Pottawatomie massacre

The Pottawatomie massacre occurred from May 23 and continued until May 26, 1856, with the killings occurring on the night of May 24 and morning of May 25. In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, by pro-slavery forces on May 21, and the severe attack on May 22 on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner for speaking out against slavery in Kansas , John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers—some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles—made a violent reply. Just north of Pottawatomie Creek, in Franklin County, Kansas, they killed five pro-slavery settlers, in front of their families. This soon became the most famous of the many violent episodes of the "Bleeding Kansas" period, during which a state-level civil war in Kansas Territory was described as a "tragic prelude" to the American Civil War which soon followed. "Bleeding Kansas" involved conflicts between pro- and anti-slavery settlers over whether Kansas Territory would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. It is also John Brown's most questionable act, both to his friends and his enemies. In the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass , it was "a terrible remedy for a terrible malady."
John Brown was particularly affected by the sacking of Lawrence, in which the Douglas County Sheriff Samuel Jones on May 2 led a posse that destroyed the presses and type of the Kansas Free State and the Herald of Freedom, Kansas's two abolitionist newspapers, the fortified Free State Hotel, and the house of Charles Robinson, the free-state militia commander-in-chief and leader of the "free state" government, established in opposition to the "bogus" pro-slavery territorial government.

Wikipedia