A group of followers of radical abolitionist…
May 1856 CE
John Brown had been particularly affected by the sacking of Lawrence, in which the Douglas County Sheriff Samuel Jones led a posse that destroyed two abolitionist newspaper offices (the Kansas Free State and the Herald of Freedom), the fortified Free State Hotel, and the house of Charles Robinson (the free-state militia commander-in-chief and leader of the Free State government established in opposition to the pro-slavery Territorial Government).
A Douglas County grand jury had ordered the abatement because the hotel "had been used as a fortress" and an "arsenal" the previous winter and the "seditious" newspapers were indicted because "they had urged the people to resist the enactments passed" by the territorial governor.
The violence against abolitionists is accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Dr. John H Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose."
Brown is outraged by both the violence of pro-slavery forces and by what he sees as a weak and cowardly response by the anti-slavery partisans and the Free State settlers, whom he describes as cowards, or worse.
In addition, two days before this massacre, Brown had learned about the caning of abolitionist Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks on the floor of Congress.
In the two years prior to the massacre, there had been eight killings in Kansas Territory attributable to slavery politics, and none in the vicinity of the massacre.
The Brown faction—it remains unclear whether or not John Brown himself was directly involved—kills five in a single night, and the massacre is the match to the powder keg that precipitates the bloodiest period in "Bleeding Kansas" history, a three-month period of retaliatory raids and battles in which twenty-nine people will die.
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