Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Finally, after having pondered the matter awhile, I moved in close to the Old Man and said to him, “Father, listen to me. If we do not go now, many good, slavery-hating men will die because of it. And the Lord needs those men alive, Father. Not dead.”

Slowly, he turned and gazed into my eyes; I thought he was angry with me and would sharply condemn my words. But, instead, he settled both hands onto my shoulders and sighed heavily, as if relieved of a great burden. In a low voice, he said, “I thank thee, Owen. God bless thee. I’m not afraid of this enemy,” he said. “But I am too much afraid of leaving things to chance. It’s my old habit of procrastination. I’m merely weak and don’t trust sufficiently in the Lord. Go and get the others, son. We’ll load the wagon and leave for Lawrence at once.”

Getting up to Lawrence on a moonless night was not easy. It was a fifteen-mile ride, and we were obliged to ford the Marais des Cygnes River and several lesser creeks and then make our way over rough, pitted and gouged ground as we crossed the southeast corner of the Ottawa Reserve, until we reached the darkened cabin of the Indian trader Ottawa Jones and his white wife, where the California Road joined the Santa Fe Trail. From there, the route lay over mostly high, flat prairie on a trail that was little more than a track beaten into the thick, high-grass sod by the hundreds of westering wagons that had passed this way in the last few years. The horses needed no guidance then, and we began to make good time. Father was in the lead, up on his fine sorrel mare, Reliance, and Oliver drove the heavily loaded wagon, our Roman war machine, which was drawn by our old North Elba Morgans. John and Jason each rode their horses, brought out with them from Ohio, but the rest of us, Salmon, Henry, Fred, and I, walked behind the wagon.

By the time we crested the last rise before the Wakarusa River, a few miles south of Lawrence, it was nearly dawn, and in the pale, pinking light we could see the encampment of the Border Ruffians spread out below — not thousands of armed men, as we had expected, but many hundreds, with dozens of fires burning. The entire force was in disarray, however, with no one on watch at the bridge or guarding their scattered horses. Large numbers of men appeared to be drinking whiskey and carousing, while others slept in makeshift bedrolls or lay in heaps where they had fallen sometime during the night. A general debauch was still going on, with discordant strains of fiddle music coming up the slope, accompanied by obscene shouts, bawdy songs, and occasional, random gunfire. We held up in the shadows of a copse of cottonwood trees on the ridge above and for a long while studied them on the floodplain below. They did indeed look to our eyes like Satan’s own dispirited, disorganized army of volunteers.

I came up beside Father, and he said to me, “Well, Owen, as I feared, they lie between us and the bridge. What say you?”

“They look like a pack of drunken cowards to me.”

John then moved his horse alongside Father’s and proposed that one of us sneak down on foot and cross the river above the bridge and slip into Lawrence, to inform the leaders there that we had arrived this far and ask for further instructions. “It might turn out that it’d be better for them if we stayed hidden here,” he said. “Outflank the Ruffians, you know?”

“Useless,” said Father. “If we are to serve any purpose in this, we must get into Lawrence itself’

“The Missourians are rabble,” I said. “Knockabouts. They haven’t the right or the will to stop us, if we simply go down there and cross over. The Lord will protect us.”

I leveled my rifle at my waist and commenced walking downhill, the same as when I’d walked in amongst the wild boys and men in Boston. Immediately, the others followed, as I knew they would. Father rode to the front again and led our little band down the crumbly slope and straight into the rowdy encampment. We did not look to one side or the other but marched on a line across the broad, grassy floodplain that led to the river and the town of Lawrence beyond.

The Ruffians got up and parted as we passed, then came forward and stared at us, their mouths open, evidently astonished by us and unsure of what we meant to do, cowed by our wagon rattling its tall spears and our heavy broadswords and revolvers strapped to our waists, our Sharps rifles leveled and cocked. A few hollered at us and cursed, but weakly, and we did not acknowledge them. Not one man made a move to stop us. In moments, we had marched through the stumbling, drunken throng of disheveled men, had crossed the narrow bridge to the other side of the Wakarusa, and were moving straightway on to Lawrence, where, as we rode and walked into town and made our way around the rough earthworks they had thrown up, we were greeted by the frightened citizens with huzzahs and much jubilation. Only then did we look at one another and start to smile. Even Father.

The besieged townsmen gaped at our weapons — our broadswords and bayonets in particular, for they were formidable and implied on our part a desire for bloody close combat. And all the citizenry were mightily impressed by our having parted the army of Border Ruffians as if they had been the Red Sea and we the ancient Israelites coming out of Egypt. We were, at least for the moment, heroes. And we wanted to stay that way, especially the Old Man, who at once, before he had even dismounted, as if in a fever, began to harangue the leaders of the Committee for Public Safety who had come to welcome us, insisting that they brook no compromise with the enemy, make no peace treaty or agreement with them. “We should strike now,” Father declared, “whilst they’re still be-dazzled. Round up a hundred men, and I’ll lead them!” he commanded.

No one obeyed. They merely kept telling him how pleased they were that we had joined them, giving little speeches, the way committees do.

“Let me speak to the man in charge,” Father finally said, and he and John and I were immediately taken to address Messrs. Lane and Robinson, who were located in an upstairs room of the half-finished Free-State Hotel, a cavernous stone building on Massachusetts Street in the center of town, which the Committee for Public Safety had appropriated for its headquarters. Mr. Robinson, who had been a physician and was now the chief agent for the New England Emigration Aid Society and who eventually became the Free-Soil governor of the territory, shook Father’s hand with unctuous pleasure and nervously passed him on to his evident superior, Mr. Lane, a lean, blade-faced man in rumpled clothing with a red kerchief around his neck, a well-known radical abolitionist who’d been leading settlers into Kansas by way of Iowa and Nebraska all year. He was a natural leader of men, comfortable with his authority and a shrewd exhorter. His voice had gone raspy and hoarse, evidently from making too many speeches to the crowd of defenders outside, and he appeared to be greatly fatigued. He seemed not to have slept in a week and spoke to us while lying down on a horsehair sofa.

John, whom Mr. Lane already knew from his politicking, introduced Father and me, and after greeting us, Mr. Lane explained that, as he was pretty far along in his negotiations with the pro-slave governor, Mr. Shannon, and the leader of the militia encamped beyond the Wakarusa, Mr. Atchison, he did not want to disrupt things. “It’s all at a most delicate moment,” he said. But even so, he was glad to have reinforcements from Father, whom he referred to as “the aged gentleman from the state of New York.” He urged us to hold off from any violent action until or unless a peace treaty became impossible. “I don’t want anyone killed,” he said. “Least of all women and children. And that’s no army out there by the river, as you surely saw. It’s a mob, and their leaders have almost no control over them.”