Author: Kirke Mechem
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Published: 2015-08-04
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 9781332147885
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Excerpt from The Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 9 of 26: 1940 On The night of May 24-25, 1856, John Brown, with four sons, a son-in-law and two other Kansas settlers, made a raid on Proslavery settlers on Mosquito creek and Pottawatomie creek, killing three Doyles, Allen Wilkinson and William Sherman. At the time a special congressional house committee was in Kansas investigating the Kansas troubles. It consisted of John Sherman of Ohio and William A. Howard of Michigan, both Antislavery in sentiment, and Mordecai Oliver of Missouri, a Proslavery Democrat. As the Pottawatomie massacre occurred after the date of the appointment of the special committee the Antislavery majority took the ground that these outrages were outside the scope of their powers. The minority member, Oliver, differed, pointed out that the majority had taken testimony concerning this class of events in Kansas when it supported their partisan purpose, and therefore he insisted that the Pottawatomie massacre be investigated, and on his own responsibility took affidavits of Mrs. Doyle and her surviving minor son, Mrs. Wilkinson and James Harris, who was employed by the Sherman brothers, of whom there were three, Henry, William and Peter, Dutch Henry, Dutch Bill and Dutch Pete. These papers were printed with Oliver's minority report, and regardless of the merits of the controversy among the members of the committee at the time, the historian owes to Mordecai Oliver a deep debt of gratitude for his stubborn partisan insistence that these be made a matter of permanent record. In the affidavit of James Harris, whose testimony applied only to the incidents surrounding the murder of Dutch Bill, he stated that three men were spending the night at his house: William Sherman, John S. Whiteman, and the other man I did not know. They were stopping with me that night. They had bought a cow from Henry Sherman, and intended to go home the next morning. When John Browns band entered Harris house, the men were taken out separately and questioned. Harris omitted comment on Whiteman, but the stranger and Harris himself appear to have given answers satisfactory to John Brown and were returned to the house. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
