It was in December when rumor that the governor and his pro-slavery followers planned to surround Lawrence came to the Browns. On getting this news, they at once agreed to break camp and go to Lawrence. The band, approaching the town at sunset, loomed strangely on the horizon: an old horse, a homely wagon, and seven stalwart men armed with pikes, swords, pistols and guns. John Brown was immediately put in command of a company. Negotiations had commenced between Governor Shannon and the principal leaders of the free-state men. They had a force of some five hundred men to defend Lawrence. Night and day they were busy fortifying the town with embankments and circular earthworks. On Sunday Governor Shannon entered the town, and after some parley a treaty was announced. The terms of the treaty were kept secret, but Brown wrote jubilantly to New York that the Kansas invasion was over. The Missourians had been sent home without fighting any battles, burning any infant towns, or smashing a single Abolitionist press. “Free-state men,” he said, “have only hereafter to retain the footing they have gained, and Kansas is free.” Developments in Kansas did not please the powerful slavocracy. Furious representatives hurried to Washington. And President Pierce, who had once sent a battleship to Boston to bring back one trembling, manacled slave, denounced the free-state men of Kansas as lawless revolutionists, deprived them of all support from the Federal government, and threatened them with the penalty for “treasonable insurrection.” Regular troops were put into the hands of the Kansas slave power, and armed bands from the South appeared, one from Georgia encamping on the “swamp of the swan” near the Brown settlement. Surveying instruments in hand and followed by his “helpers”--chain carriers, axman and marker--John Brown sauntered into their camp one May morning. He was taken for a government surveyor and consequently “sound.” The Georgians talked freely. “We’ve come to stay,” they said. “We won’t make no war on them as minds their own business. But all the Abolitionists, such as them damned Browns over there, we’re going to whip, drive out, or kill--any way to get shut of them, by God!”[16] They mentioned their intended victims by name, and John Brown calmly wrote down every word they said in his surveyor’s book. On May 21 the pro-slavery forces swooped down on Lawrence, burned and sacked it. Its citizens stood by trembling and raised no hand in defense.