Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

There is something that I have always wanted to explain, because in the various considerations of Father’s lifelong commitment to the overthrow of slavery, it has been much misunderstood. A great but little noted problem faced by Father throughout his life was his constantly divided mind. This division arose because, as much as he wished to be a warrior against slavery, he also wished to be, like most Americans, a man of means.

To be fair, it was a more basic and praiseworthy need than that. He had a large family, after all, and merely to house and feed and clothe them required enormous, sustained effort, especially if his only sources of income were his farm and his tannery. And by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, he was beginning to fear that, because of this requirement, he would always be a poor man with no time to wage war against slavery. His poverty, therefore, sabotaged his moral life. That is how it seemed to him. And that is what eventually led him down a path that very nearly did indeed sabotage his moral life.

Despite his having been poor and struggling since childhood, the Old Man himself dated the onset of his true financial woes to his thirty-ninth year, to the period of what he called his “extreme calamity.” Father always believed that there were three ways to make money in America: manufacturing or growing things; buying things low; and selling things high. A man who did only one of these would forever remain poor. He had to do at least two of them: best if he did all three, but without capital to invest in large-scale manufacture, impossible. A farmer made things, as it were, and sold them; a tanner did the same. Father had tried making and selling for nearly two decades, but he was still poor and exhausted: the process of manufacturing food, livestock, or leather goods took too long and consumed all a man’s days and nights, and thus he would never in his lifetime accumulate sufficient capital to manufacture steel, for instance, or some other item of great cost where the margins of profit were large enough to enrich him in his own time. He might turn to buying low and selling high, then. And what could be easily bought and rapidly sold by a man with little or no capital? Land. Hundreds of thousands, millions, of acres of loamy land rolling west from the Alleghenies all the way to the Mississippi and beyond. There was no greater or cheaper material resource available to an Ohio man in those days.

Inexpensive, arable land — it lay for miles all around him, and every month new immigrants from the crowded New England states and the eastern seaboard cities and even parts of Europe were pouring into the Western Reserve, bringing with them an insatiable hunger for farmland. They would also need new roads and canals to ship their produce east, new settlements and villages to reside and do business in, new schools and churches and public buildings to accommodate their expanding society. But before all else, they needed land, for they were mostly small farmers and young, and they brought with them or could easily borrow the necessary cash to buy it with. And in those years the bankers were eager to loan money with little or no collateral to secure it, for they well understood that a man who did not need that land for his own use, if he borrowed enough money to buy it first, could turn around and sell it for a higher price tomorrow, could pocket the difference, borrow more and buy more and sell that, too.

Basically, that was how Father fell into debt — by following the advice of bankers — and afterwards no amount of time and energy spent at war against the slavers, no amount of preaching to his neighbors, and no amount of training and conditioning his large family to become an army for the Lord could keep his mind free of his terrible indebtedness. Thus his divided mind.

It was very complicated, how Father first got himself into debt and then proceeded to worsen his situation permanently, and as I was but a boy in my early and middle teens then, I did not much understand it. Besides, it was not then or ever Father’s way to provide people with the details of his business matters, so that most of what I know I learned years later and gleaned from others. He could not keep everything from us, of course. Especially since we, his family, had so often to cover for him and over time were called upon to make so many material sacrifices that were a direct result of the Old Man’s schemes. But I do not think that anyone — family member, friend, or business associate, or even Father’s own lawyers, when later he was suing and being sued — knew all the facts of his financial dealings. He tended to give out partial or contradictory information and sometimes even false information, all designed, or so it seemed, to keep his interrogator from asking further questions, as if somewhere at the bottom there were a secret fraud, when in fact there was none — it was only Father who was being fooled, and for the most part fooled by himself. He was deceived by his desires, actually, which is why, when it all came crashing down on his head, he blamed his own greed and vanity.

Early on, his secrecy had sprung from an ingrained sense of decorum and desire for privacy. Then for many years, when he was in flight from bankruptcy and, later, from the consequences of bankruptcy itself, he probably felt that secrecy was necessary to protect his family and business associates. “A man who is wholly candid about his finances, who opens his ledgers to anyone who asks, such a man abandons his responsibility to Others,”Father insisted, although he had arrived at this philosophy by a somewhat circuitous route. It served him well in the end, however, and others also. After Kansas and Harpers Ferry — when what had originally been Yankee manners, and then self-interested necessity, had become military policy — these habits of secrecy and occasional dissembling protected many of the people who were his chief supporters, and they may well have even saved the lives of some good men, like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Howe and Frank Sanborn.

It started back in the middle ’30s, after Father had closed down his tannery in New Richmond and returned to Hudson, Ohio, where, like so many other men of small money and big ideas, he got drawn into buying land and farms on easy credit and unsecured loans. Of course, with hindsight one can say that it was inevitable and hardly inexplicable, and having found himself dangerously overextended, he should simply have cut his losses and gotten out. But the Old Man, once he had determined that optimism was realism, could not be shaken from his course. After all, just take a look around, he would say in those early days of the land boom. All over the Western Reserve, men clearly less intelligent and hard-working than he were getting fabulously rich. Why not jump in himself? And why not bring in friends and family, too? Share the coming harvest.

At first, however, and for a long time, he successfully resisted the temptation to join the general run to speculate on land with borrowed money. That was when optimism was not realism; it was fantasy, or worse. He saw it then as a sickness, the mentality of a stampeding herd. And he justified his resistance, typically, on moral grounds, on principle, fortified by the Bible. As in Deuteronomy 15:6: Thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow. As in Proverbs 22:7: Therichruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

Later, when he began to borrow, it was on principle then, too. He borrowed everywhere from everyone — from his father and brothers in Akron, from rich men and poor, banks, friends, and strangers. He had a well-deserved reputation for probity and honesty, and so great was his belief in his ability to take the measure of land (a not altogether unfounded belief: though self-taught, he was a skillful surveyor and possessed a sensitive, knowing eye for good farmland) and so attractive a talker was he that, once he set his mind to make a purchase, it was not difficult for him to convince others to become his partners and to loan him the money for his share of the partnership as well. From this side of the fence, however, he took to citing Luke 14: 28–30—the story of the man who tried to build a tower and did not have sufficient material to finish it and was mocked by his neighbors. And 2 Kings 6:4–6—the story of the borrowed iron axe-head that fell into the water and was made to float and was not lost. And also, from 2 Kings 4:1–7—the story of Elisha’s widowed daughter-in-law, whose sons were taken in bond by her creditors, so she borrowed many vessels from her neighbors, and the vessels were made to fill with oil, which were then sold to pay all her debts, even that for the borrowed vessels, freeing her sons and leaving the rest for her and her sons to live luxuriously on afterwards.