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.

The battles of Black Jack (where Brown, now a wanted man and outnumbered two to one, captured the man deputized to catch him) and Osawatomie in June and August of 1856, sealed John Brown’s fame as a fearsome guerilla fighter. Brown continued to evade capture, but a force of 250 men killed his son Frederick and burned the free-state town of Osawatomie to the ground. His son Jason later recalled that, while watching the flames, his father said, "God sees it. I have only a short time to live - only one death to die, and I will die fighting this cause.

The sight of federal marshals and slave catchers on the streets of Philadelphia, Boston, or even North Elba incensed abolitionist and even larger numbers of more moderate Northerners. A fugitive in chains being returned to slavery and the South personalized the issue and made it real for thousands of Northerners for whom, up to this point, slavery had been a hazy abstraction. For an already committed abolitionist like John Brown, the new law was an abomination.

Just as [William] Parker’s violence was both understandable and probably unwise, so was the reaction in the South. Blacks had murdered a white Southerners acting wholly legally, with the white North figuratively looking on. The South saw treason, and to pacify the region, [Castner] Hanway and the rest were tried for this crime; Maryland attorney general William Brent was imported to direct the case.

Fugitive slave incidents, long predating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, raised for North and South  alike troubling issues. For Southerners, escaping slaves both provided active satire on their idealized claims about slavery and suggested most directly their frightening dependence on others without commitment to their system. For the North, these escapees most movingly put the peculiar institution in human terms, while mocking the favorite conservative pretense that the North had nothing to do with slavery.