Five of Brown’s sons—Owen, Jason, Frederick, Salmon, and John, Jr.—had emigrated to Kansas and joined the free-soil cause. When they appealed to their father for help in May 1855, Brown, another son Oliver, and son-in-law Henry Thompson rushed to Kansas and plunged into the conflict with a fury. As captain of the “Liberty Guards,” a quasi-militia company that he himself formed, Brown shortly gained national notoriety as a bold and ruthless leader. For the next several years, murders, bushwhackings, lynchings, and burnings were common occurrences, and the territory was aptly named “Bleeding Kansas.” Atrocity matched atrocity. When pro-slavery forces sacked and burned the town of Lawrence in May 1856, Brown was outraged. Proclaiming himself an instrument of God’s will, he, with four of his sons and three others, deliberately and brutally murdered five pro-slavery men along the banks of Pottawatomie Creek. In the months that followed, Brown terrorized the Missouri-Kansas border by a series of bloody guerrilla attacks that brought him to the attention of the Nation’s abolitionist faction. In late August 1856, about a month before he left Kansas, Brown and his men clashed with pro-slavery Missourians at the small settlement of Osawatomie. That action earned him the nickname “Osawatomie” and cost him the life of his son Frederick. It also hardened his stand against slavery. “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die,” he said, “and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory. I will carry this war into Africa.” Three of John Brown’s most trusted lieutenants in the Harpers Ferry raid: [Illustration: John E. Cook] [Illustration: Aaron D. Stevens] [Illustration: John H. Kagi] The attack on Harpers Ferry was the culmination of a plan Brown had evolved many years before he went to Kansas. By the early 1850’s he had come to believe that a location within the slave States should be selected where raids on slave plantations could be easily carried out and the freed bondsmen sent to safety in the North. Convinced that mountains throughout history had enabled the few to defend themselves against the many, he believed that even against regular Army troops a small force operating from a mountain stronghold could hold out indefinitely and provide sanctuary for freed slaves, who would be supplied with arms to fight for their liberty. Brown had decided, from studying European fortifications and military operations, that somewhere along the Allegheny Mountain chain a small force could achieve those objectives.