The Abolitionist and the Spy

June 1, 2020
The story of two Civil War-era anti-slavery activists, father and son. Spencer Kellogg Brown was just 19 years old when he volunteered to become a spy for the Union, having already served in the Army and then enlisted in the federal Navy patrolling the Mississippi River. Spencer, writes Lizzio, an anthropologist and popular historian, may have been driven by ambition, a desire for adventure, and "an impassioned abolitionist's abhorrence of slavery" all at once. Certainly a factor, as well, was the example of his father, Orville, an earnest Christian from the so-called Burned-Over District of western New York, where religious fervor fueled sectarianism and abolitionism. Orville tried his hand at this and that before moving the family to Kansas, where the issue of whether the territory would join the Union as a free or a slave state was being put up to a vote that led supporters of both sides to stream in to cast ballots. In the case of one key vote, nearly 5.5 out of 6 ballots were for slavery, about which Lizzio observes, "since legal pro-slavery voters greatly outnumbered free-soilers, Missouri settlers would have prevailed easily in a free and fair election." The free-staters cried foul, and in no time the territory became the "Bloody Kansas" of the history books, with militias led by such firebrands as John Brown and his pro-slavery counterparts murdering opponents right and left. "John Brown has been described as a bit player in the Kansas conflict, yet the old broadswords man was anything but," writes the author. "His massacre of innocent men on the Pottawatomie marked the moment when what had thus far been largely a political conflict turned violent." The violence mounted to the point of civil war, whereupon Orville takes a back seat to Spencer in Lizzio's fast-paced and lucid account. A sturdy contribution to the popular history of the Civil War and especially its western theater.

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