arrest him, only to have him leave Kansas, as he did the latter part of September, 1856, reaching Tabor in Iowa October 10. Colonel Walker told me this story, illustrative of the perplexed situation under Geary:

...

one morning, after a deed of Brown which had made much noise, Geary sent a note to Walker, as he was drilling his men out on the field, telling him to get word to Brown that a warrant was out against him, which must be served, and that Brown must get away. Walker saw a man looking on, whom he had before seen in Brown's camp; he took him one side, showed him Geary's note, and told him to find and warn Brown [who was then on the Wakarusa, some ten miles from Lawrence]. Not long after came an orderly from Governor Geary with a warrant against Brown, which Walker [the deputy marshal] must serve with his posse. "Take him, dead or alive [was the order]; and for this I shall hold you, Captain Walker, personally responsible." [He] took the warrant and made search for Brown [who, of course, was not to be found]. [Walker soon learned that the man he had sent to warn Brown, at Geary's suggestion, was James Montgomery, not yet much known as the fighter he afterward became.]1

...

I do not wonder that it is hard to pick the way through the intricacies of the Kansas situation from 1856 to 1858, where the man you denounced to-day might be your dearest friend

to-morrow.

Dr. Howe did not enter Kansas in 1856, but was there in 1857, and spoke at a public meeting in Lawrence, along with Henry Wilson, the Massachusetts senator, afterwards vicepresident, and Rev. John Pierpont; but I find little mention of this in the Jackson papers. They do contain, however, much material for an account of the pecuniary contributions of Massachusetts, and the rest of New England, to the relief and

1 F. B. Sanborn, Life and Letters of John Brown, 338, 339.

defence of the free-state men in Kansas during the years 1856 and 1857. The full amount of these contributions can never be exactly known, I suppose, but it would be worth while for some younger man to work up this material, in connection with that existing in the historical collections at Topeka, and in private hands. This I shall not attempt, either now or hereafter; only remarking that two thousand dollars of the money which passed through Mr. Jackson's hands as Treasurer, July 3, 1856, came from a Kansas Settlers' Society in Chicago, whose president was Peter Page, through William B. Ogden, a prominent citizen there; and that Colonel Higginson had the expenditure of some three thousand dollars for a party of emigrants which he raised and assisted into Kansas, after his return from Fayal in the early summer of 1856, not in September, as his "Cheerful Yesterdays" records. It was in September that he was in Kansas, where he met Lane and the two rival Governors, Geary and Robinson, of whom he says in the same book:

I formed that day a very unfavorable impression of Governor Geary, and a favorable one of Governor Robinson, and lived to modify both opinions. The former, though vacillating in Kansas, did himself great credit afterwards in the Civil War; while the latter did himself very little credit in Kansas politics, whose bitter hostilities and narrow vindictiveness he was the first to foster [pp. 206, 207].

Colonel Higginson met Lane at Nebraska City, -"a thin man of middle age, in a gray woolen shirt, with keen eyes, smooth tongue, and a suggestion of courteous and even fascinating manners." Lane was then retreating from Kansas in deference to the orders of Geary, the new Governor, but delayed two days at Nebraska City, and made a speech of which Higginson says:

I have seldom heard eloquence more thrilling, more tactful, better adjusted to the occasion. Ralph Waldo Emerson, I remember, was much impressed by a report of this speech as sent by me to some Boston newspaper [p. 204].

I come now to a second series of letters and papers, given to the Society by Amos A. Lawrence, by whom they were collected and to whom most of them were addressed, from twenty-five to thirty years after the events they in part pro

fess to describe. Among these are a letter from myself, one from Colonel Samuel Walker, and the last in the collection, from Rev. John S. Brown, quoting the notes of an unfinished document by E. B. Whitman, in his last illness. My own letter, bearing date Concord, January 26, 1885, and addressed to Mr. Lawrence at Brookline, is as follows:

In your attack on John Brown at the Historical Society, May 8, 1884, you contrasted him very unfavorably with Charles Robinson, who, you said, "was in every respect worthy of the confidence reposed in him by the settlers (of Kansas) and by the (Emigrant Aid) Society." If you still think so highly of him, you will doubtless take pleasure in submitting to the Historical Society the following letter from Robinson to Judge Hanway of Lane, Kansas, which he wrote about six years ago, and before he found it expedient to disown all his former opinions concerning Brown. I copy from a copy sent me by a member of the Kansas Historical Society, on whose files the original letter of Robinson now stands:

HON. JAMES HANWAY,

LAWRENCE, Feb. 5, 1878.

DEAR SIR: Your favor of the 30th ult. is received. I am also in receipt of a letter on the same subject from Mr. Adams. I never had much doubt that Capt. Brown was the author of the blow at Pottawatomie, for the reason that he was the only man who comprehended the situation, and saw the absolute necessity of some such blow, and had the nerve to strike it. I will improve my first leisure to put on paper my views of the situation at that time, and forward them to Mr. Adams.

