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 newspaper“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 greatest 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. Slave-catchers frequently kidnapped vul- nerable blacks in Kansas and conveyed them to Missouri, where they either returned them to aggrieved masters or sold them into bondage there or in the Deep South. In most cases, they waylaid black people on rural roads or at work in farmers’ fields; on other occasions, they forcibly invaded black homes—or white homes known to house black people—and dragged their victims off by force. As a measure of the frequency of these events, one study found at least thirty-three such slave-catching incidents in Kansas between 1858 and 1863 The arrival of slave-catchers in town generated concern and newsprint. Included here is a reference to the use of a black decoy to facilitate the kidnapping, as found in alone. By the summer of 1863, however, slave- the Wyandotte Commercial Gazette, July 12, 1862. catchers had effectively ceased their operations in Kansas, probably as a result of a combination of events. First, with the collapse of slavery counties after the August 1863 burning of Lawrence, and, consequently, of the fortunes of many slaveholders Kansas, driving out most of the residents, burning innu- in Missouri, they found fewer vengeful masters eager merable homes and farms, and in the process disrupting to pay for their services. Second, President Abraham the slave-catchers’ bases of operation. By April 1865 the Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1862 and war was over, slavery was destroyed, and the residents effective in 1863, made the investment in human fles of Missouri and Kansas were beginning the herculean an even more precarious undertaking. Finally, Union task of piecing their shattered societies and racial orders forces imposed Order No. 11 in four Missouri border back together.11

8. For an 1856 incident of brutality against a slave by her master in Kansas, see Lowell J. Soike, Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State 11. Brent M. S. Campney, “‘The Infamous Business of Kidnapping’: Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War (Lincoln: University Slave-Catching in Kansas, 1858–1863,” Kansas History (Autumn 2019), of Nebraska Press, 2014), 93–94. 154-170, and Brent M. S. Campney, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in 9. “The Prairie City Matter,” Lawrence Republican, May 3, 1860, 2. For Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 19. For more on this incident, see “The Hanging Affair at Prairie City,” Lawrence more on slave-catching in the Midwest in these years, see Brent M. Republican, May 17, 1860, 2. S. Campney, Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the 10. Untitled, White Cloud Kansas Chief, July 25, 1861, 2. Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

“Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 259 In addition, white Kansans and Missourians used violence more aggressively to achieve their objectives. As historian Michael Fellman wrote in his classic study of war- time Missouri, many whites believed that in the wake of slavery’s demise, blacks “had to leave the region or else be hanged” because the idea of racial equality was to them simply “imper- missible.”14 Whites in Kansas, fearful of a considerably enlarged free black population, undertook to subordi- Incidents of violence against blacks were also recorded in the writings of contemporaries, such as nate it with more lethal violence as Samuel J. Reader’s diary (volume six). In his June 4, 1865 entry, Reader notes that two blacks well. Consider their handiwork in had been shot and buried at Indianola near the Rochester school house. 1865 alone. From April—when the Civil War ended—to December of that year, lynch mobs in Douglas and n both sides of the border, whites did every- Shawnee Counties killed five black men in separate in- thing they could to fetter the aspirations of and cidents, and one or more white men in Miami County opportunities for the freed people. A former hanged another black victim. Additionally, in Franklin MissouriO slave who settled in Leavenworth, Kansas, in County white and black men engaged in a gunfight that 1864 later recalled that white men treated him badly in left one dead on each side; in Lawrence a mob destroyed both states, but in diffe ent ways. the home of a black resident; in Leavenworth white riot- ers assaulted blacks repeatedly; and in Topeka a white I found the white men of Kansas quite diffe - vigilante stabbed a black resident to death in front of a ent from those in Missouri, in their dealings with crowd of witnesses.15 During the remainder of the 1860s, Colored people or ex-slaves. They would talk and white Kansans persisted in their violent control of the act nicely and politely, and in such a way as to black population, lynching eighteen black men in ten win my confi ence; always referring to my former incidents between 1866 and 1869. As a national com- condition and abusing pro-slavery men, pretend- mentator quipped after a series of racist killings in Hays, ing great friendship for me, and by so doing they “Kansas Bleeds Again.”16 ingratiated themselves into my confidence to such an extent, that I would follow their advice in the purchase of what they had to sell. Of course I be- 14. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri lieved what they told me and was often cheated during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 12 out of my hard earnings. 1989), 70. On the challenges facing black Missourians after the Civil War, see Jeremy Neely, The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, In another passage, he added, “I found by sad expe- 2007); Aaron Astor, “The Lexington Weekly Caucasian: White Supremacist rience that the white men in a free state, especially in Discourse in Post–Civil War Western Missouri,” and John W. McKerley, business transactions, were not as truthful as the slave- “‘We Promise to Use the Ballot as We Did the Bayonet’: Black Suffrage Activism and the Limits of Loyalty in Reconstruction Missouri,” both holders of Missouri, in dealing with colored people, a in Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border, fact to which many colored men in Leavenworth and ed. Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 189–203 and 205–224, respectively. On lynching in Atchison, Kansas, can testify, men like myself who have Reconstruction Missouri, see Harriet C. Frazier, Lynchings in Missouri, been deceived into buying a lot, and who, in installments 1803–1981 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, had paid the entire price agreed upon. After having built 2009), 38–66. 15. On the episodes of racist violence, see Campney, This Is Not Dixie, a house thereon, in a few years they found that the land 25–27, 220–224. was owned by some one else.”13 16. “Kansas Bleeds Again,” New-Hampshire Patriot (Concord), January 27, 1869, 1. For a useful article on racist violence in western Kansas, see James N. Leiker, “Black Soldiers at Fort Hays, Kansas, 1867– 1869: A Study of Civilian and Military Violence,” Great Plains Quarterly 12. Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, 17 (Winter 1997), 3–17. On the lynchings between 1866 and 1869, see Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man (York, PA: P. Anstadt & Sons, 1895), 114. Campney, This Is Not Dixie, 221–222. 13. Ibid., 115.

