Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“I see,” said Mr. Douglass. “And you propose to man each of these blockhouses with a small force of… what? Twenty-five men at the most?”

“At most,” Father said.

“Whilst your main army conducts forays into the flatlands below.”

“Exactly.”

“Fine, but how shall they be supplied? Your main forces can’t do it. They’ll be too busy eluding capture and hanging by the slaveowners.”

“They’ll be supplied from the North,” Father explained. He would establish agents in Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose responsibility would be to gather and store supplies and arms purchased for them by radical abolitionist supporters and to ship them south along the Passway, even as freshly liberated slaves came north along the same route. No wagon would come south empty, just as no wagon would return empty, either: the Underground Railroad was to run two ways now, instead of one. Father’s main army, he went on, would simply take its supplies, its food, fresh horses, and so forth, from the raided plantations. They would also have whatever food and supplies they were given by sympathetic Southern whites. For there would be some supporters among the whites, Father was sure, small farmers and the like, who, not owning any slaves, were bound to be profoundly disgusted by the ways that the system oppressed them, too, people who would therefore welcome the opportunity to aid and abet men come south to wage war against slavery.

Here Mr. Douglass shook his great head. “I think, Mister Brown, that you don’t know those folks like I do. You’re a white man and perhaps understand whites, but you’re not a Southern white man. Go on, though. There’s much to admire here anyhow,” he said gently.

A sustained, guerilla war would swiftly drive the price of a slave worth one thousand dollars today to ten thousand dollars or even more, Father explained. The cotton could not be grown, harvested, ginned, shipped, and sold without a huge labor force, and there were not enough whites in the South to accomplish that great and economically necessary task alone. Father was convinced that if the fight lasted long enough and caused a sufficient number of slaves to escape, the costs of holding on to their slaves would so greatly outweigh the benefits that the Slavocracy would move to strike a deal that would free all slaves in exchange for their return home as paid workers. “Slaves run north for freedom” Father noted, “not work.” If they had freedom, they would stay, and many of those now living in the North would likely return also. “I do not intend to conquer the South,” Father declared. “I merely mean to make slavery prohibitively expensive. If a people cannot be made to do the right thing, Mister Douglass, then we must make them do the thing that is in their interest.”

For this reason, he was convinced that his war of liberation must be undertaken now or very soon, before slavery was extended into the western territories. If we did not strike now, he said, when the Southern states, because of their dependence on cotton, were economically vulnerable and more or less evenly matched in Congress by the North, then we would be faced later with only two alternatives — division of the Union or a bloody civil war. Or perhaps both. The longer we delayed, the more successful the South would be in extending slavery into Texas and the other territories, and even into Cuba and Mexico. Expansion out of the South into the west and the Caribbean isles would diversify the slaveholding economy from cotton and soon make it powerful beyond belief, and as those territories became states, they would come to dominate the North in Congress. With a slaveowning Democrat President, Senate, and House of Representatives, the North would have no choice but to secede from the Union or, to avoid total absorption by the Slavocracy, go to war. There were already calls for secession-or-war from both sides.

“Yes, but let me be sure, Mister Brown, that you’re not resurrecting that old idea of a black republic. Your plan could produce that. I would vehemently oppose that. A little land-locked Haiti, separate from and surrounded by a white United States;’ Mr. Douglass said. “I would not wish for that.”

“No, no, no! Not at all. Well, temporarily, perhaps. But only as a way of keeping the venture from being mistakenly construed as a policy of the Northern states,” Father insisted. He wished to do it more or less the same as the Texans had done against Mexico. He planned to publish assurances that as soon as slavery was abolished in every state and territory, his temporary Negro republic would be dissolved, at which time all conquered regions would be returned to the control of their original state governments.

Mr. Douglass sighed heavily, a melancholy exhalation, and peered down at the map before him. “The federal army will come after you, sir. It doesn’t matter, North or South — they won’t permit it.”

It would take them too long to act, Father explained, and when they did, he would have moved his forces to another front. From the mountains of Virginia, we would slip down to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee and on into the hills of Georgia. We would be divided into small, highly mobile units, little more than bands, striking where least expected and then retreating to our mountain hideouts, disappearing into the upland forests like the Seminole Indians into the swamps of Florida. Also, as he pointed out, our campaign would have hundreds of thousands of civilian supporters, millions, North and South, which would weaken to a crucial degree any federal army commissioned to stop us. “A federal army would have to cut down every tree from Alabama to Ohio to defeat us!” Father said, wagging a finger.

“They well might. Perhaps—” Mr. Douglass began.

Father interrupted him. “Also, I believe that our job could be completed in a single year, too soon for them to muster the requisite force. On the first day, right off, we’d issue a statement of our intentions and show our willingness to negotiate a peace strictly in terms of the ending of slavery. We’d be absolutely clear that we have no other intention but to end slavery. A war conducted without a precise goal can never be won! Remember that, Mister Douglass. I learned it in Europe. By the same token, the more precise the goal, the fewer soldiers needed to win it. Learned that there, too. You must state your objective clearly and then show that you’re willing to die for it, and if you can demonstrate that it’s in your enemy’s own interest to have you gain your objective, as we’ll do by making the market price of every slave in America insupportably high, victory will fall into your lap like an overripe fruit!”

While the two went back and forth, Father explaining and defending his ideas and Mr. Douglass questioning them, gently objecting here and there, but gradually, as it seemed to me, going along, I looked freshly at Father’s map of his wonderful Subterranean Passway. It was the central nervous system for his whole operation, a spinal cord that ran from Timbuctoo south all the way to Alabama, with a thousand nerve-like branches east and west along the way. I remembered, years before, first tying into it from a western branch, riding down from Ohio with Father and my brothers into the hills of Kentucky, where we met slaves who had escaped from plantations far to the south in Georgia and South Carolina, exhausted men, women, and children who had been passed along for weeks, emerging blinking into the light of freedom as if they had come up from a network of tunnels hundreds of miles long. And I knew that Timbuctoo, where we would soon be living, tapped into the Passway at its head in the Adirondacks, and lately we had come at it from the east here in Springfield, Massachusetts, where I had seen the great Harriet Tubman, she whom Father called The General, “a woman who is most of a man,”he said, and heard her testify as to its existence. It was real, this Subterranean Passway. Father had not dreamed it up. The slaveholders had not been able to sever it or to block it permanently anywhere along its length. If they attacked it in one place, it appeared the next night in another. Father’s plan for a guerilla war against the Slavocracy was, in fact, a logical extension of the ongoing work of the Underground Railroad, and he had focused his thinking on the one aspect of the Railroad that no other abolitionist had so far grasped — that its continued existence had slowly raised the dollar value of slaves. He was proposing simply to accelerate that process.