John Brown's Battle of Black Jack

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Tour the battlefield where John Brown,
fierce opponent of slavery, led his militia against
a proslavery force on June 2, 1856.

This armed clash, The Battle of Black Jack, is
considered by many to have been
the first battle
of The American Civil War.

Learn about the battle and its significance in the struggle over slavery that was "Bleeding Kansas".

On a rise overlooking the
battlefield is a farmhouse
built by Robert Hall Pearson
in 1890.

Pearson fought beside Brown
at Black Jack and later returned
to carve out a prosperous farm
from the prairie.

To access a map of the Battle of Black Jack titled Prelude to War, published by the Lawrence Journal-World for the
150th anniversary of the Battle, click here

For a brochure on the Black Jack Battlefield and Nature Park click here

On the western side of the property is the nature park.
The Black Jack Battlefield Trust is making a concerted effort to
restore major portions of the forty acres to its pristine condition.

Efforts are underway to manage encroaching woody growth and
restore native prairie through reseeding, prescribed fire, and
mowing.

Early in the pre-dawn hours of June 2, l856 a group of about twenty-five Kansas free-staters, led by the controversial abolitionist John Brown, moved quietly across the prairie a few miles east of present-day Baldwin City, Kansas. Within a few hours they would be engaged in a pitched battle with seventy Missouri pro-slavery men led by Captain Henry Clay Pate.

This confrontation had its roots in recent events which had raised tensions in the area to the breaking point. Sheriff Jones and his pro-slavery forces had sacked the town of Lawrence less than two weeks earlier, destroying the Free State Hotel and dumping the newspapers’ presses into the river. Just three days later five people in Franklin County were dragged from their homes and brutally murdered in the Pottawatomie Massacre. John Brown and his sons were implicated in the killing, and Henry Clay Pate set out to find him.

Pate, travelling west, camped at Black Jack Springs, a popular campground along the Santa Fe trail, and it was here that he was surprised by the attack of Brown’s men in the early morning light of June 2. Each side sought cover behind the banks of a creek, and the firing went on for several hours before Pate, thinking he was outnumbered, sought a truce. Brown, however, took Pate as a prisoner and the battle was over. The Battle of Black Jack was the first armed action in which forces of comparable strength fought over the issue of slavery, and a growing number of historians agree that it was here that the Civil War began.