Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Salmon and Oliver both were hot-blooded boys eager to test their mettle in a good fight, and they had long ago grown used to following, if not Father himself, then me. They were wholly reliable, therefore.

That left to constitute our little army only Henry Thompson and brother Fred. Henry was newly married to Ruth, his wife back in North Elba residing during his absence with the Thompson clan, but despite that — because he believed in Father’s wisdom and moral clarity even more than Father’s natural sons did — if the Old Man let him, Henry would follow him straight into the jaws of hell. And then there was Fred, poor, wild Fred, whose dreams and visions seemed to have become so thoroughly intermingled with his daily reality that he thought we had already gone to war against Satan: with Fred, the main difficulty for us lay in holding him in check until such time as we needed him to start firing his Colt and laying about with one of the terrible, ancient, double-edged broadswords that Father had brought out with him from the East and which Fred wore strapped to his waist day and night.

Including myself, then, this was the core of John Brown’s little army of the Lord. Before long, we would be joined at times by as many as fifty others, some of whom stayed on for the duration and followed the Old Man all the way to Harpers Ferry, some of whom weakened and fell away, especially after the news of what happened at Pottawatomie got around, and some of whom were slain in battle. Father was our general, our commanding officer, our guide and inspiration, the man whose words chided and corrected us and gave us courage and direction, and without whose example we would have foundered from the start.

Left to his own devices, however, the Old Man, once he had got our camp up and running again and had us properly armed and organized into a fighting force, would have fallen back into his lifelong patterns of wait and see, of delay and discuss, of research and reconnoiter, of organizing his followers and enticing them to war and then stepping away and leaving us to our devices — just as he had done in Springfield with the Gileadites, just as he had done all along: for while Father was a genius at inspiring and organizing men to wage war, when it came to leading them straight into battle, he needed someone else — he needed his son Owen — at his ear. Action, action, action! may have been his constant cry; but at crucial moments he needed someone else to whisper, Now! Until that spring in Kansas, he did not truly know this. Nor did I.

It began in a small way. While Father was off at the Ottawa Nation, making one of his interminable surveys, it happened that below us, down in Douglas County on the far side of Dutch Sherman’s camp, a Free-Soil settler from Ohio named Charles Dow, a man whom John and Jason happened to have known back East, was cutting timber for his cabin and got into a row with his nearest neighbor, a pro-slaver from Virginia named Frank Coleman. The Virginian claimed that the trees were his, not Mr. Dow’s, and shot and killed Mr. Dow in cold blood. A few days passed, and when the Virginian was not arrested, John, who was now up and about and had begun active politicking, contacted Mr. Dow’s numerous Free-Soil friends and called for a protest meeting up in Lawrence. As Lawrence was by then fully a Free-Soil redoubt, John and I and Henry Thompson expected no trouble and rode up for the meeting unarmed. It was the last time we did that.

Just south of Lawrence, we were met at the Wakarusa bridge by a large troop of heavily armed Border Ruffians, deputized and led by the sheriff of Douglas County, a pro-slave appointee named Samuel Jones. Without ceremony or explanation, they put their guns on us and demanded to know our reasons for going into Lawrence. When John forthrightly said that we were going there to attend a meeting that he himself had called for the purpose of protesting the unpunished murder of Mr. Charles Dow, the sheriff promptly arrested him for disturbing the peace and took him off at gunpoint towards Leavenworth.

Henry and I galloped straight on to Lawrence, where we quickly rounded up a band of close to thirty men with Sharps rifles and rode out after the sheriff. We managed to throw down on him and his ragtag troop and their prisoner before they crossed the Kansas River into slave territory. Wisely, they did not resist, and we promptly took John away from them and rode in triumph back to town, where John and, to a lesser extent, Henry and I became instant celebrities.

Humiliated and enraged by this act, the sheriff had ridden back to Leavenworth, where he informed the bogus governor Shannon that there was under way in Lawrence an armed rebellion against the laws of the territory. At once, the governor mobilized the Kansas militia and put it under the command of the slaveholding senator from Missouri, Hon. David Atchison, a drunkard, who brought into his force the leaders of several other whiskeyed-up bands of Border Ruffians, and loudly vowing to exterminate that nest of abolitionists, the whole gang of them headed for Lawrence.

We learned this the day following our protest meeting, when we were riding peacefully back from Lawrence. Nearing Browns Station, we met up with a breathless rider come from the Shawnee Mission over near the Missouri border, a Free-Soil settler who had raced all the way to Douglas County to spread the alarm. He told us that more than two thousand Missourians and members of the Kansas militia were taking up positions on the Wakarusa south of Lawrence, and they intended to burn the town to the ground.

Angered and alarmed, we rushed on to Browns Station to round up Father, our brothers, and our weapons. When we arrived, we saw that Father had returned from the Ottawa Reserve and, unaware of what had transpired, was engaged in preparing to join us in Lawrence to protest the killing of the Ohioan Charles Dow. Quickly, John related what had happened, and the Old Man, I remember, reacted with what seemed like delight.

“It’s come, then,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “The time has come at last.”

First, however, we needed to run off another hundred bullets, he declared. Dutifully, Salmon and Oliver set to work.

“Father;’ said I, “the Border Ruffians very likely have already placed Lawrence under siege. We must hurry.”

“I know, I know. But our friends up there will need all the bullets we can carry,” he replied, and instructed us to fasten our pikes with the bayonets attached to the sides of the wagon box, to affix them with the blades pointed to the sky, so that we would impress the enemy with our machinery. An old Roman military tactic, he explained.

“Come on, Father, let’s just toss everything into the wagon and get on to Lawrence now. We can do all this up there.”

No, he thought that we might have to fight our way into the town, since the Ruffians had probably taken their position on the Wakarusa bridge, which lay between us and Lawrence. We would have to make all our preparations for battle here and now, he declared.

Then there were provisions to pack. The siege might last a long time, he pointed out. And the broadswords wanted more sharpening. And then the wagon had to be loaded with exquisite care so as not to damage any of the weapons, and so on, until finally it was dark, and we still had not left Browns Station. Since there was no moon that night, it was too dangerous, Father thought, to travel up along the California Road to Lawrence with so many Missourians about, for we did not want our weapons and horses to fall into the hands of the enemy, did we? We had better wait till morning, he decided.

John slouched off towards his lean-to, frustrated and angry, although Wealthy was not, and Jason was not, nor Ellen. Henry agreed with Father, of course, for no other reason than that Father had said it. Fred did whatever he was told, and Salmon and Oliver, gnashing their teeth, did, too, and followed the Old Man’s orders to empty the wagon once again and re-balance the load.