260 Kansas History With their greater reliance on lethal violence, whites siderable mental power.”22 Pinks evidently had a notable established their dominance before the black popula- sense of humor. He was “one of the funniest fellows I tion could even establish a toehold in the free state. ever met with,” declared Doy. “I could fill a volume with Nevertheless, it would be an error to suggest that black records of his funny deeds and sayings.”23 Kansans submitted meekly to their oppressors. A black y one account Pinks occasionally condemned resident of Leavenworth recalled the ugly state of af- the racist society in which he lived, although he fairs between the Irish and the black population in that tended to shroud his critique in humor, which city, a conflict that was at the root of some of the rioting mightB have mitigated some of the anger that white lis- there in the summer and fall of 1865. “I remember the teners would otherwise have felt. When one white man bitter feeling existing between the Irish and the Colored “call[ed] him ‘boy,’ . . . Pinks would retort: ‘Yes, boy!—till laborers in Leavenworth, Kansas, which had its begin- I’m a hundred years old, and then a d—d old nigger!— ning about the close of the war,” he wrote. “I recall an never a man!’” When another asked him in Missouri instance when the Colored people had been informed to which slave master he belonged, he replied that he that the Irish were intent on surrounding the Baptist belonged to “Allen Pinks, sir.” Perplexed, the interloc- Church, corner Third and Kiowa streets, to ‘clane the utor responded, “There’s nobody here of that name.” nagurs out,’ on Sunday night. The Colored people pre- Frustrated with what he viewed as an insubordinate pared to meet them, by selecting Fenton Burrell as cap- slave, he demanded, “What’s your name?” Having pro- tain, and secreting nearly fifty armed men in a vacant voked the anticipated question, Pinks retorted, “Allen lot in the rear of the church, to await the appearance of Pinks, sir.”24 the Irish.” As the black men watched from their vantage In his mid-teens Pinks worked as a cook and head- point, the Irish men marched up the street toward the waiter on steamboats operating along the Mississippi church and then—suddenly and unaccountably—stopped and Missouri Rivers. After receiving a paycheck in St. and then turned back. “I learned afterwards that Col. D. Joseph, Missouri, in late 1858 or early 1859, he set off on R. Anthony, a recognized friend of both races, went in foot along the Missouri River en route to Leavenworth. person to the leaders and informed them of the recep- Before long he was detained as a fugitive slave by a fer- tion they would receive” at the hands of the assembled ryman and then jailed in Platte City. “Thinking that his black men “if they proceeded further, and advised them 17 free papers were wearing out, he had left them with a to disperse and go home, which they did.” free colored wagon-builder at Independence, Missouri,” This, in short, was the harsh and violent world in recalled John Doy, who had lived in close quarters with which Allen Pinks found himself. Born in approximately Pinks in the Platte City jail after his own widely publi- 1843 and raised northeast of Pittsburgh in Allegheny cized arrest for transporting fugitive slaves. “As it was County, Pennsylvania, he was a young, light-skinned 18 for the interest of those concerned in detaining him, that free black man. Observers agreed that he was a striking he [Pinks] should not prove himself free, he could get no and imposing figu e. “In person Pink [sic] is a splen- one to send to Independence, though only thirty miles didly developed mulatto, largely and powerfully built, distant, and ascertain whether his assertions were true with hair cut in the fighting fashion, and gifted with an or false, and would certainly have been sold for his jail eye of villainous aspect,” declared one;19 he was “sharp 20 fees and consigned to hopeless slavery, had he waited [and] shrewd looking.” Another observed that he “had for the working of the law.”25 A knowing observer rec- the appearance of being possessed of an iron frame and ognized the high market value of Pinks as a commodity: immense endurance” and was “of medium height and 21 “He is nearly white, very intelligent, and would have of [a] peculiar yellow color.” He also possessed “con- commanded a high price in the Southern market.26

