256 Kansas History “Leave Him Now to the Great Judge”: the Short and Tragic Life of Allen Pinks, Free Black, Fugitive Slave, and Slave-Catcher

Photo of Dr. John Doy (seated) and his rescue party, dated 1859. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 42 (Winter 2019–2020), 256–269 256 Kansas History “Leave Him Now to the Great Judge”: The Short and Tragic Life of Allen Pinks, Free Black, Fugitive Slave, and Slave-Catcher by Brent M. S. Campney rom boyhood up,” declared the Leavenworth Times and Conservative in an 1869 obituary, Allen Pinks was “either in the hands of justice or trying to escape justice.” He was “cool, determined, daring and vicious, a man to be feared.” Piecing together the life of Pinks was no easy task, the Kansas news- paper“F observed, and doing so required the interrogation of a patchwork of facts and mythologies that were so inextricably intertwined that it was di ult to determine which was which. “We will not follow his wanderings and relate the many strange incidents of which he was the hero,” the Times and Conservative concluded. “Of his... history we cannot get much authentic information, though we have not yet heard a single word to his credit.”1 The task of reconstructing the life of Pinks is no easier for the historian than it was for the Times and Conservative, yet it is fruitful. A young free-born black man, Pinks moved among some of the best-known historical figu es of the Bleeding Kansas era, including the white abolitionists John Doy and John Dean and the proslavery guerrilla leader William Clarke Quantrill. Indeed, Pinks would be worthy of historical inquiry for no other reason than his role as a noteworthy actor in the storied drama of the Kansas-Missouri border in the 1850s and 1860s, the bloodi- est years in either state’s history. Pinks is even more significant because his short and violent life, bursting with intrigue and betrayal, provides so vivid and tragic a prism through which to explore the tangled issues of racism, violence, agency, and justice in that oft-visited intersection of time and space. This study, therefore, follows the ‘wanderings’ and ‘strange incidents’ of his life. Brent M. S. Campney is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the author of This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015) and Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 1. “Death of the Victim of the Mob,” Times and Conservative (Leavenworth), May 1, 1869, 4. “Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 257 To achieve its aims, this study patches together the To control the enslaved population and exercise their relatively few and scattered scraps of information related dominance, white Missourians employed violence of all to the life of Pinks as captured in contemporary news- kinds. While masters perpetrated much of this privately papers, the reminiscences in The Narrative of John Doy, within their own households, white mobs enacted it of Lawrence, Kansas (1860), and a later account of Pink’s publicly with whippings and other acts of spectacular life in Quantrill and the Border Wars by historian William violence. In the most infamous incident, whites lynched Elsey Connelley (1910). It follows Pinks from his arrival four enslaved men during an episode of racist hysteria on the Kansas-Missouri border during his midteens until in Saline County in 1859. In the firs act, a mob seized his death in Leavenworth, Kansas, a decade later. First, an unnamed slave in Arrow Rock and hanged him. In it seeks to understand his harrowing existence. Then, the second, a mob in nearby Marshall took possession it undertakes to explain the racial double standard ap- of three more men—known only as John, Holman, and plied to both his life and his death by contemporaries Jim—and likewise put them to death. When the mob and historians alike. Before pursuing these objectives, members sickened even themselves by burning John at however, the study provides some context for Pinks’s the stake, they decided to dispose of the other two with life with a sketch of brutality endured by black people a quick hanging.5 on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border during this Prior to 1858 some of the enslaved people in Missouri period. escaped from bondage and fled west to Kansas and, with rom the settlement of their state to the end the support of the Underground Railroad there, often of the American Civil War, white Missourians beyond. However, after the northern free-state settlers enforced slavery.2 Although white contempo- in Kansas secured demographic and political dominance raries (and subsequently historians) have of- over the proslavery settlers who had previously prevailed, ten asserted that slavery was “mild” in Missouri, his- enslaved Missourians recognized that that territory would torianF Diane Mutti Burke has illustrated the complex no longer be hospitable for human bondage and began 6 