FORT SCOTT, Kan. — It was the war before the war.

During the period known as Bleeding Kansas, pro-slavery and abolitionist settlers killed one another in Kansas and Missouri between 1854 and the start of the Civil War in 1861.

To shed light on the cross-border violence, Fort Scott National Historic Site at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 25, will present a “Border Showdown Evening Tour,” with interpreters describing aspects of Bleeding Kansas, focusing on 1860.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed in Congress in 1854, established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and established that the decision on slavery in each territory would be decided by popular vote. It negated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which established Missouri as the northernmost boundary for slaveholding states.

Residents of Missouri and other southern slaveholding states saw Kansas as a promising new slave state. Northern abolitionists had another idea and settlers poured into the territory from each side.

Revenge

Terry Ramsey, museum coordinator at the Bushwhacker Museum in Nevada, Mo., said many Vernon County residents claimed land in Kansas so they could cast their vote on the Kansas question. She said many of the land claims probably wouldn’t hold up in any court today.

Vote after fraudulent vote was staged, each marked by violence on both sides. Barak Geersten, park ranger at the Fort Scott National Historic Site, said one election featured four times as many ballots cast as registered voters.

Ramsey said for most at the time, slavery was not the clear-cut issue it is now. She said it’s difficult to get into the mind-set of the people back then. She said only wealthy whites owned slaves in Missouri, and most Missourians didn’t own slaves.

Ramsey said many slave owners worked along with their slaves in the fields, and ate meals together at the table. She said she recognizes that doesn’t change the fact that one owned the other as property.

The period was marked by “revenge, retaliation and retribution,” she said.

“It very quickly became ‘Where do your loyalties lie?’” Ramsey said.

The violence before the Civil War mostly happened in Bourbon County, Kan., and Vernon County, Mo., said Geersten.

Competing hotels

Geersten said after the military abandoned the fort in 1853, it sold the buildings in 1855. Primarily pro-slavery settlers from Missouri populated the town, but there also were free-state settlers in the area.

On the eastern side of the fort property is a building that became the Fort Scott Hotel, known as a hotel for abolitionists and other free-staters. A building on the western side of the property was the Western Hotel, housing pro-slavery boarders.

To complicate things more, Geersten said, both free-staters and pro-slavery boarders stayed in each hotel. William Campbell, the owner of the Fort Scott Hotel, for free-staters, was a pro-slavery entrepreneur, a member of the pro-slavery territorial legislature, and joined the Union Army during the Civil War. Geersten said Campbell’s politics were ambiguous.

A champion

James Montgomery, a militant abolitionist based in Mound City, was well known around Fort Scott, Geersten said.

The park ranger said free-state men living in Bourbon County were driven from their homes in 1856 by the so-called border ruffians from Missouri. They tried to return to their homes in 1857, but their claims were thwarted by the pro-slavery territorial government.

“They found a champion in James Montgomery,” Geersten said. Montgomery began sporadic raids on Fort Scott beginning in late 1857.

The Marais des Cygnes Massacre on May 19, 1858, some 30 miles north of Fort Scott, provided another provocation for Montgomery, Geersten said. A pro-slavery faction of about 30 men led by Georgia native Charles Hamilton captured 11 unarmed free-state men, lined them up in a ravine and shot them. Five of the free-state men died. Hamilton and his men fled into Missouri.

Geersten said Montgomery had reason to believe Hamilton had planned the massacre at the Western Hotel. In response, Montgomery traveled with his men to Fort Scott and crashed a burning wagon into the side of the Western Hotel. The building didn’t catch fire. Montgomery retreated to the Fort Scott Hotel for a leisurely breakfast.

Territorial Gov. James Denver presided over a tense peace convention at the Fort Scott Hotel in June 1858, Geersten said.

Montgomery’s exploits don’t quite reach the level of those of another militant abolitionist, John Brown. Brown had gained notoriety in May 1856 near Pottawatomie, where he, his sons and others murdered five pro-slavery men who had been harassing anti-slavery settlers. Brown and his men used broadswords in the bloody, gruesome killings. Brown was motivated by revenge for the sacking of free-state stronghold Lawrence by pro-slavery forces a few days before.

Brown returned to Kansas in the summer of 1858, after traveling east to raise money for what he told benefactors was further action in Kansas. By then, the violence had diminished and the sides were at a stalemate. Brown’s real plan was in Virginia, at the armory at Harpers Ferry.

