Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

He enjoyed making our camp into a philosophical and political classroom, and such were the power of his ideas and the force of his expressiveness that even though many of his men were either illiterate and unused to abstract disputation or else were agnostical, they were nonetheless, for the most part, eager students. He instructed the men as to the faults of both parties in Kansas, showing, of the pro-slavery side, how slavery besotted the enslavers of men and coarsened them and made them into brutal beasts. Of the Free-State side, he said that, while there were many who were noble, true men, unfortunately they were being led by broken-down, cynical politicians of the old order, timid men who would rather pass high-sounding resolutions than act against slavery with a force of arms. He insisted that a politician could never be trusted anyhow, for even if he held a decent conviction, he was ever ready to sacrifice it to advantage himself. Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it. Despite his earlier attempts to acquire wealth, he believed that all great reforms in the past, such as the Christian religion, as well as the reform which we ourselves were now embarked upon, were based on broad, generous principles, and therefore he condemned the sale of land as a chattel, for instance, and thought that it should be held in common and in trust, as had been practiced by the Indians when the Europeans first arrived here. Slavery, however, was “the sum of all villainies,” and its abolition was therefore the first essential work of all modern reformers. He was perfectly convinced that if the American people did not end it speedily, human freedom and republican liberty would pass forever from this nation and possibly from all mankind.

Father, as always, slept little, as did I myself now, and often it turned out that only he and I would be awake keeping late watch, he having early dismissed the grateful regularly scheduled watch, and as he was, like many surveyors, a thorough astronomer, he enjoyed pointing out the different constellations and their clock-like movements across the deep, velvety sky. “Now,” he would say, “it is exactly one hour past midnight,” and he would show me which stars to separate from the myriad of lighted pinpoints overhead and how to line them up so that they resembled the hands on Grandfather’s old clock. He often turned rhapsodical at these times. “How admirable is the symmetry of the heavens! How grand and beautiful it is! Look how in the government of God everything moves in sublime harmony!” he declared. “Nothing like that down here with the government of man, eh?”

Father was pretty easily brought to heightened emotion in those days, even to the point of shedding tears and sometimes to loud laughter as well, which was uncharacteristic and probably due in part to the generally high level of tension and excitement that we habitually and necessarily lived with out there on the plains all that year and into the next. It made him seem physically larger than he was and gave his personality added volume, too, and because of his acts of violence against the enemy and his growing reputation as a warrior and successful leader of men, notwithstanding the fact that he always went about well-armed, with twin revolvers and his broadsword at his belt, a Sharps rifle close at hand, and a dirk in a scabbard above his boot, he was never, as sometimes of old, an object of derision: his manias were widely regarded now as passions, his stubbornness as belief in principles, his willfulness as self-assurance, and his Bible-based strategies as brilliant innovations in the science of warfare.

Even the enemy regarded him that way. They were not wrong to do so, of course, but it helped that, compared to us, our Free-State allies were timid and that our enemies were disorganized, ill-trained, often drunk, and inadequately armed. And as the Border Ruffians were mostly natives of Missouri rivertowns and did not live or work in Kansas, they did not know the countryside as well as we. The federal troops, though well led and equipped, were young, frightened conscripts and few in numbers, too few by far to patrol that vast a region effectively. And it was helpful, too, that Father, for the first time in his life, was lucky.

The famous Battle of Black Jack is an example. It has been written about often and described as a turning point in the war against slavery, but certain defining elements of the story always get left out. A bright, sunny Sunday morning in early June it was, and we had all gathered in a field out on the Santa Fe Trail near the tiny, mostly burned-out, Free-State settlement named Prairie City. Father had led us there to confer with a Captain Samuel Shore as to the possibility of combining our force with Captain Shore’s so-called Prairie City Rifles, one of the few Free-State militias aggressive enough to merit Father’s approval. We were also there to attend an outdoor service led by a popular itinerant preacher by the name of John Moore, two of whose sons had recently been captured and hauled off by a large band of marauding Border Ruffians led by the Virginian Henry Clay Pate. Pate would in time become a well-known colonel of the Fifth Virginia Cavalry in the Civil War, but in Kansas, though at bottom a pro-slavery Ruffian, he was a deputy United States marshal and had assisted the federal forces in the recent capture near Paola of brother John and had helped take in Jason also and had been pushing on into Kansas with his pack of Ruffians in search of us remaining Browns.

We had close to a dozen men in our group at that time, not including the journalist Redpath, who afterwards wrote up the story for the Eastern newspapers. Having arrived late, we stood on horseback at the edge of the crowd close by the road, which was more a rutted wagon track there than a proper road, when Fred drew first my and then Father’s attention to three riders approaching from the east, the direction of Black Jack Spring. As we had intelligence that Pate’s band of Ruffians had recently been seen encamped out there at Black Jack, and as the riders were strangers to all, Father decided to grab them. “Owen, take five of the men and run those fellows down,” he said, and returned his attention to Preacher Moore’s ongoing peroration.

With Fred, I gathered together Oliver and three others (I think including August Bondi, who after Harpers Ferry was said, first by the Southern press and then by the Northern press as well, to have been a Jew, but who, as far as I knew, was merely agnostical and of Austrian parentage) and rode out to meet the strangers. As soon as they saw us coming, they broke and ran like rabbits across the plain in three different directions. Like rabbit hunters, we split into two parties of three, enabling us quickly to cut off and capture two of the men, whom we marched at gunpoint back to the service, which had by then ended, thus freeing Father to interrogate the terrified fellows.

“I am Captain John Brown,” he announced to them, and needed little more to obtain their swift confession that they were from the camp at Black Jack. But not of the party of Henry Clay Pate, they insisted, which no one believed, so we bound them and turned them over to Captain Shore, who had one of his Prairie City volunteers march the two back to town, there to await negotiations with the Ruffians for an eventual exchange of prisoners — a useful, widespread practice among the warring parties that, for a while, until the Ruffians started executing their prisoners, helped keep the bloodshed down on both sides.

Immediately, most of the congregation called for a raid on Pate’s camp, their ardor being somewhat heated, perhaps, by the reported presence in the camp of the two sons of Mr. Moore, a man whom they now loved, and by Pate’s having aided in the capture of John and Jason, which was widely seen by Free-State people as unwarranted. Father, however, advised the excited crowd to wait till nightfall, so they could arrive in Black Jack at dawn, when least expected. This was wise, because the delay allowed those who had been merely carried along by the enthusiasm of the moment to separate themselves from men who, like the Gileadites, could be relied upon in a fight, which ended up being all of our group and most of Captain Shore’s militia.