Kagi, John Henry

Life Span
to
    Full name
    John Henry Kagi
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    Occupation
    Military
    Attorney or Judge
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    John Henry Kagi (Villard, 1910)

    Scholarship
    John Henry Kagi was the best educated of all the raiders, but was largely self-taught. Many admirably written letters survive as the productions of his pen, in the New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post, and the National Era. He was, moreover, an able man of business, besides being an excellent debater and speaker. He was an expert stenographer and a total abstainer. His father was the respected village blacksmith in Bristolville, Ohio, whose family was of Swiss descent, the name being originally Kagy. John A. Kagi was born at Bristolville, March 15, 1835; and was killed October 17, 1859. In 1854-55 ne taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia, where he obtained a personal knowledge of slavery. This resulted in such abolition manifestations on his part, that he was compelled to leave for Ohio under a pledge never to return to Hawkinstown. Kagi then went to Nebraska City, Nebraska, where he was admitted to the bar. He next entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane's parties. He enlisted in A. D. Stevens's ("Colonel Whipple's") Second Kansas Militia, and was captured in 1856 by United States troops. Kagi was imprisoned first at Lecompton and then at Tecumseh, but was finally liberated. He was assaulted and severely injured by Judge Elmore, the pro-slavery judge, who struck him over the head with a gold headed cane, on January 31, 1857. Kagi drew his revolver and shot the Judge in the groin. Elmore then fired three times and shot Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. Kagi was long in recovering from his wounds. After a visit to his Ohio home he returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner.
    Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 679.
    How to Cite This Page: "Kagi, John Henry," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6014.