Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

But there was no reasoning with Father. Nor with me, for that matter, although I stayed silent and let Father speak for me. He stormed up and down the lamp-lit room, declaring that we should launch an attack this very minute, time was wasting, we could achieve complete victory over these scalawags now and be done with it.

“Father, for heaven’s sake,” John finally said. He was himself plenty relieved to hear that a peace treaty might be at hand. “Hear Mister Lane out.” But the Old Man’s blood was up for battle now, and he did not want to hear any talk of compromise with men who would enslave other men. He stated that a condition of war existed between the Free-Soilers and the pro-slavery men, and we must give no quarter, especially now that John Brown and his sons had shown everyone what cowards the Ruffians were.

I was glad to hear the Old Man going on with such ferocity. I had never before felt as I did then, like a true warrior, invulnerable and powerful: a righteous killer. I felt, and evidently Father did also, a strange, new invincibility, which we must have obtained from having marched untouched through the ranks of the enemy. It was as if we were wearing invisible armor and could not be harmed by bullet or sword. I wanted to test that armor, to risk it against the guns and swords of the Border Ruffians, and Father’s words spoke for my desires. So go on, Old Man, I thought, rouse these people to fight! Don’t let them go maundering on about negotiations, treaties, and orderly retreats. We want to rout the slaveholders! We want to send them howling back to Missouri, leaving a trail of blood behind and a territory cleansed of the evil of slavery forever.

Taken aback by Father’s furious declarations, Mr. Lane, a cynical man, evidently misunderstood the Old Man’s motives. It was as if he believed that what Father wanted was glory only, and not necessarily the immediate death of his enemies. He interrupted Father, and as if to placate and thus to silence him, abruptly proposed to commission him a captain in the First Brigade of Kansas Volunteers. He would give him his own command, he said, a company to be called the Liberty Guards, which would consist of the Captain’s own brave sons and other men, up to a total of fifteen, as were willing to volunteer to join the company under Captain Brown’s personal command.

This seemed to surprise Father and to please him greatly, for he stopped his fulminations at once and thanked Mr. Lane and then begged to leave, so that he could quickly begin interviewing men who might wish to join him.

“Captain Brown;’ Mr. Lane said. “I salute you, sir, and I thank you for your willingness, even at your advanced age, to join in the defense of the people of this poor town.” He lay back on his sofa, draped one arm across his chest, and closed his eyes, dismissing us.

“I should like to make my son Owen here my lieutenant, if you have no objection, sir.”

“Excellent, Captain. Fine. Whatever you wish,” he said, and Mr. Robinson officiously ushered us from the room.

As we descended the rough staircase to the large, open hall below, Father instructed John and me to circulate in the town and recruit the best Christian men we could find and bring them to him out on the barricades, by which time he would have a battleplan. “I did not bring those rifles and swords all the way out here for nothing,” he pronounced.

John hung back noticeably, until Father asked him what was the matter.

He then stepped up to the Old Man and looked him straight in the face. “I want to know, Father, why didn’t you ask Mister Lane to make me a lieutenant, too? This is no criticism of Owen,” he said. “I just want to know your thinking on the matter.”

Father smiled and said, “You’re a good man to wonder that and to want the same as Owen.” He placed one hand on John’s shoulder and the other on mine and looked at us with evident pride. “You, John,” he said, “you will be my political officer. I can’t limit you to a military role. You have too great an ability for dealing with people for that, and besides, we must keep the tasks separate. Owen will be my military officer, which is why I’ve made him a lieutenant. Boys, I tell thee, there will come a day when you will think back to these moments which have just ended, and you will see them as having begun a mighty thing. I promise thee. There is a plan behind all this. The Lord’s plan. And He has given me mine.”

John shrugged, evidently still unsatisfied, but unwilling to pursue his point further, and departed from us to do as Father had asked, while I eagerly went a different way, also in search of recruits for Father’s company of Liberty Guards. To my surprise, I was immediately successful, as there were in Lawrence at that moment hundreds of men who were eager to follow the newly commissioned Captain Brown, for the nature of our arrival had thrilled the town and our reputation for valor and righteousness had swiftly grown large. It took me barely an hour of hurried conversations with men in the barber shops and stores and in the hotel lobby before I found myself walking the main street with forty or fifty of them trailing behind. When finally I thought I had enough, I turned back to take them to Father, and along the muddy street came John, leading an equal number.

Father was at the earthworks, which was a ditch and a head-high bank of dirt heaped across the wide central street at the edge of town. Most of the town’s defenders had positioned themselves behind the bank with their rifles and were watching the fires of the enemy camp across the river with mild curiosity and not a little fear. Father was engaged in heavy discussion with several men, militia captains like himself, urging them to join him in a frontal charge against the Ruffians. Red-faced, stamping angrily and flailing his arms, Father was arguing strenuously with the gentlemen. “Those who don’t have guns can be armed with pitchforks!” he said. “If my company leads the charge, and the entire populace comes rushing out against them, the Ruffians will be terrified and will flee back to Missouri for their lives!”

The other militia leaders would have none of it, however. But then Father saw me and John approaching with our flock of volunteers, and abruptly he turned away from his colleagues and led our troop towards our Roman wagon, where the other boys were lounging around, chatting like old veterans with various townspeople.

The Old Man jumped up on the box and, placing his hands on his hips, surveyed the crowd of volunteers. “I can take no more than eight, for a total membership of fifteen,” he declared. “And you must be as willing to die for the cause as my sons and I myself are.” Quite a few drifted away at this. “We are here to slay the enemy of the Lord. I want bloodthirsty men at my side. No kittenish weaklings, no mild-mannered Garrisonians, no cowards who prefer peace with the slavers to war. And no men whose courage depends on whiskey. I want temperance men.” Here a number of men turned and strolled away. “And ye must be Christians,” he said. “True soldiers of the Lord is what I need! Ye must be armored by God, for we are going forth to smite His enemies down!” And now there were but a dozen remaining. “And ye must swear, as I and my sons have sworn, to wash chattel slavery off the map of this territory. Even if it be washed with thine own blood. Ye must swear to purge it from the nation as a whole. What we begin here will not end until the entire country is free!” Now there were only three men standing by the wagon, one of whom, it turned out, was the well-known journalist Mr. James Redpath, from the New York Tribune, who would follow us throughout the Kansas wars and make us famous all over the East but would not join us in battle. The two others, as it happened, we already knew and did not want — Mr. Theodore Weiner, a big, brutal Dutchman who kept a store on the Pottawatomie Creek a few miles below our camp, and an older man, Mr. James Townley, a longtime settler in Osawatomie, originally from Illinois, who had acquired a reputation for quarrelsomeness.