Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

As the surveyor Shubel Morgan, however, and with his rifle and Colt and broadsword tucked out of sight in the wagon box, Father was able to put himself on friendly terms with most everyone he met. Thus did he quickly gain wonderful intelligence of the meandering rivers and sparkling creeks, the densely wooded gullies, washes, ravines, and gorges that criss-crossed the vast, grassy plains like the lines of a flattened hand. Also, he learned the names and locations of the cabins of every pro-slave settler in the region and in short order knew them as well as the names and locations of the Free-Soil settlers. He observed and tallied up the pro-slavers’ weaponry, too, and the number of horses they had, and he discerned something of their general character, which he thought little of. “Cowards” he reported, “and drunkards. Illiterate, ignorant fools with no taste for a real fight, unless it’s over a woman or a jug of corn liquor.”

There was down on the Pottawatomie River, not far from Browns Station, a particularly nettlesome settlement of Border Ruffians that Father liked to complain of, the Shermans, the Doyles, and the Wilkinsons, our nearest neighbors, in a sense, although to call them neighbors was a gift, for they despised us as much as we them. They were landless farmers who’d drifted up from the Southern hillcountry and built tippy, dirt-floored cabins where they made their babies — angry, poor, ignorant people who took their greatest pleasure in puffing up their sense of their own worth by making drunken threats of violence against Northern abolitionists and against us Browns especially. So far, they had not delivered on any of their threats, and none of us thought they could stay sober long enough to carry it off.

There were not many Negro slaves in the region, half a hundred perhaps, rarely more than one or two attached to a single owner, as most of these pro-slavers, like our Pottawatomie neighbors, were failed, landless farmers come out from Tennessee and Missouri and parts of the deeper South, many of them without families, even, and with almost no livestock. And Father was right, there was amongst all of them a surprisingly high proportion of reprobates, whiskey-sellers, thieves, prostitutes, tramps, gamblers, scamps, and other parasites who had followed the Southern settlers as if they were a conquering army instead of a migrating mob of ignorant farmers desperate for cheap land.

In fact, the motives of the pro-slavers for coming out to Kansas were no less mixed than those of us Free-Soilers: like us, they had come for land, for pecuniary advancement, and to wage war over slavery, usually in that order. And, to be truthful, their wild, violent, racialist, and pro-slavery rhetoric was no more incendiary than ours. The difference between the two sides was that, whereas their rhetoric was Satan’s, ours was the Lord’s. They shrieked at us from Satan’s camp, and we trumpeted back from the Lord’s.

That is how Father saw it. We were not superior to the pro-slavers by virtue of our intrinsic morality or our intelligence or our farming and animal husbandry skills or our weapons or even our courage, he daily preached to us. No, we were made superior solely by virtue of Him whom we had chosen to follow. The stinking darkness of institutionalized slavery had made the Southerners into a foul and corrupt people. It had stolen their souls and had made them followers of Satan. For centuries, they had resided in a permanently darkened pit, and thus, to them, the world was a dimmed, low, pestilential place. We, however, when we gazed onto the world, we stood as if on a peak bathed in the bright light of freedom, which enabled us to see the true nature of man, and therefore, simply by following our own true nature, we were able to follow the Lord God Almighty. And after much scrupulous examination, having confidently discerned the Lord’s will, we naturally had determined to make all men and women free. If, to accomplish that great task, we must put to death those who would oppose us, then so be it: it is the will of the Lord: and in this time and place, He hath no greater work to set before His children than that they stamp upon the neck of Satan and crack the jaw of his followers and liberate all the white and black children of the Lord from the obscene stink and corruption of slavery. Simply, if we would defeat Satan, we must first defeat his most heinous invention, which was American Negro slavery.

I believed this. All of us at Browns Station believed it, regardless of the differences amongst us regarding religion. In our little army of the Lord, John and Jason were positioned at one extreme, freethinkers, downright agnostical skeptics; and at the other were poor Fred, tormented by his visions of a punishing God who now spoke to him personally on a regular basis, and Father, who appeared to believe that he himself was sometimes allowed to speak for God; the rest of us fell in between the two extremes at various places, which felt temporary, like stops for rest on a long journey. Nevertheless, every one of us, even the women, Wealthy and Ellen, and our brother-in-law Henry Thompson, believed that we were now about to devote our lives to the very best work we could imagine, so that if God indeed existed, it was His work that we would be doing here. And if God did not exist, then it did not matter. For, regardless of our differences, all of us believed in a law higher than any passed by a bogus or even an authentic and legal legislative body of men, and belief in that higher law required us to dedicate our lives to the overthrow of chattel slavery and racialism. And perhaps it was only chance that had placed us here in Kansas, or maybe Father was right and it was in the end God’s will, but either way, here we were, situated precisely where the battle could no longer be avoided, where the enemy had pitched his tent virtually in our very dooryard, and where we would be obliged to rise up at last and slay him.

My older brothers saw that and trembled with fear or sadly anticipated grief. Although he accepted its inevitability, Jason, especially, did not want war. The man was preternaturally sensitive to the suffering of others and could barely watch the slaughter of a hog, but even he no longer believed that there was a way to end slavery without killing people. He, more than any of the rest of us, had originally come out to Kansas strictly to farm. He had even brought along cuttings from his Ohio vines and eight sapling fruit trees, and while the rest of us sharpened our swords and ran bullets for our revolvers and Sharps repeaters and attached bayonets to long poles, Jason merely watched with a terrible sadness in his eyes, planted his vines and little trees in the newly thawed ground, and kept mostly to himself. His wife, Ellen, and John’s wife, Wealthy, were naturally as reluctant for us to go to war as was Jason, but the women, too, knew that it could not be avoided now, unless the Lord Himself intervened, and there was no sign of that. They seemed to accept it as their fate, although Ellen was starting to talk about returning to Ohio in the autumn, with or without Jason, if fighting broke out.

Brother John had always been an anti-slavery firebrand, certainly, but he was also an ambitious, somewhat worldly man and still seemed to hold out hopes for a political victory, as we would soon have in the territory a sufficient number of Free-Soilers to establish a legitimate Free-Soil legislature and governor of our own and pass an anti-slavery territorial constitution that would get Kansas admitted to the Union as a free state. Well-spoken and more educated than the rest of us, John had it in his mind to get elected to the Free-Soil legislature in Topeka. There was a significant number of radical abolitionist settlers in and around Osawatomie and Lawrence who were eager to support him, and every day hundreds of Eastern radicals who honored the name of John Brown were coming down into the territory by way of the new Iowa-Nebraska trail, settlers who back home had regularly read The Liberator and The Atlantic Monthly and would be proud to vote out here for the son and namesake of Old John Brown, the famous abolitionist from New York State, friend and associate of the even more famous abolitionists Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Dr. Samuel Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.