morning and induced to surrender. Brown thus gained control of a
number of horses and other supplies and began to arrange terms for
the exchange of his son and Captain Pate as prisoners of war. The
negotiations were interrupted, however, by the arrival of Colonel Sumner
with United States troops, who restored the horses and other booty and
disbanded all the troops. With the Colonel was a deputy marshal with
warrants for the arrest of the Browns. When ordered to proceed with his
duty, however, the marshal was so overawed that, even though a federal
officer was present, he merely remarked, "I do not recognize any one for
whom I have warrants."

After the capture of Captain Pate at Black Jack early in June, little is
known about Brown and his troops for two months. Apart from an encounter
of opposing forces near Osawatomie in which he and his band were
engaged, Brown took no share in the open fighting between the organized
companies of opposing forces, and his part in the irregular guerrilla
warfare of the period is uncertain. Towards the close of the war one of
his sons was shot by a preacher who alleged that he had been robbed
by the Browns. After peace had been restored to Kansas by the vigorous
action of Governor Geary, Brown left the scene and never again took an
active part in the local affairs of the Territory.

John Brown's influence upon the course of affairs in Kansas, like
William Lloyd Garrison's upon the general anti-slavery movement of the
country, has been greatly misunderstood and exaggerated. Brown's object
and intention were fundamentally contradictory to those of the freestate
settlers. They strove to build a free commonwealth by legal and
constitutional methods. He strove to inaugurate a revolution which would
extend to all pro-slavery States and result in universal emancipation.
John Brown was in Kansas only one year, and he never made himself at one
with those who should have been his fellow-workers but went his solitary
way. Only in three instances did he pretend to cooperate with the
regular freestate forces. He could not work with them because his
conception of the means to be adopted to attain the end was different
from theirs. Probably before he left the Territory in 1856, he
had realized that his work in Kansas was a failure and that the
law-and-order forces were too strong for the execution of his plans.
Certain it is that within a few weeks after his departure he had
transferred the field of