Brown built and occupied a fortified cabin near the site of the Marais des Cygnes Massacre a few weeks after the event.

Minister of the devil

Montgomery’s raid on Fort Scott on Dec. 16,1858, was meant to free Montgomery’s comrade, Benjamin Rice, who Geersten said for some reason was being held in the Fort Scott Hotel. Rice was being held for alleged crimes committed before the territorial governor had issued a general amnesty.

During a firefight, court deputy John Little, also a shopkeeper at the general store, was shot and killed as he was preparing to shoot from the store window. Montgomery and his men liberated Rice and looted some goods before retreating.

Geersten said it had been Little and pro-slavery Judge Joseph Williams who in April stood at the door of the Fort Scott Hotel and defended free-state resident George Crawford from George Clarke and a crowd of other border ruffians that had gathered to harm Crawford, some of whom took part a month later in the Marais des Cygnes Massacre.

Geersten said John Brown had planned the raid with Montgomery, but Montgomery and his men vetoed a plan by Brown to torch the town, so he didn’t participate.

That account doesn’t ring true to Eric Carton, author of “Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America” (Free Press, 2006). Carton said he didn’t think Brown would advocate the indiscriminate burning of a town. He said Brown targeted his victims carefully.

Little’s fiancee, Sene Campbell, the daughter of the Fort Scott Hotel’s owner, wrote an angry letter to Montgomery in January 1859, warning him that though she was a girl, she could fire a pistol and would use it on him should they ever meet. She called him “a mean minister of the devil and a very superior one, too.”

Brown in Vernon County

Before John Brown left Kansas to undertake his plan at Harpers Ferry, he had one more thing to accomplish, and it was in Vernon County, Mo.

“John Brown was nothing if not his own best P.R. man,” said Ramsey, at the Bushwhacker Museum. Ramsey called Brown’s theft, or liberation, of 11 slaves from their owners in northwestern Vernon County as probably the most notable event in the county before the Civil War began. She said she was no admirer of Brown or his tactics.

Carton also said the plan garnered Brown publicity from his eastern benefactors who had given him money for an action in Kansas.

According to Carton, Brown and his men crossed into Vernon County on the night of Dec. 20, 1858. Brown’s entourage included two who would later join Brown in Virginia. Their first stop was the Hicklan farm, where they held Hicklan at gunpoint while they liberated his five slaves and ransacked the house. Hicklan’s first name isn’t given in the account. Five more slaves were liberated at the home of John Larue, where Larue and a visitor also were taken hostage. They stole a covered wagon, horses and oxen to transport the freed slaves. Another group of Brown’s men went to the home of David Cruise. Cruise was shot and killed when he grabbed a pistol. They freed one female slave from that property.

Abolitionist invasion

Newspapers on both sides of the state line condemned the action as an unnecessary provocation when the violence had diminished. Ramsey said it was viewed in Missouri as a home invasion and theft of property. A $3,000 reward was offered for Brown’s arrest.

“For Missouri slaveholders, the war that John Brown had brought across the border represented the very kind of abolitionist invasion they had feared for years,” wrote Jeremy Neely, of Lockwood, Mo., in his book “The Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line” (University of Missouri Press, 2007).

The large group met up with Montgomery at Mound City, Carton’s account continued. While some of Brown’s men took the freed slaves to Brown’s base in Osawatomie, Brown, Montgomery and their men stationed themselves on the border with Missouri waiting for a retaliatory attack that never came. The slave-owner hostages were released unharmed by Brown’s men.

The 11 former slaves remained with Brown in Osawatomie for a month before they traveled north. As they approached Nebraska near Atchison, a Missouri posse gathered on the other side of a creek Brown’s group had to cross. The freed slaves were given rifles and taught how to use them. Brown and his men marched across the creek ahead of the wagons, though the Missouri posse outnumbered them three- or four-to-one. The posse members panicked and ran away without a shot fired.

Carton wrote that there were 12 who took the ferry from Detroit into Canada, when the former slaves reached their destination. One of the former slave women had given birth and named her infant son John Brown.

Brown was hanged Dec. 2, 1859, after his unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., on Oct. 16. He had hoped the raid would inspire a widespread slave revolt.

Montgomery later became a Union colonel and commanded a regiment of black Union soldiers in South Carolina, dying in 1871.

Kansas was admitted as a free state on Jan. 29, 1861, when U.S. senators from the South, who had blocked admitting a free state, withdrew after the Southern states seceded. The start of the Civil War followed in April.