5. Soule’s activities during the Bleeding Kansas period are largely undocumented
Prior to the jailbreak in St. Joseph, Missouri, Soule’s movements and activities during the many raids and ambushes which marked the period in Kansas and Missouri are not well known. But he was well known to John Brown and his followers. Brown led his supporters in the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which they murdered five pro-slavery settlers in 1856, but the known records of the raid did not include Soule among the raiders. The same can be said for the Battle of Osawatomie, where there were several dead, and an exchange of prisoners, though Soule has not been linked to Brown’s group during that raid either.
Following Osawatomie, Kansas descended into partisan violence which was really simply organized murder and terrorizing of each side. When Brown finally launched his raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, his friend Silas Soule was not among the party which was eventually forced to surrender to US Marines commanded by Army Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee. But he was one of the men approached to join an expedition to the east in an attempt to free Brown and his followers from federal custody, and he joined with alacrity, traveling to Pennsylvania and Virginia in late 1859.