Donald... I still owe you an answer and have not forgotten. Time for study has been limited lately for both personal and professional reasons. However, I have gone back to all of the known writings of John Brown and William C. Quantrell. Unfortunately all of Quantrell's letters other than a brief mention of inequities against Southern people and that John Brown should be hung do not specifically ascribe to him either the passion of the fanatic, or the focus of the visionary. While there is, in my opinion, a hint of furtiveness, there are no specific comments that would lead one to believe from the 1850's through 1860 just before Quantrell lured five Quaker abolitionists to Morgan Walker's farm in a fabricated raid to liberate slaves. John Brown on the other hand is full of focus, speaks as one whose fanatacism and vision are paramount, and does fufill the concept of one who would foment war on the South to free slaves and would die for his beliefs.

I would suggest that I will have to research secondary sources as close to real time as possible to confirm these perceptions, and to walk in the path of many historians who have done a much better job of analyzing, dissecting and opinionating on these two men. Given my initial perceptions and following the train of our discussion, the approach of these two men to the brewing Civil War would make John Brown a terrorist, allbeit a prophet and visionary of sorts; and William Quantrell at best a mixture of guerrila and terrorist, more self serving and less altruistic than Brown.

I believe that the challenge would be to find that Brown did not have provocation other than his ultimate goal of eliminating slavery. Even with the death of his son, Frederick, at the hands of Reverend Martin White at Osawatomie, I do not think that John Brown was swayed from his purpose. While I do recall some Kansas literature (part of what I need to look up) surmises that Dutch Henry and the Doyles were pro-slavery along Pottawatomie Creek and were more active in opposing free-staters, I would support the concept that Brown's position on murdering these men and boys was not in retaliation to Lawrence being burned as much as it was to create terror among the pro-slavery community.

However, the more difficult challenge is to determine if provocation, whether the collapse of the Kansas City prison or the burning of Osceola, was the primary cause of the massacre at Lawrence or not. There is plenty of literature claiming these two events forced the raid on Lawrence, however men that participated also claim in their memoirs and literature, that Lawrence was to be raided and men killed solely for the purpose of terror to the state of Kansas, eliminating politicians, shop-keepers, newspapermen, and "abolitionists". While I am sure that men like Bloody Bill Anderson were anguished and incited to murder in retaliation for the death of his sister, we are talking about Quantrell and his motives.

I will continue to read and will let you know what I find.

Thanks,
Howard Mann