forms of exploitation that defined the state’s small-scale to flee there in increasing numbers. When war erupted slaveholding households. “[The] image of benign border in 1861 and internecine conflict split white Missourians slavery has persisted in spite of the more complex pic- into opposing camps, enslaved people fled to Kansas in even greater numbers until, before long, the “peculiar ture painted by the individuals who actually endured 7 enslavement in the state,” she argued. These formerly institution” collapsed on itself. enslaved Missourians “remembered their experiences in slavery in a myriad of ways, ranging from kind treat- ment at the hands of their owners to the worst forms of psychological and physical abuse.”3 Likewise, a small 5. Thomas G. Dyer, “Judge Lynch in Saline County, Missouri,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage number of white Kansans enforced slavery in that ter- (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 81–108. In a ritory in the 1850s, claiming by one count—as many as recent study, historian Michael J. Pfeifer found that white lynch mobs four hundred enslaved persons.4 killed at least twelve slaves in Missouri between 1836 and 1860. See Michael J. Pfeifer, “Appendix: Lists of Confirmed Lynchings,” The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 6. See Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the 2. Since French and Spanish colonial settlers had imported slaves Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), esp. 190– into the region that would eventually become Missouri, “African slaves 218. Approximately 65 percent of all slaves in Missouri lived along were . a significant presence in the Upper Mississippi Valley by the the Missouri River or in the western border counties. See Richard B. 1730s.” For discussions of the history of slavery in Missouri, see Diane Sheridan, “From Slavery in Missouri to Freedom in Kansas: The Influx Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, of Black Fugitives and Contrabands into Kansas, 1854–1865,” Kansas 1815–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 17–51 (quoted History: A Journal of the Central Plains 12 (Spring 1989), 28–47. Those who passage p. 20); Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri lived in the geographically fortuitous western counties enjoyed relative Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Athens: University of Georgia proximity to Kansas Territory, a circumstance that surely persuaded a Press, 2016); Kristen K. Epps, “Before the Border War: Slavery and the larger number of them to attempt their escapes. Similarly, those who Settlement of the Western Frontier, 1825–1845,” in Bleeding Kansas, lived farther east along the Missouri River at least enjoyed proximity Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border, ed. Jonathan Earle to that waterway and to the possibilities for escape that it offe ed. As and Diane Mutti Burke (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), Sheridan noted (p. 29), “Slaves escaped as stowaways on steamboats. 29–46; Kristen Epps, “The Kidnapping of Charley Fisher: Questioning Others stole small boats or built rafts to speed their flight to f eedom.” the Legal Boundaries of Slavery in Bleeding Kansas,” Kansas History: A 7. Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 268–307. For another discussion of the Journal of the Central Plains 40 (Autumn 2017), 150–167. impossibility of isolating slaves from the political and military currents 3. Burke, On Slavery’s Border, 3. For a classic study of the brutality of the day, despite the efforts of white slave masters to do precisely that, of slavery in Missouri, see Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave (Athens: see Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the University of Georgia Press, 1991). Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: The 4.Epps, Slavery on the Periphery, 100. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 13–159. 258 Kansas History n ‘free’ Kansas, enslaved, fugitive, and free blacks alike found little peace, en- during the same forms of suffering as theirI counterparts in Missouri.8 In 1860, whites in Prairie City accused “a poor colored man” of attempted murder and subjected him to a harrowing ordeal. “He was taken by the mob and strung up two or three times, to make him ‘confess,’” reported the Lawrence Republican.9 The following year, an ad hoc lynch mob in Wathena killed a fugitive slave from Missouri after one of its members was slashed while trying to corral him. As the white man lay bleeding, his counterparts riddled the offen - ing fugitive with bullets.10 Perhaps the great- est threat facing the free blacks and fugitives living in nominally free Kansas, however, was the menace posed by the slave-catchers who prowled the territory in search of their victims.

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