Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/158

150 town and after some parley a treaty was announced. Immediately Brown's suspicious were aroused. He surmised that the governor's party had not thus lightly given up the light for slavery, and he feared that the leading free state politicians had sacrificed the principles for which he was fighting for the sake of the temporary truce. Already the drunken governor was making conciliatory remarks to the crowd in front of the free state hotel, the free state Governor Robinson replying, when John Brown, mounting a piece of timber at the corner of the house, began a fiery speech. "He said that the people of Missouri had come to Kansas to destroy Lawrence; that they had beleaguered the town for two weeks, threatening its destruction; that they came for blood; that he believed, 'without the shedding of blood there is no remission'; and asked for volunteers to go under his command, and attack the pro-slavery camp stationed near Franklin, some four miles from Lawrence. . . . He demanded to know what the terms were. If he understood Governor Shannon's speech, something had been conceded, and he conveyed the idea that the territorial laws were to be observed. Those laws he denounced and spit upon, and would never obey—no! The crowd was fired by his earnestness and a great echoing shout arose: 'No! No! Down with the bogus laws. Lead us out to fight first!' For a moment matters looked serious to the free state leaders who had so ingeniously engineered the compromise, and they hastened to assure Brown