Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

From his perch, Father looked sadly down at them. “Well, if ye be all who remain… then I believe I have the men I need,” he said, and he bade them raise their right hands and swore them into the Liberty Guards.

But there was to be no battle that day, although the episode, thanks to Mr. Redpath’s lively, vivid dispatches back East, soon came to be known as the “Wakarusa War”—when the brave citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, under the courageous leadership of Captain John Brown, drove off a thousand Border Ruffians and afterwards forced the pro-slave leaders to accept conditions that amounted to total surrender. The reality was that, while Father railed in vain against the citizens of the town for their reluctance to follow him and charge the Missourians’ camp, Messrs. Lane and Robinson slipped out the back of the hotel and rode down to the town of Franklin, a few miles south of Lawrence, where they secretly met with the pro-slavery governor of the territory, Mr. Shannon, along with Senator Atchison and several other leaders of the Ruffians. These men had grown alarmed at having lost control of their supporters and consequently agreed to take their ragtag army back to Leavenworth at once, if the case of the shooting of the Ohioan Mr. Charles Dow was dropped by John’s protest committee of Free-Soilers. The committee, they insisted, had been an act of provocation. Its dissolution would restore the peace. Messrs. Lane and Robinson thought that a perfect arrangement. They drew up a treaty, signed it, and returned to Lawrence to oversee the quick withdrawal of the Missourians and to enjoy the gratitude and adulation of the Free-Soilers.

Except for us, of course. We admired them not a whit and thought their treaty a surrender. Nonetheless, we stayed on in Lawrence for a few days longer. We were the only ones who had dared to confront the Ruffians directly and were much admired for it, especially by the younger men in town, and this puffed us up somewhat and took some of the sting out of Father’s failure to enlist more than two sorry men in his Liberty Guards, and it justified his anger at Lane and Robinson for having bargained with the enemy. Finally, though, we grew restless, and John and Jason began to worry about their wives and John’s son, Tonny, so Father, who had been spending much of his time giving interviews to Mr. Redpath and the many other journalists who were flocking into Lawrence, gave the order to depart for home.

Home was then still our tents at Browns Station, John’s and Jason’s land claims, and at one point on our way back there, I had with Father a small conversation that turned out later to have large consequences. It was late in the afternoon, and we were a few miles past the old California Road and the cabin of Ottawa Jones, traveling along a broad ridge that curved slowly above the floodplain of the Marais des Cygnes River. I was coming along at the rear of our little train, deep in thought of home at that moment, which meant memories of Lyman and Susan Epps and the calamity at Lake Colden, when I was brought suddenly out of my dark, cold cavern of thought by the clatter of hoofbeats. Father had turned his red horse back past the wagon to the rear, and when he drew abreast of me, he dismounted and walked along beside me in silence for a ways.

Finally, after a while, he said, “I had a most interesting word with Mister Lane before we left.”

“You mean he granted you an audience.” Still smoldering with anger for having been betrayed by Lane’s cowardice and ambition, I could barely speak of him except with sarcasm and disdain. Popularity, that’s all these men cared about, top to bottom, from the traitorous New Englanders Franklin Pierce and Daniel Webster down to the pullets who ran the Committee for Public Safety of Lawrence, Kansas — these men sold their souls for the adulation of a mob, while the bodies of millions of Americans continued to be sold on the auction block. That’s how I reflected then: the second a subject was introduced to me, regardless of what it was, I would find my thoughts connected to a series of pulleys and belts, as if my mind were a factory, so that the mere mention of Mr. Lane’s name brought me in seconds to the grisly specter of permanent Negro slavery.

Father said, “I informed him that I intended to resume the fight that had been so unfortunately interrupted by his willingness to negotiate with the slavers.”

“What did he say to that?” It was raining lightly, and the ground was muddy and dark, even up here on the ridge — hard going for the horses. Our company now included Father’s new recruits, one of whom, Mr. Weiner, had his own wagon, and the journalist Mr. Redpath, who seemed to think Father a moral and military genius, a view the Old Man did not discourage, for he knew that the man’s communiques were rapidly enlarging the reputation of John Brown back East and would encourage continued financial and logistical support for our venture, regardless of what the rest of the Free-Soilers wanted. Father now knew that here, as much as back in North Elba or Springfield, it was not enough merely to be against slavery. Too many Free-Soilers, in reality, only wanted peace. Thus, so long as we were allied with white people, we had enemies amongst our own ranks. Here, in the absence of free blacks, we were obliged to do the Lord’s work alone.

“Mister Lane urged me to hold my fire but to keep my powder dry.”

“That old saw.”

“Yes. But he also revealed to me that he had met with Governor Shannon a second time, after the Ruffians had withdrawn back to Leavenworth. They got the governor so drunk that the man signed a document which authorizes the Free-Soilers to use force the next time the Missourians enter our territory.”

“What does that mean to us?”

Father laughed. “Why, it’s a legal license, son! A license to shoot Missourians. Or anyone else who would obstruct us in the work. We would do it anyway, I know, but this makes it legal.”

“Well, good,” I said grimly.

“I thought that would pleaseyou,”he said, and slapped me on the shoulder. Then he mounted his horse and rode to the front of the line and led us home.

With the death of Lyman Epps, I had crossed a line that I would never cross back over again. I could not: Lyman’s death at Lake Colden had made me permanently a different man. It froze me at the center of my heart, gathering ice in layers around it, so that, in a short time, I had become outwardly a hard man, a grim, silent warrior in my father’s army, soon to be a killer more feared by the slavers for his cold, avenging spirit than any Free-Soil man in all of Kansas. More feared even than Father, Captain John Brown himself, Old Brown, who, at least until Pottawatomie, was viewed by the slavers and even by most of the abolitionists as dangerous mainly because of his peculiar, but not especially long-lasting, influence over the young, idealistic men coming out from the East and because of his refusal to work in concert with the regular Free-Soil militias, even the one led by his son John, and with the legally instituted authorities in Lawrence. Oh, Father stamped his feet and grew nearly apoplectic with rage against the regulars, as he did against the President of the United States, the Democrats, and even the Republicans, against the abolitionists back East who were now and then reluctant to send him money and arms, against the timidity of the Free-Soil authorities in Lawrence and Topeka, and, always, against the pro-slavers, the Missourians, the Border Ruffians, the drunken Southern Negro-hating squatters down along the Pottawatomie River who were threatening in their newspapers and meetings to wipe the Yankees, and especially us Browns, off the face of the earth. But in most people’s minds, even in the minds of our enemies, the Old Man was, indeed, an old man, “the elderly gentleman from the state of New York” a man in his middle fifties. His rage and spluttering, given his radical abolitionist ideology and his old-fashioned, Puritanical form of Christian belief, were understandable, if not quite coherent.