Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Border ruffians also engaged in general violence against Free-State settlements. They burned farms and sometimes murdered Free-State men. Most notoriously, border ruffians twice attacked Lawrence, the Free-State capital of the Kansas Territory. On December 1, 1855, a small army of border ruffians laid siege to Lawrence, but were driven off.
G. Murlin Welch, a historian of the territorial period described the Jayhawkers as bands of men that were willing to fight, kill, and rob for a variety of motives that included defense against pro-slavery "Border Ruffians", abolition, driving pro-slavery settlers from their claims of land, revenge, and/or plunder and personal profit. [19]
On the morning of August 30, 1856, a force of several hundred Border ruffians led by pro-slavery leader John W. Reid entered Osawatomie, in which John Brown and his family were staying at the cabin of the Rev. Samuel Adair, the husband of Brown's half-sister, Florella. 26-year-old Frederick Brown, the only member of the Brown family present ...
For premium support please call: 800-290-4726 more ways to reach us
After taking 11 local free-staters hostage from their homes and fields, the border ruffians forced them into a nearby ravine and began shooting at them. 10 of the men were hit by the fire, five of them fatally. The wife of one of the victims followed the border ruffians to the site, and attempted to give medical treatment to the wounded.
At the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861, Kansas was the newest U.S. state, admitted just months earlier in January. The state had formally rejected slavery by popular vote and vowed to fight on the side of the Union, though ideological divisions with neighboring Missouri, a slave state, had led to violent conflict in previous years and persisted for the duration of the war.
Washington served as a Border Ruffian in a company under the command of Captain Henry Clay Pate. [ 28 ] [ 29 ] [ 30 ] On June 2, 1856, Washington and his company were attacked at their encampment near Baldwin City, Kansas by anti-slavery Free-Stater forces under the leadership of abolitionist John Brown .
The Pottawatomie massacre occurred on the night of May 24–25, 1856, in the Kansas Territory, United States.In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces on May 21, and the telegraphed news of the severe attack on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers—some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles—responded violently.