Charles R. Jennison, abolitionist and federal cavalry colonel, was born on June 6, 1834, in Antwerp, in upstate New York’s famed “Burned-Over District,” so named for its fervid evangelical religious revivals that were foundational to Northern antislavery reform. In 1857 he moved his young family to Osawatomie, Kansas, perhaps not coincidentally the home of John Brown, whose by then notorious radical politics Jennison would soon emulate.