Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Sadly, Father’s Bible failed to warn him that the newly elected President, Martin Van Buren, would abruptly establish the National Bank and change the lending rules, causing the famous Panic of ’37. Thanks to Van Buren’s National Bank, soon all the small-monied borrowing men like Father were left holding packets of worthless paperpiles of currency issued by the various states and high mountains of mortgaged titles to vast tracts of western land and farms that could be neither sold for one-tenth their costs nor rented for the interest due on the unsecured loans that had purchased them barely a year before. The lucky fellows and the bankers and politicians who understood the system and thus had been able to anticipate the sudden deflation of value that inevitably follows hard upon a speculative boom, those men sold off their properties early and high and walked away counting their profits. Within weeks, they were doing the President’s bidding, calling in their neighbors’ loans and hiring sheriffs to seize land, houses, livestock, and even the personal property of the foolishly stubborn men who persisted in believing that the decline was only a temporary aberration. For those men, men like John Brown, surveyor, tanner, and small-time stockman, the collapse of the land boom was catastrophic.

Thus, by the summer of ’39, Father — who two years earlier had thought himself practically an Ohio land baron, who in his mind had laid out an entire town on five thousand mortgaged acres overlooking the Cuyahoga River, where he expected soon to see a government-financed canal that would be as enriching to him as the Erie had been to developers in western New York; a penniless man who owned title to two mortgaged farms he did not live on and one, the Haymaker Place, that he loved and hoped to make his family estate one day; a one-time tanner of hides raising thoroughbred horses and blooded Saxony sheep, who rode about like a squire in a carriage behind a matched pair of gray Narragansetts, all this on borrowed money — that man suddenly, inexplicably, found himself hounded by bondsmen, banks, process-servers, and sheriffs.

Bound as much by principle and Biblical text as when he had stayed out, Father with foolish consistency covered his borrowings with more borrowing and dropped deeper and deeper into debt. In ‘37 and ‘38, with everyone else rushing to sell short and salvage what little property he could, Father, almost alone, refused to get out. “This too shall pass, children, this too shall pass,” he would say. “We must be patient.” But all his promissory notes, which had been piled on top of one another even higher than any of us had imagined, were coming due. One by one, his titles began to be seized, titles that he had used to guarantee second loans, which afterwards he had used for the purchase of still other properties, until finally it began to look as though he would lose all his plots of land, his canal-side properties, also his carriage and Narragansetts and the blooded stock. Even the house we lived in, the Haymaker Place, was under siege, the sweet little farmstead that we older boys and Mary, sister Ruth, and the younger children had been managing well enough to keep the family adequately fed and clothed, while Father raced around the countryside frantically trying to keep his paper empire from being blown utterly away.

He was in those days more frightened than I had ever seen him before or afterwards. The growing violence of his words alarmed all who heard him, especially Mary and us children. The more frantic and frightened he became, the more reliant on his Bible for guidance and on his moral force for instruction he became, but now his discourse was a tangle of contradictory quotations and maxims that even he could not unravel. “This prolonged tribulation, if it be the will of Providence, must be endured with cheerfulness and true resignation,” he instructed us. “We must try to trust in Him who is very gracious and full of compassion and of almighty power, for those that do not will be made ashamed. We must not be ashamed, children! Remember that Ezra, the prophet, when himself and the capitivity were in a strait, prayed and afflicted himself before God. So must we go and do likewise.”

Thus, though we had come to dread the announcement of any new scheme or plan to make money and at last turn things around, it was with barely concealed relief that we greeted his decision to round up a herd of miscellaneous cattle from all over the county and drive it east to Connecticut, where there was a ready, cash-paying market operated by the agency of Wadsworth & Wells, a company that Father had dealt with successfully in the past. In short order, he managed to put together a sizeable herd of cows owned mostly by Grandfather and several of Father’s friends, with seventeen head of our own, all but our last two milch cows. He drove his cattle aboard the barge at Ashtabula, and we waved him off and, when he was out of sight, happily embraced one another, glad to see him gone from us for a while, so that we could re-gather our wits and reclaim a shared sense of reality.

When he went east in ’39, Father’s real plan, which he did not reveal to those who had entrusted him with their cattle, was not merely to raise cash by selling livestock to Wadsworth & Wells, but also while there to negotiate still further loans in New York or, if necessary, up in Boston, to cover his growing losses back in Ohio. It took him only a few days to fail in New York; bankers there had already withdrawn all speculative loans from the Western Reserve and were not about to risk more. Directly, he went on to tap the more deeply rooted money trees in Boston, and when he returned to complete his cattle-dealing in Hartford, although lugging an empty bucket, he was once again brightly optimistic. He never said who, but someone up there had allowed Father to believe that within a few days, a week at the most, of his return to Hartford, he would receive an unsecured loan of five thousand dollars. I suspect his supposed benefactor was a wealthy abolitionist like Mr. Stearns or even Dr. Howe, whose wife, the poet, was rumored to be an heiress, but it might have been a Yankee banker still looking to extract titles to western lands from a bumpkin in need, a rich man only temporarily deluded as to his own best interests by Father’s enthusiasm, naïveté, and evident honesty.

Five thousand dollars. The figure is important. This was the amount for which Father had recently been sued by the Western Reserve Bank of Warren, Ohio, for having defaulted on several loans. Judgement had been found against him, and unable to pay even a portion of the debt, he was being threatened with outright bankruptcy or jail. At the last minute, an old friend from Akron, Mr. Amos Chamberlain, had kindly taken over the note for him. To guarantee that loan, the Old Man had written Mr. Chamberlain a note against the Haymaker farm. What he did not tell Mr. Chamberlain or the Western Reserve Bank was that the Haymaker title had earlier been used to guarantee any number of additional loans of money for the purchase of other large plots of land along the Cuyahoga River. It had been done pursuant to the digging of the proposed Ohio-to-Pittsburgh canal, which, unfortunately, had ended up going in further west, near Cleveland. It was another of his schemes gone bad, still unpaid, and one of the bottom cards in Father’s shaky house of cards.

A few days passed, and no money arrived from Boston. A week. Then another. Every few hours, Father walked from the office of Wadsworth & Wells, which he was using as his headquarters, to the post office, only to return empty-handed, puzzled, increasingly angered, and very frightened. At best, he would lose everything: the farm and livestock, the house and all its furnishings — everything! How would he feed his poor babies? How could he face his family and friends? Then sometime during the afternoon of June 14, 1839, Mr. Wadsworth went into the office of his company and discovered that the sum of five thousand dollars had been removed from the cash box. As the box was undamaged and still locked, he knew at once who had taken it. Besides Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells, only Father, their trusted agent, who might now and then need a few dollars in order to help conduct their business, had a key.