LF: It fascinates me when people say, “Why won’t gun owners compromise?”

I've come across two incidences of private ownership of cannons in my nineteenth century reading. Both occur in Territorial Kansas, where the Kansas-Nebraska Act had left the question of whether Kansas (and any other territory) would have slavery or not up to the people there in the hopes that this would spare the nation any political turmoil. The theory was that if you took the slavery question out of Washington, it became a local matter that no one much cared about except locals. There's a huge deal of really interesting background here, but I'm just going to hit the high points on the way to the cannons.

The problem with letting the local people decide for or against slavery, aside from the slavery, is that it doesn't really resolve anything. Specifically, what was the legal status of human property in Kansas before those locals decided one way or the other? If you opposed slavery, it was that slavery was a creature of mere municipal law with no explicit sanction in the law of the nation. Thus, Kansas was free until voted slave. If you were for slavery, then slavery was national law already and applied in Kansas until the territory voted otherwise. You can make a decent argument either way.

Missouri's most enslaved areas lay adjacent to Kansas and they weren't about to just sit by and let a bunch of abolitionists, backed by wealthy New England corporations, set up shop next door. From Kansas' very first election, for a delegate to Congress on November 29, 1854, they came over the border in organized bands. They had expenses paid by major planters and activities coordinated through masonic lodges. The job was to go to the polls and vote, despite the Kansas-Nebraska Act clearly saying that only actual residents of Kansas could do so. If anybody objected, or anybody not looking “sound on the goose” (proslavery) tried to vote, then they would make trouble. One fellow managed to cast a vote by lying about his proslavery bona fides, at which point the crowd literally carried him aloft. Another, John Wakefield, objected strenuously to all of this. He was threatened credibly enough that he took refuge with the election judges and claimed their protection for the day.

But there's no cannon in that story. Lots of guns and knives, though. The cannon came out for the March 30, 1855 elections. For these, Kansans would elect a legislature that could, in principle, hold an immediate vote on whether or not to have slavery in Kansas. They would also be in charge and so shape the development of the state thoroughly to their liking. The Missourians wouldn't miss that and came over in the thousands. They included a future governor of the state (Claiborne Fox Jackson) and just-former (and stil not aware that he wouldn't be re-elected) Senator David Rice Atchison. Atchison was instrumental in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He came to Kansas that day boasting that he and his border ruffians would take the territory, boasting of the eleven hundred men from his own county who had come to vote

and if that ain’t enough we can send five thousand-enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory

This man had recently been President Pro Tempore of the Senate, incidentally.

Atchison wasn't kidding. Edward Chapman was present that day and later told his story to a congressional committee sent out to investigate:

They claimed that they had a right to come here and vote; all they asked was to vote here peaceably, and if they could not do it peaceably they must resort to some other means. Most of them had double-barreled shot-guns, and guns of various descriptions, and most of them had side-arms. I saw a couple pieces of artillery.

That's not figurative artillery. Chapman saw the proslavery men settle down in a large camp near his house, so he went out to have a talk. He recognized Claiborne Jackson by sight and got introduced around, all very pleasant. They just wanted to vote, you see? Peaceably, even!

Chapman and some associates of his left the camp and he went on to Lawrence, where a fair helping of the Missourians had gathered. (Others went to attend other polling places.) He got near to the Lawrence polls before one of the Missourians called him aside and asked point-blank if Lawrence would give them any trouble. Chapman thought probably not, probably taking the lesson from all the weaponry that the proslavery men had on hand as one tends to. The other guy said he hoped Chapman was right. Chapman answered to the effect that Lawrence did have men enough to make a fight of it if they caused trouble.

Oh really? The other guy

thought there would be no use in doing that, and invited me to go down a short distance with him. We went to a wagon, and he lifted up a cloth and some blankets, and remarked to me that there was a couple of “bull-dogs” they had, loaded with musket-balls. They were all covered up in the hay, with the exception of the rims of them; they were a couple of brass cannon.

The cannon wasn't used that day, but the Missourians didn't haul it all the way for the hell of it and they proved, quite often, that they were willing to use more than threats of violence to carry Kansas elections. They would vote peacefully, unless someone gave them reason to do otherwise. In another district, they literally tried to knock down the cabin where the voting took place and held the election workers at gunpoint until they resigned.

The proslavery men carried the day and spent most of the summer of 1855 consolidating their hold on Kansas, culimating in a draconian set of laws that literally made saying slavery did not exist in Kansas into a crime. They also got the governor replaced with a more proslavery one and purged from the legislature the few antislavery Kansans elected fair and square in districts where the first governor had ordered new elections after getting solid proof of shenanigans. (That governor, Andrew Horatio Reeder, took the precaution of announcing the special elections while under armed guard.)

That's two cannons for you. I have one more. At the end of November, 1855, a claim dispute with political overtones ended in the murder of an antislavery settler, Charles Dow, by a proslavery settler, Franklin Coleman. Through a convoluted series of events, this led to the new governor of Kansas, Wilson Shannon, ordering the county sheriff (who was one of the guys who held election judges at gunpoint in the district where they tried to knock the house down) to serve a warrant on Jacob Branson. Branson was a friend of Dow's, had his own land dispute with Coleman, and was also an officer in the not-so-secret militia that antislavery Kansans had set up to protect themselves from proslavery attacks. And occasionally burn down the houses of proslavery settlers. Coleman suspected that Dow had something to do with the burning out of his proslavery neighbor, whose claim Dow had then taken up.

Incidentally, it looks quite a lot like Shannon might have sent the sheriff, Samuel Jones, off with a blank commission so he could make someone justice of the peace in exchange for issuing the warrant against Branson. The whole business is convoluted like this.

The murder took place not too far from Lawrence. Jones went off and arrested Branson, though given it was December and in the middle of the night, he found Branson sans pants. Branson had to plead with him a bit to get permission to put some on. (Seriously; Branson recounts it in his testimony on the subject)

Jones was pretty obvious in going for Branson, assemblying a posse of fifteen or so men and making a fair fuss. People noticed and a party of Branson's fellow militiamen, if from the Lawrence chapter rather than his immediate neighborhood, got together, intercepted Jones, and rescued Branson. They took him off to Lawrence, which was by this point the major antislavery headquarters in the territory.

Jones would not take that laying down. He went to Franklin (a town, not Franklin Coleman) and wrote off a letter for his allies in Missouri. He sent that, then wrote a second one to the governor to explain that the law was being thwarted and Lawrence was full of crazies bent on rebellion. It was anarchy.

(back in a moment for part two)

were Americans allowed to own cannons under the second amendment?