Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. But I am no longer silent. I am saying that those men did not so choose. I chose for them. Their fates were in my hands alone.

There is much, of course, that I am leaving out of my account, much that need not be told here by me. Most of what happened back then occurred in full public view, anyhow, and is known to the world; it needs no corrective from me: I’m not writing a history of those years or a biography of my father. I leave those high tasks to you and the professor. I have neither the mind nor the training for them, nor the inclination. As for the wider events across the nation and in Washington during those years, when the slaveholding South like a gigantic serpent slowly wrapped the rest of the Republic in its suffocating coils: I leave to others the obligation to set straight that record; and for the most part they have already done so, the journalists, the historians and biographers, the memoirists, and so on. The fact that nearly all of us then engaged in the war against slavery believed in the late ’50s that the war was all but lost, that much today, if little noted by the world, is nonetheless collected and recorded there. I needn’t recount these highly visible public events, although I do wish you to know how, over time, they made us believe that our entire government and even our nation’s destiny itself had been stolen from us, as if we had been invaded and all but conquered by a foreign, tyrannical power.

We were enraged by this, to be sure, and howled at it, but when the slavery-loving, Negro-hating mobs gathered legitimacy in Washington and in the Southern press, when the Border Ruffians were portrayed as legitimate settlers and the overseers of human chattel as statesmen, when our leaders, like Senators Douglas and Webster, sold us out for a handful of silver coins and our heroes, like Senator Sumner, were clubbed down in the Capitol building itself, our rage turned suddenly to cold desperation. We who early on had been merely anti-slavery activists and who, slowly over the years in defense of our own rights of protest, had evolved, almost unbeknownst to ourselves, into guerilla fighters and militiamen — we now became terrorists. And having become terrorists, we found ourselves almost overnight made emblematic to those remaining white activists who mostly sat in their parlors or at their desks grieving over the loss of their nation. We inspired them, and they encouraged us. And so we waged their war for them. Unwilling to do more to regain their nation than write a poem or a cheque to help arm, clothe, and feed us, they were often objects of scorn and derision to us, although we were, of course, grateful for their poems and monies and used both to solicit still more monies and, with our purses thus fattened, purchased more Sharps rifles, more horses and supplies, more of the terrorizing broadswords and pikes.

Ah, but you know all this. You are an educated woman, who has sat for years at the foot of a wise and learned historian, a man whom I know also by reputation as the illustrious grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. The grandsire, of course, I was myself, through Father, personally acquainted with, and his nobility of purpose and great personal courage I hope I have not impugned in these pages. It’s just that, in the heat of battle and in the face of imminent death, I habitually bore towards Mr. Garrison and most of the other white abolitionists my father’s long-held resentment and impatience. And even today, these many years after, it still rankles that, whilst I and my family and our comrades were laying about in Kansas with our broadswords, bloodying ourselves and our enemies and putting at ultimate risk our lives and our immortal souls, Mr. Garrison, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Whittier, and all those other good men and women back in Boston and Concord and New York were adjusting their sleeves so as not to spot their starched cuffs.

I hear you protest, and I apologize; I concede: it was not the fault of those good men that we risked our lives and butchered the men and boys down on the Pottawatomie and in the ensuing several years raised homicidal havoc across the Kansas plain and even into Missouri itself, or that later we marched into martyrdom in Virginia; these things we did, not because others did not, but because we ourselves almost alone could not bear to see the war against slavery come to an end there. Out there on the old California trail, we understood what no one else in the country could have known, not in Boston or New York or Washington or even in the capitals of the South. We were on the battlefront, and that night in May of ’56, with the news of the abject sack and surrender of the town of Lawrence to the Border Ruffians still drumming in our ears and barely hours later the sudden arrival of word of the near assassination of Senator Sumner in Washington, we believed that the war was all but over and done with. On that night, we saw Satan settle comfortably into his seat and commence to gather his slaveholding minions in to serve and honor him.

Though it’s not my intention here to explain or excuse our acts, mine or Father’s or those of any who followed us, I do want you to understand that we were desperate men. And of all of us, I suppose I was the most desperate. We were made so, me especially, by three inescapable realities: our position on the ground out there in Kansas; the clarity of Father’s understanding of the true nature and scale of the war against slavery; and our principles. We could not be where we were, know what we knew, uphold what we honored — and do other than we did. And joining us were other men for whom these same three circumstances applied as well: not many, a dozen, twenty, usually one at a time and on occasion arriving in groups of three or four, but enough of them quickly came forward and joined our band, especially after Pottawatomie, that we were before long no longer a small, guerilla force made up only of Old Brown and his sons but an actual, insurrectionary army that was well-armed and was growing rapidly in size and fearsomeness.

Sometimes as many as fifty men, sometimes as few as ten, we stayed on horseback day and night almost continuously and, all that summer and into the next year, conducted swift, daring, terroristic raids against the Border Ruffians and their supporters amongst the settlers, moving our encampment every few days from one tree-shrouded river-bottom to another. We burnt down the cabins and barns of the enemy and liberated their property, their horses and cattle and supplies and weapons, and although some men, even amongst our allies, called it looting or simple horse-stealing, for us it was merely a necessary and legal continuation of our war policy, for it weakened our enemy on the field and frightened him everywhere, whilst us it strengthened and our allies it encouraged.

During this period, dozens of journalists came out from the East by way of St. Louis, Leavenworth, and Lawrence, or down from Iowa to Topeka, and entered thence into the war region of southeastern Kansas. The more intrepid among them, like Mr. Redpath and Mr. Hinton, would eventually make their way to the marshes and ravines and the cottonwood groves along the Marais des Cygnes and the Pottawatomie or out onto the high, grassy plains of the old Ottawa Reserve, where they would find and follow our band for a few days or a week until, exhausted by the pace of our steady marches and raiding and by Father’s night-long monologues and preachments, they would head back to Lawrence or Topeka and dispatch back to the East vivid accounts of Old Brown’s indefatigable and brilliant campaign against the pro-slavery forces. Soon they had made him a heroic figure out of some old romance, like a legendary Scottish Highlands chieftain leading his doughty clansmen against the British invader, and by summer’s end his name was on the lips of nearly every American, North and South. To all, he had become a figure perfectly expressive of the antislavery principle.