Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

In a sense, I suppose that what I am inscribing on these pages is the Secret History of John Brown. You may, of course, do with it what you wish, or do nothing with it, if it seems worthless to you and Professor Villard. As I have said, we each will have very different uses for it anyhow, uses shaped by those to whom we each imagine we are telling our respective tales. For you and the professor, it is told to present and future generations of students of the history of nineteenth-century America; for me, it is being told to the dead, the long dead and buried companions of my past. And told especially to my dead father.

Your history of John Brown, however, will be of no use to the dead. It is for the living and the unborn: you are in the business of creating received knowledge. I am in the business of coming along behind and correcting it. I remind you of this for several reasons, but mostly so that you will understand that what I leave out of my account is all that I see no reason to correct or to enlarge upon. Simply put, I accept the truth of whatever is absent from these pages.

And for that reason, you will not find here any further description of the war in Kansas, even though it continued to burn beyond the so-called Battle of Osawatomie for fully another year and a half, before finally flickering down to a charred pile of ash in the winter of ’58, with the Free-State forces arrived at last in exhausted ascendancy. By then, Father’s and my attentions were elsewhere. His attention was on the Eastern sources of funding for his African Campaign, as he had come to call it; mine was on the recruitment and training, in our secret encampment at Tabor, Iowa, of the young men who would follow Father into Africa, and the long, broody wait for him to signal that the moment to attack had at last arrived. Also not here: Father’s lengthy visits and planning sessions during the spring and summer of ’57 and all throughout ’58 with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, and Gerrit Smith in Peterboro; and, over in Massachusetts, his fiery speeches at Springfield, Worcester, Medford, Concord, and Boston; and his stay in Concord with the distinguished authors Messrs. Emerson, Thoreau, Higginson, and Sanborn, all of whom have since published what I assume to be truthful accounts of Father’s appearance, words, and deportment there. By then, his apotheosis was nearly completed anyhow, and he was to everyone he met a grand, Cromwellian figure transfigured in the glow of their lofty, optimistic thought. But I was not myself present at any of those meetings so cannot know how, in fact, he behaved.

I do not include here anything that I myself know nothing of or know only through hearsay. For instance, Father’s journey to Canada in April and May of ’58, where, at the famous Chatham Convention of Negro leaders, he first presented to the public, as it were, his plan for the Subterranean Passway and obtained from the most prominent Negroes, Frederick Douglass and the Reverends Loguen and Garnet and Harriet Tubman and others of that radical ilk, the same sort of trust and financial support that he had earlier secured in private from the radical whites in New York and New England. It was at Chatham that he recruited into our little army its first Negro member, Osborn Anderson. Later, of course, as you may know by now, there were four other Negroes who went the full route with us, courageous, doomed men — the mulatto Lewis Leary and his nephew John Copeland, who had been a student at Oberlin College in Ohio; and the splendid Dangerfield Newby; and Frederick Douglass’s friend and valet, Shields Green, of whom, despite his willingness to abandon Mr. Douglass and follow Father, I had no particularly high opinion, and of that I may later write. I have at this moment no desire to puncture Shields’s somewhat inflated reputation, for he was young and ignorant and surely did not realize what he had let himself in for, when he left his protector and went down with Father into “the steel trap!’ as Mr. Douglass called it. He died horribly. One must, as long as one remains alive, forgive the dead everything.

There is, of course, the well-known story of Father’s seeking out and recruiting in New York City Mr. Hugh Forbes, the conceited British journalist who had accompanied us on shipboard from Boston to Liverpool and by carriage to London during our ill-fated voyage abroad. That sordid story has been told often elsewhere, told more by Father’s enemies than by his friends, probably because of its tendency to portray Father as a deluded old man or, at best, as disastrously naive. I’m reluctant to enter it here, however, because Forbes, too, like Shields Green, may be dead by now, and I had few dealings with him myself and from the start viewed him as a callow, cynical, pompous man and a dissembler. But then, I was never so innocent as Father, especially when it came to a certain type of man, of which Forbes was a prime example — the carefully reticent, smooth-talking fellow with a casual claim to experiences and knowledge that, to Father, were cosmopolitan, which is to say, European. And because he did not boast in the usual loud American way of having fought alongside Mazzini and Garibaldi in Italy and of composing a military handbook for the Austrian army and reporting on the cataclysmic events in Europe in ’48 for the New York Herald and his own periodical, The European, but instead implied and insinuated them into conversation in the educated British way, the Old Man, the rough-cut Yankee auto-didact, believed him and hired him on as our only salaried recruit. He even commissioned the velvety fellow with the rank of colonel and sent him west to Tabor to drill and train his troop of young, ragtag volunteers, all of whom by then were hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign and needed, not drilling exercises, but weaponry, supplies, and more fighting men. We certainly did not need a man like Forbes, Colonel Forbes, telling us what to do.

Little matter, for he did not turn up in Iowa for months anyhow, and when he finally arrived, he was mainly taken up with the composition of his military handbook for the coming American anti-slavery revolution, which, thanks to Father, he was convinced was imminent, a volume that, as soon as it was properly published, he expected to see purchased and eagerly read by all Americans, north and south, and by Europeans, too. He expected this book to make his personal fortune.

Though Forbes was the first, he was the most transparent of the many men who tried to exploit Father for personal, financial gain. There was also the growing number of journalists who wrote for the Eastern newspapers and periodicals and now followed Father every-where and sent back to their editors lavishly embellished accounts of the Old Man’s adventures in Kansas and his public appearances in New York and New England. Father had taken to traveling under the name of Shubel Morgan again, ostensibly to conceal his identity from federal officers still seeking to arrest him for his actions in Kansas, and wore the long white beard with which after his death he was so famously portrayed; but under any name and in whatever disguise, the comings and goings of Osawatomie Brown were by now well-known to the press, for he had become a colorful character, one whom all Americans enjoyed reading about, regardless of their views on slavery. With these journalists I have little quarrel, however, for quite as effectively as they exploited him, Father exploited them back by using their vivid, exaggerated stories of his military exploits and his spiritual and moral clarity to advertise and confirm his own accounts of his bravery, personal sacrifice, and character.

Most of the other profiteers — at least until later, after Harpers Ferry, when the sale of Father’s personal letters and effects and the odd, cast-off article of clothing or weapon became as lucrative as the sale of portions of the True Cross — were small fellows, merchants, mainly, and tradesmen out to extract from Father’s purse as much as the market would bear for guns and bullets, sabers and saddles and other war supplies. Exploiting a market inflated by the Old Man’s needs for secrecy and speed of delivery, they picked Father’s pocket, which had been filled and re-filled again and again by his now-loyal cadre of Eastern gentlemen of means, men who had finally decided that Father was right, that the war against slavery would have to be carried into Africa, and Osawatomie Brown was the only man to do it. They were Mr. Gerrit Smith, as always, and Dr. Howe and Messrs. Lawrence, Stearns, Sanborn, and Higginson. Good men, all, if not personally courageous. And I do not fault them for denying Father in the weeks and months immediately following the uproar at Harpers Ferry, any more than one can fault Peter for denying Christ. Later, in the aftermath of the Civil War, they did return to his side and glorified his memory with more than appropriate praise.