Border War: Kansas Nebraska Act 1854

The Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri. To balance the number of “slave states” and “free states,” the northern region of what was then Massachusetts was admitted into the United States as a free state to become Maine. On March 30, 1,000 Missourians come to Lawrence to vote for a pro-slavery territorial constitution.

In October 1855, John Brown, Sr. arrives near Osawatomie to join his sons.

On November 21, 1855, Free-Stater Charles Dow is shot and killed by pro-slavery settler Franklin N. Coleman. On December 1, 1855, a small army of Missourians, acting under the command of Douglas County, Kansas Sheriff Samuel J. Jones, entered Kansas and laid siege to Lawrence.

During the siege, the main body of the invaders were encamped on the Wakarusa bottoms, some six miles (10 km) from Lawrence. The invading army numbered nearly 1,500 men. They were indifferently armed as a whole, although they had broken into the United States Arsenal at Liberty, Missouri, and stolen guns, cutlasses and cannon, and such munitions of war as they required.

In Lawrence, John Brown and James Lane had mustered Free-State settlers into a defending army and erected barricades. No attack on Lawrence was made. A treaty of peace quelled the disorder, and its provisions were generally accepted. The only fatal casualty occurring during the siege was of a Free-State man named Thomas Barber, who had come to the defense of Lawrence. His death was memorialized in a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier entitled Burial of Barber.