17. Bruce, The New Man, 119–120. 18. The 1850 census shows that on July 25 of that year, the enumerator 22.“Mob Law,” Times and Conservative, April 30, 1869, 4. surveyed the Pinks family in Pitt Township, Alleghany County, 23. John Doy, The Narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas (New York: Pennsylvania. At that time Allen was identified as a seven-year-old Thomas Holman, Book and Job Printer, 1860), 65, 66. child, the fifth of seven children born to John and Mary Ann Pinks, a 24. Ibid., 67, 66. working-class family. See U.S. Census, 1850, Pennsylvania, Alleghany 25. Ibid., 65–66. Doy claimed that Pinks was “about twenty” (p. 65) at County, Pitt Township, “Schedule I. Free Inhabitants,” pp. 1–2. the time of his incarceration in the Platte City jail, but another observer 19. “Fearful Tragedy,” Leavenworth Daily Commercial, April 30, 1869, claimed that he was “about the age of seventeen.” See “Death of the 4. Victim of the Mob.” On John Doy and his imprisonment and eventual 20. “Shooting—Particulars,” Leavenworth Daily Commercial, April 20, escape, see Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 203–204. 1869, 4. 26. “The Perils of Freedom,” Herald of Freedom (Lawrence), September 21. “Fearful Tragedy.” 17, 1859, 2.

“Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 261 steamboat captains, had easily found employment on the Minnehaha, bound for St. Louis—this was about two weeks after his escape.” Before long, however, official in Missouri rearrested Pinks and returned him to the Platte City jail. Months later, when again retrieving water—this time at the point of a shotgun—Pinks overpowered the guard, seized his gun, and then took fli ht with a large number of white townspeople hot on his heels. “He was chased for several miles, but as his pursuers went by the bridge, he gained ground and they lost his track. By night he got to the Missouri River above Leavenworth City, and swam over, stemming its swift current with much difficul , and at last stood on Kansas soil.”27 Given these youthful experiences, it is not surprising that, as future events would soon demonstrate, the ado- lescent internalized the notion that, whether he liked it or not, blacks were merely commodities to be bought or stolen and then sold. earful of being recaptured by slave-catchers and returned anew to his cell in Platte City, Pinks made his way along the back roadsF to the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence, where he was reunited with Doy, who had in the interval been rescued from the St. Joseph jail by fellow Kansas abolitionists in a daring prison break. When Pinks arrived in town, recalled Doy, “he was nearly naked, having nothing on but shirt and trowsers, and those almost torn to pieces. When let in, he accounted for his dilapidated appearance, by saying that he had traveled on a bee-line from Platte City, and having been in somewhat of a hurry, had not paid su cient respect to the thorns and briars he met with, from whose atten- tion he had withdrawn himself with difficul .” Pinks soon found employment at a city hotel and, according to Doy, “is considered one of the best and steadiest hands there, and has the confidenc In this February 24, 1859 letter, Ephraim Nute of Lawrence describes his 28 involvement in the Underground Railroad in hiding one of the Doy party’s of the proprietor.” fugitive slaves. He hints at the dangerous nature of this work. In September 1859, not long after Pinks arrived in Lawrence, Doy arranged to have his friend’s free papers conveyed from Missouri in order to

Recognizing that his Missouri captors intended to protect him from any further imprisonment as sell him into slavery, Pinks rst earned the trust of his a fugitive slave. The abolitionist recorded Pinks’s am- guards and then one night, when dispatched to fill pails bivalence upon receiving the documents: “What good of water, fled on foot, equipped with a coat furnished will they do me?” he asked. “Haven’t we seen plenty of by Doy’s son, Charles, who was imprisoned with them and who was roughly the same size and build as Pinks. “After his escape from the jail,” wrote Doy, “he had made for the Missouri River, and being well known to all the 27. Doy, The Narrative of John Doy, 69. 28. Ibid., 69, 72.

262 Kansas History free papers torn up and burnt in Platte City jail?” Doy concluded that “Pinks was right. A colored man’s free papers are not worth one red cent to him in the border towns of Missouri, even if he carries them with him and has them registered in every town on the rivers on which he works.” Whenever a fugitive slave escaped the clutches of bondage, Doy lamented, sup- porters of the peculiar institution put up “a great noise” and decried the treachery of the abolitionists, “but we seldom hear of the cases, which I believe are ten to one of the former, in which free-born men are kidnapped and sold into hopeless slavery.”29 otwithstanding his The activity of slave-catchers, and the disdain it provoked, is documented in this sketch of slave-hunters own narrow brush being expelled by the Twenty-Second Illinois Volunteers in camp at Bird’s Point, Missouri. It appeared with enslavement, in Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1861. PinksN soon became involved in a dangerous, but perhaps profi - send [a representative] to the river for it. Fields sends able, partnership with white slave-hunters who would the aforesaid boy, and at the river he was seized by kidnap fugitive slaves and free Negroes alike throughout Allen Pinks and put in a skiff by force, and . . . with the local area, transport them to Missouri, and sell them the assistance of Charley Hart, the poor boy was taken into bondage. Given his own exploitation as a black man to Missouri and sold for $650 to a farmer.”30 Following despite his “free” status and his own experience-based this event, another recalled, “such was the indignation understanding of blacks as mere commodities, Pinks may against Pinks and Quantrell [sic] that they would both have concluded that he might as well profit rather than probably have been hung had not some citizens inter- merely suffer from this sale of human flesh. In this trade fered.”31 Indeed, had Doy written his portrayal of Pinks he acted as a “decoy,” luring unsuspecting fellow blacks after his friend’s conversion to slave-catching became into traps and then assisting his white confederates in widely known, he may well have represented him in a overpowering them and whisking them away. Among dramatically less favorable way. those with whom he collaborated was William Clarke The slave-catchers operated in a dangerous world, Quantrill (alias Charley Hart), who would achieve no- often mingling promiscuously with abolitionists and toriety in August 1863 when he led a band of Missouri sometimes joining them in their efforts to free slaves— guerrillas into Lawrence, burned the city, and murdered if only for their own purposes. “It is a strange thing that more than 150 men. most of the ruffia and kidnappers living in Kansas A contemporary later recalled an operation undertaken would join the underground railroad agents in raids by Pinks and Quantrill to ensnare a youth employed in into Missouri to get slaves for freedom, but often they a local black-owned barbershop. “One evening towards would kidnap these same slaves after they had assisted dark, Charley Hart came to this shop and offe ed to give Fields [the proprietor] a bunch of fish if he would

