“I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave.”

So said Frederick Douglass of the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown. At Pottawatomie, this hero of the Second American Revolution also drew the blood of counterrevolutionaries.

170 years ago last month, Brown led the so-called “Pottawatomie Massacre.” Bar far from viewing this episode as some abstract political atrocity, revolutionaries understand it as part of the struggle for democratic rights, like the freedom of the press.

In the decades preceding the American Civil War, the slaveholding planters and the federal government suppressed abolitionist ideas whenever they could. Congress received over 300,000 petitions for the abolition of slavery in 1836, but for the next eight years Congress imposed a “gag rule” automatically tabling petitions on the question.

With the exception of Kentucky, abolitionist papers were outright banned across the slave states. Even wealthy textile manufacturers in Boston attempted to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the The Liberator, an influential abolitionist newspaper.

Bleeding Kansas

In the 1850s, the struggle over the “peculiar institution” exploded in “Bleeding Kansas,” a preview of the coming Civil War.

Under the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 declared that the status of slavery would be decided by a popular vote of the territory’s settlers. In response, pro- and antislavery forces flooded into the newly formed Kansas Territory. They formed rival governments based in rival capitals and fought a vicious low-grade guerrilla war from 1854 to 1859.

On one side were “Free-Staters” or “Jayhawkers,” antislavery small farmers and tradesmen like John Brown and his sons. On the other were “Border Ruffians,” who came from neighboring Missouri hoping to impose a pro-slavery Democrat government on the new territory.

Pro-slavery thugs not only cast fraudulent ballots, but also terrorized and murdered “free-soil” farmers. The watchwords of the pro-slavery press were, “War to the knife and knife to the hilt!” and “Death to the Abolitionists!”

Sacking of Lawrence

In February 1856, Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones organized a 1,500-man militia composed of pro-slavery Missourans to arrest free-staters in Lawrence, Kansas’s antislavery capital. The residents of Lawrence organized their own 800-strong militia and drove Jones out, wounding him in the process.

In May, Israel B. Donalson, a pro-slavery US Marshal, proclaimed the Free-State Legislature unlawful. Jones returned with a posse of 800 men to take his revenge on Lawrence. On May 21, they destroyed the presses of two abolitionist papers, along with the fortified Free State Hotel, and the free-state governor’s home.

Until the sacking of Lawrence, the abolitionists had not retaliated. Indeed, many abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, were opposed to using physical force, even in self-defense.

For his part, John Brown rebuked abolitionism’s pacifist wing: “These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!” Brown and his sons, whom the Ruffians singled out for their tenacity, were prepared to meet material force with material force in defense of the Free-State Legislature and the abolitionist press.

On the night of May 24–25, Brown, four of his sons, and two other comrades captured and hacked to death five proslavery activists with broadswords just north of Pottawatomie Creek. The bloodiest period of Bleeding Kansas followed, with another 29 retaliatory killings on either side.

The ruthless forces of reaction showed no quarter, and John Brown—who was later executed after the famous raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859—answered them in the only language they understood.

Writing about the incident a quarter century later, Frederick Douglas declared:

He never lost sight of what he called his greater work—the liberation of all the slaves in the United States … He met persecution with persecution, war with war, strategy with strategy, assassination and house-burning with signal and terrible retaliation, till even the bloodthirsty propagandists of slavery were compelled to cry for quarter … To call out a murderer at midnight, and without note or warning, judge or jury, run him through with a sword, was a terrible remedy for a terrible malady.