John Brown

John Brown appears in the account as a new settler in Kansas whose attack at Pottawatomie Creek followed the raid on Lawrence in May 1856. His actions belong to the escalating border conflict, and the book later uses the violence associated with his name as a point of comparison for wartime killings.

The Pottawatomie Creek attack

On May 22, 1856, Border Ruffians attacked Lawrence, an abolitionist stronghold. Two days later, Brown and his sons went to three isolated cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and killed five pro-slavery men and boys. The account stresses that none of the five had taken part in the raid on Lawrence, distinguishing them from the attackers Brown was responding to.

The attack is presented amid a cycle of retaliation between pro-slavery and Free-Soilers forces. After Free-Soilers gained control in Kansas in a subsequent round of elections, Kansas riders crossed into Missouri to carry out further violence. The book describes this wider conflict as continuing for years, with attacks, destruction, and revenge spreading along the border.

A name used to measure wartime violence

Brown’s role recurs later as a comparison. In the account of Jim Crow Chiles’s wartime actions, Chiles and his associates kill Union Captain Daniel H. David and his men, and the passage likens the killings to Brown’s earlier attack. This reference does not make Brown a participant in that later episode; it shows how the Pottawatomie violence had become a measure for describing the conflict’s brutality.

Across these appearances, Brown is defined less through personal background than through the consequences and memory of a particular act. The first episode places his violence within the reprisals following Lawrence; the later allusion makes it part of the language through which the book conveys the continuing violence of the border war.