Louis S. Warren Read Online Free PDF Page B

or get to work at neighboring farms or towns. When a pro-slavery party visited the Cody house in 1855, Isaac evaded them again. But they took nine-year-old Will’s horse, Prince: “The loss of my faithful pony nearly broke my heart and bankrupted me in business, as I had nothing to ride.” 33 Julia Cody remembered that when they stole her horse, “I was left without anything to ride for the cows, or to go to the store, or anything. We felt all broke up. . . .” The raiders stole some of Isaac Cody’s best horses as well, “and they stole all of Father’s machinery, such as [the] mowing machine, rakes, and everything.” They even “took our small wagon and Plow.” 34 As at the Codys’, so throughout eastern Kansas. Raiders from both sides burned businesses, destroyed farm fields, and broke down fences and barns.
    The region’s violence grew most extreme after mid-1856, when pro-slavery “border ruffians” from Missouri plundered the town of Lawrence, killing one man and looting shops by the score. Several nights later, an abolitionist mob led by John Brown and two of his sons knocked at the doors of a small pro-slavery settlement on Pottawatomie Creek. Taking five men out of their homes, ignoring the pleas of their desperate families, Brown’s party shot, stabbed, and dismembered their victims. 35
    John Brown sought slavery’s abolition. The Codys, like most Kansas settlers, wanted only a ban on slavery in Kansas. Nonetheless, pro-slavery forces lumped them all together as “abolitionists,” and they suffered fearsome retribution for Brown’s raid. The Cody family’s sense of vulnerability during this time of terror was compounded by Isaac Cody’s frequent lengthy absences. Like many Kansas men, he moved from place to place, not daring to return to his family for fear of being murdered. When he did come home, he often brought Free State crowds with him. The Cody home became the site of Free Kansas rallies, complete with speeches by visiting Free Soil candidates, angering the pro-slavery neighbors all the more. An election in 1855 gave control of the first territorial legislature to pro-slavery settlers. Free State voters, infuriated by blatant fraud and intimidation at the polls, refused to recognize the territorial government and elected their own legislature, which met at Topeka to petition the U.S. Congress for admission to the Union as a free state. Isaac Cody won a seat in the Topeka legislature, railing against the armies of drunken “Pukes” who were stealing Kansas elections by arriving en masse from Missouri and casting votes as Kansas residents. He may have been an agent to recruit settlers for the Free State cause in Kansas. His town of Grasshopper Falls was a center of Free State activity. 36
    Isaac Cody’s absence required the family to make their way without him much of the time, and to contemplate the terrifying possibility of losing him forever. A family that lost its primary breadwinner easily slipped into poverty, and there was no social safety net beyond the goodwill of neighbors, whom the Codys understandably mistrusted. All the while, the open hostility of pro-slavery factions reinforced the family’s constant sense of impending destruction. As Will Cody put it in his autobiography many years later, “We were almost daily visited by some of the pro-slavery men, who helped themselves to anything they saw fit, and frequently compelled my mother and sisters to cook for them, and to otherwise submit to a great deal of bad treatment.” And always, there were more threats against the life of Isaac Cody. “Hardly a day passed without some of them inquiring ‘where the old man was,’ saying they would kill him on sight.” 37
    On the rare occasions when they saw him, the family’s fears for him only grew. Julia Cody recalled that “whenever Father came home he had to come in after