30. “The Shooting Affai ,” Times and Conservative, April 30, 1859, 4. 31. “The Colored Tragedy at Leavenworth,” Kansas Daily Tribune 29. Ibid., 71. (Lawrence), May 1, 1869, 2.

“Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 263 in bringing them into Kansas, then return them to their Quantrill and an acquaintance, Holland Wheeler, were owners for the reward or sell them again into slavery.”32 in town and together they hurried off to the site of the In this way, the slave-catcher was often something of a attempt on Pinks’s life. Wheeler later recollected that “it “double agent.”33 Pinks himself may have worked on was evident to me that he [Quantrill] had an interest in both sides. The Leavenworth Daily Commercial suggested the affai . He pushed his way through the crowd at the as much when it hinted that he had worked with the drug-store and asked if he was dead.” Pinks wore the famed abolitionist John Brown. “Pink[s] is no common evidence of this brush with death thereafter.39 Almost a nigger, but one who in times past enjoyed the friend- decade later, an editor observed that “the marks [from ship and shared the dangers of ‘Brown,’ . . . he having the bullet] can still be felt on Pinks’s head!”40 aided that Radical saint, in kidnapping slaves from their In addition to the dangers that he faced from various masters.”34 Although Pinks probably did not know or factions of the white population, Pinks faced similar haz- work with Brown, who had left Kansas before Pinks ards from the black population for his work as a decoy. escaped from the Platte City jail, he may have joined In 1862 a local newspaper exemplified these dangers in other abolitionists in their raids.35 an article on the experiences of an unnamed decoy in Wyandotte, Kansas. “We are assured that a couple of s a decoy, Pinks faced peril from every side. [white] men were in town Tuesday night with the object When they learned of Pinks’s avocation, ar- of stealing some of the negroes who are stopping here,” dent Lawrence abolitionists John Dean and reported the Wyandotte Commercial Gazette. “They had JohnA E. Stewart were furious and asked Hart (Quantrill) a decoy nigger with them, and he tried to get some of and his confederate Bob Wilson to kill him. Since Hart the colored brethren here to keep him over night, but and Wilson were both double agents, they determined somehow they had not accommodations for him and he that it would be “rank waste” to murder Pinks when had to shift for himself. He was notified on Wednesday they might sell him into slavery instead. Accordingly, that he would not be needed here any longer, and was Wilson summoned Pinks, now working as a barber, to further informed by persons he could rely upon, that his home under the pretext of having him “dress his the climate was really unhealthy for colored persons of wife’s hair.” As he worked on Mrs. Wilson’s hair, Pinks his persuasion, so he speedily came to the conclusion spotted two men approaching the house in a suspicious that he might better skedaddle, and he skedaddled.”41 manner. “Pinks knew in a moment what was up, for In late 1860 official in Jackson County, Missouri, ar- he had devised traps for negroes himself. He ran into rested and prosecuted Pinks and two white men, Thomas the next room, pursued by Wilson, and escaped from McGhee and Henry McLaughlin, for allegedly stealing a the house by a small window and got into the thickets slave from a local resident. Though relieved to report that of hazel brush. He was searched for but not found.”36 they “are not abolitionists, nor connected with them,” Having escaped from the slave-catchers, Pinks still faced the Kansas City Journal of Commerce portrayed the trio danger from the abolitionists who had put out the war- as a menace nevertheless: “They are . . . freebooters . . . rant on him in the first place. “Dean was much cha- grined when he found that Pinks was not murdered” and “decided to take no further chances; he determined to kill Pinks himself.”37 In 1860 Dean fi ed upon Pinks 39. Holland Wheeler, “Quantrill A Suspicious Loafer,” in Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1901–1902; Together with Addresses from a concealed position as he was drinking from a at Annual Meetings, Memorials, and Miscellaneous Papers, ed. George W. public well in Lawrence “and shot him in the head, but Martin, vol. 7 (Topeka: W. Y. Morgan, State Printer, 1902), 225. his skull was too thick for penetration.”38 At that time 40. “The Shooting Affai .” For a recent artistic rendering of this shooting of Pinks by Dean, see the work of illustrator Jacob C. Robinson in Darryl Levings, “Freeborn, Falsely Imprisoned,” Kansas City (MO) Star Magazine, March 2, 2014, 6. When a construction crew filled in the “old ‘town well’” in Lawrence in 1895, the Lawrence Weekly Journal 32. William Elsey Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars (Cedar included the shooting of Pinks in its recollections of the major events Rapids, IA: Torch Press, Publishers, 1910), 136. that had occurred at the venerable landmark. “In the fall of [1860] it was 33. Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of the scene of a tragedy in which John Dean shot Allen Pinks in the head William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Random as the latter was drinking water from a bucket at the well. Later when House, 1996), 69. Quantrell [sic] burned the town his men flocked around the place and 34. “Fearful Tragedy.” drank copiously.” See “Filled the Well,” Lawrence Weekly Journal, October 35. John Brown left Kansas for the last time in January 1859. See 19, 1895, 2. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown 41. “Kidnappers,” Wyandotte Commercial Gazette, July 12, 1862, 3. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 263–264. On other black slave-catchers, see Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The 36. Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars, 136, 137. Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington: University 37. Ibid., 137. Press of Kentucky, 1994), 12–13; Soike, Busy in the Cause, 99. 38. “The Colored Tragedy at Leavenworth.”

