LAWRENCE — Pittsburg State University historian Bill Hoyt made an interesting discovery about John Brown’s son on the Kansas State Historical Society’s Web site. The Lawrence Journal-World reported that the discovery was so interesting that the historical society yanked it from the Web site. Hoyt found several pages of numerical data that turned out to be coded love letters from John Brown, Jr., to his wife. The younger Brown was an officer in a Kansas cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Brown was concerned that the letters might fall into the wrong hands, and he came up a cipher, Hoyt said, discussing how he cracked Brown’s cipher during a Bleeding Kansas talk in Lawrence Sunday. Hoyt said the coded letters were racy, as he calls it, the 1860s version of sexting. So racy that the letters, as well as the cipher key, were taken off the state Web site.
Monday, Feb. 4, 9 a.m.
