Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Fred said, “Shut up, Henry! You have to do what Father says. He has spoken with the Lord all these years, and you haven’t. It’s what the Lord has told him to do.”

“Are these men not our sworn enemies, boys?” Father asked. “Have they not hundreds of times sworn to kill us?”

They all four nodded agreement — slowly and reluctantly, however. Henry said, “But we have never thought they would ever actually do it. I mean, kill us outright. You know, unless they were provoked or something.”

“This will provoke them,” I said. “Either you’re with us on this, Henry, or you’re against us.”

“What about John and Jason?” Salmon asked.

“The choice hasn’t been put to them,” I said. “So they’re neither for nor against.”

Father added that, as officers in the Free-State Militia, John and Jason were obliged to follow the orders of their superiors, even if their superiors ordered them to capitulate to the enemy, which, in a sense, they had already done. As irregulars, we were not so bound. Besides, John was a member of the Free-State legislature and had sworn to uphold the laws of the territory. The only laws we had sworn to uphold were the Lord’s.

“And the Lord wants us to do this thing?” Fred asked.

“He does,” Father pronounced.

“Good,” Fred replied, and the others nodded agreement again, this time with firmness.

This may seem strange to one who was not there on that May night out on the plain — to us it was apposite and just, and not at all strange — but at that moment, when we had reached our decision to go to the cabins on the Pottawatomie and kill the men who lived there, a single rider came out of the darkness from the direction of Lawrence, bringing news which, although it was awful news, seemed nonetheless to have been sent by the Lord Himself, sent with no other purpose than to give us permission to do this thing and do it now.

Oddly, we did not hear him approach, perhaps because our attention was so taken up with our wrangle. He seemed to emerge from the darkness like a ghost — but it was only a man, a man in a long white duster, riding a pale gray stallion, and although we were startled by his sudden appearance, we were not frightened by it, as he seemed to bear us no enmity. We did not know him, had never seen him before, and he did not introduce himself or ask who we were. He was a tall, well-built man of early middle-age, blond-haired, with a full beard. I recall him exactly. He pulled up beside the wagon and touched the broad brim of his hat with a gloved finger.

With no further greeting, he said to Father straight out, in an even voice, “You may wish to know, sir, that early yesterday it was reported in Saint Louis that Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber. You may also wish to know the name of his assailant, Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina. The senator from Massachusetts, a strong supporter of the abolitionist cause, which I take to be your cause as well, was beaten unmercifully by the Southerner. He was clubbed on the head with a stout cane, and it is very likely that he will not survive the attack.”

I had never seen Father as wild as he was then. He pulled off his hat and threw it on the ground. His face reddened with rage, and his brow darkened down as if his brain were on fire. He lifted his arms into the air and cried, “How can this be! How can such a thing happen!”

I said nothing, but the others, too, cried out their shock and anger at this latest outrage by the slavemasters. Then the messenger, if that is, indeed, what he was, said to us, “I bid you good evening, sirs” and, touching his hat a second time, rode slowly off, disappearing into the darkness as silently and swiftly as he had come.

For a long while after that, Father and the boys acted crazy, as if trying to outdo one another in their ranting and their wild promises to avenge this heinous crime against one of our heroes. I waited until they began to calm somewhat, and when I thought they could hear me clearly, I said, “It’s time now to go down along the Pottawatomie, where we can sharpen our swords and commence to use them.”

That silenced everyone, even Father, who seemed to break out of a trance. He shook his head violently, as if ridding it of evil spirits or bad dreams, and suddenly he was scrambling up on Reliance and shouting for Oliver to get the wagon moving. He took his own reins in his hands and slapped them against the flanks of the Morgans. The horses leapt forward, and Oliver was obliged to run and grasp onto the rear of the box and clamber aboard whilst it was moving. We watched for a minute longer, saying nothing, and then the others, Salmon, Fred, and Henry, mounted their horses — I had never got down from mine — and we took off at a full gallop, chasing after Father and Oliver, the wagon rumbling in the darkness ahead of us and ahead even of Father, racing along the rough old buffalo-track, the California Road, that led down from the heights of the Ottawa lands to the winding, narrow Cottonwood valley of the Pottawatomie.

Who can say which event is accidental and which is not? Or even if there exists such a thing as a true accident, a purely causeless event? When you take away belief in God’s will, then every untoward event and every blessing is viewed as merely the result of history; or else its origin is said to be a mystery; or else we lamely and with extreme insecurity reason backwards from effect to cause — from consciousness of guilt, for instance, backwards to the sinful act. Thus, if my feelings of guilt were made a measure of my intention, I have to concede that, even though I was not aware of it at the time, I nonetheless fully intended to kill my beloved friend Lyman Epps and only arranged for it afterwards to resemble an accident, in my own eyes as much as in the eyes of others. And thus it would, indeed, be as I felt it (but did not believe it) afterwards — a crime. A murder. By the same token, by the weight of guilt, I fully intended to go down there along the Pottawatomie Creek that night with my father and brothers and haul five men who claimed to love slavery and hate Negroes out of their cabins and butcher them for the sheer, murderous pleasure of it. For afterwards that is how guilty I felt, as if I had done it for the pleasure of it.

But if events are driven not by a man’s unconscious desires, and not by pure mystery, and not by some deep, unknown historical force — then what? After all, I was not obliged by circumstances or by any other man to go there with my sword and brandish it the way I did. No, I hold myself responsible for my own bloody acts. And I believe that I am further responsible, and to nearly the same degree, for the bloody acts that night of my father and brothers, too. For without my having instigated the attack and then goaded them when they grew timorous and frightened by the idea, they would not have done it.

Simply, I showed them at the time and afterwards that if we did not slay those five pro-slave settlers and did not do it in such a brutal fashion, the war in Kansas would have been over. Finished. In a matter of weeks, Kansas would have been admitted to the Union as a slave-state, and there would have been nothing for it then but the quick secession of all the Northern states, starting with New England, and the wholesale abandonment of three million Negro Americans to live and die in slavery, along with their children and grandchildren and however many generations it would take before slavery in the South was finally, if ever, overthrown. There would have been no raid on Harpers Ferry, certainly, and no Civil War, for the South would not have objected in the slightest to the break-up of the Union. Let them go. We will happily keep our slaves.