Very truly,

C. ROBINSON.

The Mr. Adams here mentioned is F. G. Adams, the Secretary of the State Historical Society, whom you perhaps know, as I do. On the 20th of August, 1878, Mr. Adams (who had doubtless heard from Charles Robinson in the six months since the date of his letter abovecited) wrote to me as follows:

Gov. Robinson has expressed the opinion that it will be sometime proven that Capt. Brown was present at the affair (of the Pottawatomie). He thinks the act was a justifiable and necessary one; that the act did in fact have the effect to check the career of wholesale murder which the proslavery men had entered upon, intended to kill or drive from Kansas every outspoken free State man in the Territory.

The original letter of Mr. Adams lies before me as I write. What he thus quotes as Robinson's opinion of Brown's act, is the same to which Robinson gave utterance at Osawatomie, in the summer of 1877, in a public speech which has been reported to me by two Kansas

gentlemen who heard it. It is also the same that Robinson expressed in a public speech at Lawrence in the winter of 1859-60, a printed report of which I have, and which is also on file in the Kansas Historical Rooms at Topeka. I printed in the Transcript, of Dec. 4, 1884 (which I sent you) Robinson's letter of Sept. 14, 1856, commending Brown in the highest terms.

These letters and speeches show that, from 1856 to 1878, Charles Robinson took the same view of Brown's action on the Pottawatomie that I now take, and by no means your view. May I rely on your candor to state this to the Historical Society?1

I was not then a member of this Society, and hardly expected ever to be. Whether Mr. Lawrence ever did submit my letter as requested I cannot say; but he sent it to Robinson, and in the collection I find Robinson's excuse for his change of opinion. He said, under date of February 6, 1885, in substance, that until 1879, twenty-three years after the executions by Brown, he had been ignorant of the character and conduct of the men killed; that Redpath's testimony was that "on which the case chiefly rested," and that upon investigation he found that the men executed "had not even threatened to commit a crime." This statement of the spotless innocence of the Shermans, Doyles, and others, was afterward expanded by him in subsequent letters, and in his volume of 1892. It contrasts sharply with his statement of 1878 that the pro-slavery men had entered upon "a career of wholesale murder, intended to kill or drive from the Territory every outspoken Free State man." One or the other of these sayings of Robinson must have been false. What do contemporary witnesses say?

One of the best of these witnesses was the late John Montgomery Shore, born in North Carolina, in 1832, who settled in Kansas about the time Charles Robinson did, in the summer of 1854. At first he worked for a well-known Ottawa Indian, John T. Jones, in the summers of 1854 and 1855, as Henry Sherman (Dutch Henry) had formerly done. Sherman, after robbing his employer, guided the Missourians to the hospitable house of Jones, which they burned in the summer of 1856. Mr. Shore was well acquainted, from 1854 to 1856, with the settlers on the Pottawatomie, both the free-state men and

1 Papers relating to John Brown, 119, 120; C. Robinson, The Kansas Conflict, 482, 483.

their enemies. Late in the nineteenth century he gave this information to Mr. Connelley the historian, then living at Edwardsville, near Kansas City, where he was a member of a Grand Army post, having been a cavalry soldier in the Civil War from September 18, 1862, to June 16, 1865:

...

He [Mr. Shore] had known Mr. Morse, the grocery-keeper, the Grants, William and Edward Partridge. He knew well, also, the proslavery men about Dutch Henry's Crossing, Allen Wilkinson, the Doyles, the Shermans, . . : and others. The Doyles had lived in a number of the slave states, Alabama, Mississippi, perhaps Tennessee, employed there as "patrollers" and plantation guards, The Missourians had them settle, with their five bloodhounds, on the military road near Henry Sherman's, to capture any slaves that might escape across the Missouri border. This family "were the lowest outfit I ever saw"; . . . The boys and their father were in the employ of Henry Sherman when they would work for anybody; they spent most of their time prowling through the woods and carousing. When Buford's men from Georgia and Carolina came to the Marais des Cygnes, the Doyles almost lived at their camp, and were known to have given them accounts of all the Free State people's doings.

Mr. Shore knew Allen Wilkinson before he was elected to the Territorial Legislature, - knew him in Missouri before either of them came to Kansas. He was always a worthless dangerous man, but much worse after that Legislature passed the "bogus" laws and adjourned. . . . His voice was always for driving out the Free State settlers, and making Kansas a slave state; anyone saying otherwise was guilty of treason. Wilkinson was instrumental in having John Brown and other[s] indicted for treason.

Dutch Henry Sherman was . . . the brains and head of the proslavery men on the Pottawatomie; he had a vineyard and made wine, which he sold, as well as whiskey. He had worked for Ottawa Jones, and robbed him of money and cattle; he also stole cattle from settlers and traders, and was supposed to have killed several people. . . . He often made trips to Missouri to see the slaveholders, and was always in communication with Buford's men after they came in [April, 1856]. In Mr. Shore's opinion, the Free State settlers on the Pottawatomie would have been slain, if John Brown had failed to get in the first blow. Townsley's confession [in 1879] is mainly right, but quite wrong as to the use made by Brown of May 24, and his statement that but for Townsley's refusal to go up the river and point out pro-slavery homes, more would have been killed. Nothing of the kind was asked of him; the 24th was really spent in close consultation with the Free State settlers who had been notified to leave Kansas, and in deciding what