264 Kansas History said mob.” Ironically, both the mob and the o - cials may have been driven to these heavy-handed methods because of their concern that the white supremacist laws—which they supported in most cases—seemed likely in this particular case to en- sure that McGhee and McLaughlin, both despised outlaws, would escape punishment. “Had their trial in Independence been conducted according to the law then in effect in the state of Missouri,” noted author Harriet C. Frazier, “the two whites would have been acquitted because blacks and mulattoes could not testify against whites.”44 Although it is unknown whether Pinks reflecte upon the irony of his escape from a lynching pre- cipitated by white anger against two white men set to pro t from white supremacist laws, it seems almost certain that he reflected upon his own racial “inferiority” as a prisoner. Following the arrest, Missouri prison records show Allen Pinks (alternatively known as George) Pinks quickly concluded that his self-interest lay in charged with the offense of “Attempting to entice a slave out of the state” and turning state’s evidence. However, he soon learned sentenced to seven years on January 7, 1861. Courtesy of Secretary of State, what he probably already suspected—and why, as Missouri State Penitentiary Database. previously noted, the townspeople and authorities were so terribly exercised: racist provisions in the Missouri law prevented him from testifying stealing anything that will pay, and as negroes are the against his white codefendants. Surely resentful of the most valuable property, they make this class of steal- prospect that only he would face prison, Pinks insisted ing their speciality.”42 Upon arrest, Pinks found himself on divulging what he knew. “The free negro . . . seems in the middle of another harrowing episode as angry anxious to make a clean breast of the matter,” reported slave owners determined to lynch the threesome. As the Journal of Commerce. “When informed that he could an observer later recalled in a letter to the governor, “a not testify against his white confederates, he said he mob of lawless persons . . . came to Independence . . . wanted to tell all about it, and they could take what threatening to tear down the jail, and hang said pris- 45 they wanted for evidence.” oners who were therein confined.” Pinks and the white In early 1861 Pinks began serving his seven-year term. men “waived their right to a jury trial to escape being However, on December 13, 1864, under murky circum- lynched,” pleading guilty “within two hours of their stances, the prisoner received a pardon from Governor indictment in the town of Independence . . . to ‘attempt- 46 W. P. Hall and regained his freedom. Although his ing to entice a slave out of the state.’”43 movements following his release remain unclear, the While a mob may have menaced Pinks, McGhee, and Democratic Commercial—a newspaper as partisan as it McLaughlin, official in Independence may well have was racist—reported years later in typically sarcastic exaggerated the danger to elicit the guilty pleas. Indeed, form that Pinks did not serve in uniform for the Union as the mob purportedly converged on the jail, the presid- and Republican cause. “It is true [that] he was liber- ing judge advised the trio “as a matter of personal safety ated thence [from the prison],” the writer noted, “but to ‘plead guilty’; which they did, and were immediately not reading his title clear on the subject of citizenship, hurried off in the night to Jefferson City in order to escape

42. Kansas City (MO) Journal of Commerce, reprinted in Albany (NY) 44. Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves, 139. Evening Journal, November 10, 1860, 2. 45. Kansas City (MO) Journal of Commerce, reprinted in Albany (NY) 43. Harriet C. Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Evening Journal, November 10, 1860, 2. Who Helped Them, 1763–1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 46. Secretary of State, Missouri Digital Heritage, Missouri State Inc., Publishers, 2004), 139. For a fascinating and detailed letter on slave- Penitentiary Database: Record Detail, “Allen Pinks,” accessed March hunting on the Kansas-Missouri border, including mention of Allen 20, 2019, https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/archivesdb/msp/ Pinks, see “Kansas,” Liberator (Boston), January 4, 1861, 3. Detail.aspx?id=1489.

“Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 265 he denied the great and glorious Radical party the aid In his 1895 memoir, Bruce vaguely affirme some of of his individual prowess.”47 Following the war, Pinks these white-authored “facts.” He implied that he may married, moved to Leavenworth, and resumed the use have operated a saloon through the use of a notably of an earlier alias, George Thompson. Along the way, vague description of his first business. “I bought out a he apparently achieved by unknown means a measure small business fronting on the levee at Leavenworth, of economic security. Following his death, the Times and Kansas, and made money out of it from the day I took Conservative reported that “he leaves a wife, at present possession,” he wrote. “I immediately had improvements on a visit to Vicksburg, Miss., in comparatively easy made to the extent of two hundred dollars, and thought circumstances.”48 I had a bonanza.”51 While Bruce never mentioned Pinks, he remembered Dillard in words that seemed to under- n April 1869 Pinks became embroiled in a feud mine white claims that the two had been at odds with with a black resident of Leavenworth named Henry one another a quarter of a century before. “He was an Clay Bruce, an older brother of Blanche K. Bruce, intimate acquaintance of mine, a man born a slave, freed whoI would serve as a U.S. senator from Mississippi by the emancipation proclamation when over thirty years from 1875 to 1881. Unfortunately, the extant sources old,” he wrote. “The greatest wonder about this man provide little clear evidence on the origins of the feud. was the exactness and correct business way in which White newspapers charged that it was the consequence he conducted it in buying and selling, and especially in of a struggle among blacks for control of the lucrative [settling] accounts, seemingly with care, accuracy, and liquor trade in that community. According to the Times rapidity as any educated man could have done.”52 and Conservative, Bruce was “the keeper of a saloon on Whatever the cause of the feud, an unknown man shot the Levee, and by his shrewdness and business tact has Bruce outside his home in the early-morning hours of amassed considerable property.”49 The white press hinted April 18, 1869, inflicting a wound that doctors declared that Pinks may have been working in collusion with—or lethal. Despite this prognosis, the victim improved and as paid muscle for—another black businessman named began to point fingers. “The wounded man accused a E. Dillard, who, in the words of the Commercial, kept a yellow man named George Thompson alias Allen Pinks “hell-hole [saloon] on the Levee, where all the vicious as his assassin, and about two o’clock he was arrested.” and dissolute darkies congregate; and who is reported According to the Times and Conservative, Bruce also to be possessed of wealth to the amount of some fiftee charged that Pinks had previously attacked his tavern thousand dollars.” The Commercial further hinted that in an effort to put him out of business. “The wounded Pinks may have torched Bruce’s business a few weeks man supposes that he was shot because he had accused earlier on orders from Dillard.50 However, these accounts the defendant of burning his saloon on the Levee.”53 must be read with skepticism because white editors, like Bruce seemed to affir this aspect of the story in his whites generally, were hostile to the rise of a successful memoir when he cryptically noted that “within sixty black business class and apt to malign, demean, and days from the time I bought the place it was destroyed misrepresent black people. Consequently, they would by fi e, with its contents.”54 Given these facts (and Pinks’s not have been averse to concocting or embellishing sen- apparent newfound wealth), it may well be that Bruce sational claims that black businessmen were embroiled and Pinks were in fact competing saloon keepers and in shady ventures involving alcohol rather than in more that the white newspapers pulled Dillard into the story reputable pursuits. simply to sully his reputation. Bruce may have decided to omit from his memoir his shooting by Pinks and the fallout from that incident because of his concern that it would tarnish his own reputation and reinforce negative white stereotypes about black people and criminality. Because Henry Clay Bruce was “a man of consider- 47. “Fearful Tragedy.” On his prison term, see Frazier, Runaway and able influence among the colored people”55 and “one Freed Missouri Slaves, 139. 48. “Death of the Victim of the Mob,” Times and Conservative, May 1, 1869, 4. 49.“Attempted Assassination,” Times and Conservative, April 20, 1869, 4. 51 Bruce, The New Man, 155. 50. “Fearful Tragedy.” On Bruce and, particularly, his brother Blanche 52. Ibid., 12 K. Bruce, see Lawrence Otis Graham, The Senator and the Socialite: The 53.“Attempted Assassination.” True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty (New York: HarperCollins 54. Bruce, The New Man, 155. Publishers, 2006); and Bruce, The New Man, 155-156. 55. “Shooting—Particulars.”

