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Before the Union troops were fired upon at Fort Sumpter in 1861, initiating the Civil War, violence over a state’s ability to remain a slave state or establish itself as a free state had been growing for over several years. It was Kansas, when the Missouri Compromise (which had federally established Missouri as a slave state and the Kansas territory free) was overturned by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which allowed the territories to vote whether they wanted to enter the Union as a slave or free state) that earned the name “Bleeding Kansas” due to the border war with Missouri that took place between abolitionists and slavery supporters.

Combatants flowed in from all over the country to either assist the Kansas “free-staters” or work to make Kansas a slave state. John Brown and his family came to Osawatomie, Kansas from New York to assist the free-staters. He used the home of his step-sister, Florella Adair, as his headquarters, and this log cabin is now the John Brown Museum.

So it was this past Thursday, as I was driving north on US 169 from a work meeting toward home, that I decided not to pass the Osawatomie exit for the museum yet again. In a few moments I was in front of the stone structure that has been built over the original cabin to preserve it. It is a two-room structure with a loft, with the main room containing the large fireplace and sitting room where, at some point, John Brown’s radical but peaceful abolitionist views turned violent, resulting in the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre, in which he and his sons in 1856 took murderous vengeance against acts committed by Missouri marauders in Lawrence, KS earlier in the year. Brown was captured and hanged in Virginia, culminating in the Yankee song “John Brown’s Body.”

Oddly, it was also in the same counties in eastern Kansas where the South launched its final, fruitless skirmishes to draw Sherman’s attention away from Atlanta, before General Lee surrendered at Appomattox in 1865. The stop at the museum this week was a great detour on the way home, and hopefully the first of several Civil War detours on this, the 150th anniversary year of the battle of Gettysburg.

This entry was posted on January 5, 2013 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Travel with tags adair house osawatomie, border war, civil war kansas, freestate, john brown, john brown museum, john brown's body, pottawatomie creek massacre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.