A Plea for Captain John Brown

The border ruffians were a loosely affiliated pro-slavery militia of raiders who migrated into the Kansas Territory from Missouri, largely at the behest of slave owner Jefferson Buford. Buford organized his expedition to secure the ongoing existence of slavery by way of voter fraud, intimidation, assassinations, and property damage. Their notorious violence became a key feature of the Bleeding Kansas era; John Brown’s troops famously fought against the ruffians, and Thoreau quotes Brown saying that “[t]hey had a perfect right to be hung” (12).

This term references Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan English statesman and revolutionary who became the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. Cromwell used violence to obtain power and establish his theocratic dictatorship; he felt that he was called by God to strip the Church of England of its institutional power. Both Thoreau and Brown were noted admirers of Cromwell, praising his direct action, religious devotion, and “Spartan habits” (11) such as simplicity, austerity, and modesty. Thoreau’s usage of the term to elevate Brown probably incorporates several of these definitions simultaneously.

Free-State men were a tactically varied band of abolitionist settlers in the Kansas Territory affiliated with the Bleeding Kansas period. Concentrated in the strongholds of Lawrence, Osawatomie, and Topeka, among others, these forces acted to ensure that any new states formed from the Kansas Territory entered the US with abolitionist policies. As the numbers of Free-State men increased, pro-slavery actors became more desperate, leading to increasing violence on both sides. Brown and “several of his sons” (3) were some of the most infamous of the Free-State men known to assassinate slave owners and border ruffians who were suspected of advancing the pro-slavery cause.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 incorporated the Kansas and Nebraskan Territories into the United States. The Act was controversial among abolitionists for its concessions to the pro-slavery camp. The Act did not explicitly allow for slavery in the newly formed states but stipulated that its legality would be contingent on voters. The failure of pacifistic abolitionists to secure legislative victories primed the Kansas Territory for a regional conflict on the question of slavery, leading to the Bleeding Kansas period.

The Liberator was a weekly abolitionist newspaper printed in Boston and disseminated throughout New England. The magazine was religiously motivated and had a largely African-American readership. It advocated for an immediate and unmitigated end to slavery, though it did not directly advance political solutions. Prominent abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison edited the paper, and regularly appealed to his readers’ moral conscience. Thoreau rebukes Garrison as a spineless man eschewing advocating for direct action to protect profits. Garrison was not in favor of the Civil War until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.