266 Kansas History ing to his record as a slave decoy and now his alleged assault on a leader of the black community, he richly deserved to die. “They all take it very coolly,” concluded the newspaper, “and [they] charge that Pinks had done the colored race much harm, for which he deserved great punishment.”59 On April 29 a group of blacks acted. After a judge bound Pinks over to await trial and assessed his bail at $2,000, a mob converged upon the victim as an offic led him through the street. “[Pinks] was handcuffed and was being taken to the jail, his right hand being chained to the left hand of Ed. Montana, a white man charged with grand larceny, when a large crowd of ex- asperated colored people followed, and at the corner of Delaware and Fifth streets began firing at Thompson,” hitting him at least twice and as many as four times.60 “The frantic efforts of Montana, the white prisoner handcuffed to Pinks, to keep an awning post between him and the bullets would have been amusing on any other occasion,” declared the Times and Conservative. “When assistance came he looked as pale as though recovering from a six months illness, and begged for God’s sake to be released from his wounded companion. If sufferin be any expiation for a violation of the law . . . we think he [Montana] su ered more in a few minutes than he would in years of incarceration.”61 truck in the head and stomach, Pinks was rushed into the jail, where doctors determined Henry Clay Bruce owned a business, perhaps a saloon, in Leavenworth. that nothing could save him. “The most serious On April 18, 1869, Bruce was shot outside his home, and he accused woundS was the one in the stomach,” noted the Times and Allen Pinks of being the shooter because of an ongoing business feud Conservative. “His pulse was very low, he vomited blood in between the two. Original photo appears in Bruce’s autobiography, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years considerable quantities, and seemed to be in the greatest a Free Man (1895). agony, though at all times conscious of what was trans- piring.”62 Reminiscing about the killing of Pinks nearly three decades after the fact, the Leavenworth Democratic of the wealthiest and most in uential of the colored Standard claimed that the mob “shot him all to pieces— denizens of the city,” many blacks in Leavenworth re- too fine for sausage meat.”63 During his final hours, in- sponded with anger to the news of his shooting.56 “The colored people are justly excited over this bold attempt 59. “Mob Law.” to kill one of their prominent men, and woe betide the 60. “The Colored Tragedy at Leavenworth.” guilty man if they had the disposal of him,” declared 61. “Mob Law.” the Times and Conservative.57 When it became clear “that 62. Ibid. 63. “Ed ‘Montana’ Is No More,” Leavenworth Democratic Standard, July this Thompson is the veritable Allan [sic] Pinks,” blacks 15, 1898, 1. In this account on the occasion of the death of Ed Montana, concluded that “Pinks was a most infamous man, and the prisoner shackled to Pinks at the time of the lynching, the Standard 58 elaborated at length on the tragicomic scene as one Office Lauber and the world would be better off to be rid of [him].” ”In Montana scrambled for safety while the crowd of blacks riddled Pinks talking with a reporter, some of them declared that ow- with bullets. “When Policeman Lauber and his prisoners were on Fifth street . . . eight or ten colored men sprang out and commenced emptying their revolvers into poor Pinks,” it recalled. “One can imagine what a comfortable position poor Ed. Montana was in—hand cuffed to Pinks. But they shot between Montana’s legs, through his hair and pockets, vertically, . . . at angles and through his open mouth; always taking care 56. Untitled, Leavenworth Daily Commercial, May 5, 1869, 4. not to injure him.” It added jokingly that “Lauber danced the fishe ’s 57. “Attempted Assassination.” hornpipe, Montana did some graceful chasse-ing and Pinks died, of 58. “The Colored Tragedy at Leavenworth.” course.”

“Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 267 vestigators and reporters tried in vain to elicit information from Pinks, but he remained tight-lipped to the last. “He was asked if he did not want a preacher, but replied that he wanted no humbug or fuss. He was also asked if he had no word to leave for his wife, and answered in the negative, stating that he did not wish to talk on that subject.” Pinks also insisted that he had played no role in the attack on Bruce. Nevertheless, the newspaper dismissed his claim, asserting without elaboration that “the Marshall has information as to this matter which makes a confession from the unfortunate man unnecessary.” On the afternoon of April 30, Pinks ex- News reports chronicling the attack and murder of Allen Pinks on April 29, 1869, and the pired. “He maintained his courage subsequent murder trial of Jack Cunningham included some editorializing about Pinks’ presumed low standing in the black community. Note the reference to a probable reception put to the last, made no complaint, and on by “our colored citizens” for the now-acquitted Cunningham, as found in the Leavenworth died game,” observed the Times and Times, November 12, 1869. Conservative. “After death the closed eyes and compressed lips were still expressive of stubbornness.” “Thus and naturalized the racist brutality that he had endured, closes the eventful life of a character seldom met with,” it using it for his own gain even if doing so meant inflic - concluded. “We will leave him now to the Great Judge.”64 ing on other blacks the same fear and anguish that he Allen Pinks led an unusually eventful life—one full had suffe ed. A mere youth in 1859, Pinks evidently of betrayal and intrigue, and replete with colorful and learned through hard experience that his own safety historically significant characters. He is even more in- and comfort depended on doing unto others before they triguing and, perhaps, even more historically signi cant could do unto him. because he provides a prism through which historians can Pinks is perhaps most intriguing and historically view the themes of racism, violence, agency, and justice significant because of his willingness—in the words of 65 on the Kansas-Missouri border during his lifetime. He Connelley—“to turn against his own people.” Many was a victim of all manner of racist brutality—sufferin white contemporaries agreed with the verdict of the violence, repeated arrests, imprisonments, kidnappings black population in Leavenworth that Pinks deserved and attempted kidnappings—by those eager to profi to die. An unnamed writer to the Times and Conservative from his enslavement. At the same time, he internalized concluded that “the occurrence [the lynching] amongst our colored friends this morning is to be pitied, but not to have public opinion too hard against those . . . who were carried away by passion and revenge, I will make 64. “Death of the Victim of the Mob.” Police officer captured a few statements to you about the notorious would-be and arrested several of the alleged lynchers within moments of the murderer, Allen Pincks [sic].” After detailing his work killing, including one Jack Cunningham. Ultimately, the authorities as a decoy and confederate of Quantrill, he concluded, pressed charges against Cunningham only, and due to the elevated emotions in Leavenworth, the justice moved the case to the courts in “So you see from the foregoing that the feeling of the Lawrence. After a hung jury in August, prosecutors tried Cunningham colored people against Pinks is somewhat excusable.”66 again in November. When Cunningham won acquittal, he returned to Leavenworth to a hero’s welcome in the black community. See untitled, In their brief discussions of Pinks, popular and schol- Kansas Daily Tribune, August 21, 1869, 3; “The Murder of Pinks,” Times arly historians alike have echoed this sentiment. After and Conservative, November 12, 1869, 4; untitled, Leavenworth Daily Commercial, November 17, 1869, 4; “Leavenworth,” Kansas Weekly describing his escape first from Quantrill and Wilson Commonwealth (Topeka), September 2, 1869, 3. For a study on black-on- black mob violence in Kansas, including the lynching of Pinks, see Brent M. S. Campney, “Race Always Mattered: Black-on-Black Mob Violence and Inter-Racial Relations in Kansas,” American Nineteenth Century 65. Connelley, Quantrill and the Border Wars, 136. History 16 (April 2015) 35–57. 66. “The Shooting Affai .”

