On the afternoon of September 14th, 1856, the Free State settlement of Lawrence in Kansas Territory faced threatened invasion by an army of 2700 pro-slavery Missourians under Generals David R. Atchison and John W. Reid, who camped near Franklin four miles southeast of town and meant to destroy a place seen as a symbol of New England abolitionism. Less than four months earlier, Atchison and Sheriff Jones had led the Sack of Lawrence, destroying the Free State Hotel and the Herald of Freedom presses, and in the following months Lawrence was blockaded while battles at Fort Franklin, Fort Saunders, and Fort Titus sought to loosen pressure on supply lines into the half-starved Free State stronghold. As townspeople armed with everything from Sharps rifles to pitchforks gathered between two circular earthen forts on Massachusetts Street to defend the town, John Brown was present and heavily armed; the New York abolitionist, captain of the Liberty Guards in Lawrence during the Wakarusa War of early December 1855, had spent much of the spring and summer of 1856 with his sons in brutal guerrilla warfare against pro-slavery factions across eastern Kansas. Though he held no formal command during the siege, Brown addressed an estimated 300 armed citizens on tactics. After an exchange of gunfire on the southeastern outskirts between an advance guard of the Missouri force and the defenders, the Missourians were driven back to Franklin. Late that evening, 300 U.S. Army dragoons from Lecompton arrived and took positions with artillery across the brow of Mount Oread, creating a standoff, and when Governor John W. Geary and Lieutenant-Colonel Philip St. George Cooke arrived early on the morning of the 15th, tense negotiations led the Missourians reluctantly to disband and fully retreat. The confrontation ended the open warfare of the bloodiest year of Bleeding Kansas, in which more than 200 had been left dead, although many of the Missourians returned on August 21st, 1863 under William C. Quantrill. Fearing Governor Geary might enforce a warrant for his arrest, Brown left Lawrence for Osawatomie, which the same forces had destroyed two weeks earlier, later continued to visit Lawrence intermittently until January 1859, and was hanged on December 2nd, 1859 at Charlestown, Virginia after his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, becoming a hero to millions of enslaved African-Americans in the South and helping ignite the chain of events that led to the American Civil War.