268 Kansas History and then from Dean in Lawrence, Edward E. Leslie In their landmark study of William Ellison, a black concluded that “Pinks’ luck eventually ran out: Word slave master in the South, historians Michael P. Johnson of his treachery got around, and one day a mob of en- and James L. Roark penned words that may be use- raged Leavenworth blacks chased him down and shot ful in understanding the decisions of Allen Pinks. They him to death.” Albert E. Castel expressed the same view wrote of the temptation “to project onto him from our more emphatically: “Ultimately and fittingly a mob of own times” but urged readers to historicize and to think Leavenworth Negroes lynched Pinks for his treachery critically and compassionately. “The late twentieth cen- to their race.”67 These authors take a position that is in tury is not without observers of all colors and political some respects understandable. Although Pinks decried persuasions who are prepared to pronounce judgment the injustice of racism and himself narrowly and repeat- on the Ellisons . . . for what they did or failed to do . . . edly escaped enslavement, he used his own blackness By today’s standards, [William Ellison] may be judged to win the trust of other blacks, only to subject them to among the worst . . . of men. But his values and his bondage for his own enrichment. He certainly did, as choices originated in his world, not ours. Although we blacks in Leavenworth charged, do “the colored race have our own opinions and have made no attempt to much harm.” hide them, we consider our primary task to explain what Ellison and other free Afro-Americans did, not what they et to suggest that it was somehow fitting that should have done.”68 So, too, is there a temptation to black people should lynch Pinks for “his treach- project onto Pinks a judgment from our own time and ery to his race” presupposes that he—and, by to declare him—a free black, fugitive slave, and slave- extension,Y all black people—was somehow honor bound catcher at war in one tortured soul—among the worst of to put the good of his whole “race” above his own self- men. Nevertheless, his values and choices originated in interest, a principle rarely if ever applied to white people, his world, not ours. To blame this friendless young man in whom the pursuit of personal economic objectives at for the heart-wrenching decisions that he made amid the the expense of collective ones has long been championed unremitting fear, loneliness, and pain that defined his as a virtue in American history. Why, because he was life is tantamount to blaming the victim for his suffering black, should Pinks be held more accountable for his role in sustaining the system of racial slavery than were the millions of whites who created it and profited from it but were not “fittingly” lynched by blacks? Why should Pinks not have enjoyed the same agency to place naked economic gain ahead of humanity? Given that whites repeatedly attempted to deprive him of his liberty in pursuit of their own economic well-being, why should it be surprising that Pinks came to appraise the value of black flesh primarily in terms of its market value? The question is not whether Pinks perpetrated terrible crimes—he did. The question is why his blackness made him guiltier for those crimes than the whites responsible for a social order that left him so few options. In the nal analysis, he perceived that his own best hope for success was the manipulation of this evil system to his personal advantage.

67. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride, 69; Albert E. Castel, William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times (1962; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 35. In his controversial biography of Quantrill, Paul R. Petersen echoed Castel in remarkably similar language: “Ultimately—and fittingly—a mob of Leavenworth blacks lynched Pinks for his treachery to his race.” Paul R. Petersen, Quantrill of Missouri, 68. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free The Making of a Guerilla Warrior: The Man, the Myth, the Soldier (Nashville, Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, TN: Cumberland House Publishing, 2003), 25. 1984) xi, xv.

“Leave Him Now to the Great Judge” 269