Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Including myself, then, this was the core of John Brown’s little army of the Lord. Before long, we would be joined at times by as many as fifty others, some of whom stayed on for the duration and followed the Old Man all the way to Harpers Ferry, some of whom weakened and fell away, especially after the news of what happened at Pottawatomie got around, and some of whom were slain in battle. Father was our general, our commanding officer, our guide and inspiration, the man whose words chided and corrected us and gave us courage and direction, and without whose example we would have foundered from the start.

  Left to his own devices, however, the Old Man, once he had got our camp up and running again and had us properly armed and organized into a fighting force, would have fallen back into his lifelong patterns of wait and see, of delay and discuss, of research and reconnoiter, of organizing his followers and enticing them to war and then stepping away and leaving us to our devices—just as he had done in Springfield with the Gileadites, just as he had done all along: for while Father was a genius at inspiring and organizing men to wage war, when it came to leading them straight into battle, he needed someone else—he needed his son Owen—at his ear. Action, action, action! may have been his constant cry; but at crucial moments he needed someone else to whisper, Now! Until that spring in Kansas, he did not truly know this. Nor did I.

  It began in a small way. While Father was off at the Ottawa Nation, making one of his interminable surveys, it happened that below us, down in Douglas County on the far side of Dutch Sherman’s camp, a Free-Soil settler from Ohio named Charles Dow, a man whom John and Jason happened to have known back East, was cutting timber for his cabin and got into a row with his nearest neighbor, a pro-slaver from Virginia named Frank Coleman. The Virginian claimed that the trees were his, not Mr. Dow’s, and shot and killed Mr. Dow in cold blood. A few days passed, and when the Virginian was not arrested, John, who was now up and about and had begun active politicking, contacted Mr. Dow’s numerous Free-Soil friends and called for a protest meeting up in Lawrence. As Lawrence was by then fully a Free-Soil redoubt, John and I and Henry Thompson expected no trouble and rode up for the meeting unarmed. It was the last time we did that.

  Just south of Lawrence, we were met at the Wakarusa bridge by a large troop of heavily armed Border Ruffians, deputized and led by the sheriff of Douglas County, a pro-slave appointee named Samuel Jones. Without ceremony or explanation, they put their guns on us and demanded to know our reasons for going into Lawrence. When John forthrightly said that we were going there to attend a meeting that he himself had called for the purpose of protesting the unpunished murder of Mr. Charles Dow, the sheriff promptly arrested him for disturbing the peace and took him off at gunpoint towards Leavenworth.

  Henry and I galloped straight on to Lawrence, where we quickly rounded up a band of close to thirty men with Sharps rifles and rode out after the sheriff. We managed to throw down on him and his ragtag troop and their prisoner before they crossed the Kansas River into slave territory. Wisely, they did not resist, and we promptly took John away from them and rode in triumph back to town, where John and, to a lesser extent, Henry and I became instant celebrities.

  Humiliated and enraged by this act, the sheriff had ridden back to Leavenworth, where he informed the bogus governor Shannon that there was under way in Lawrence an armed rebellion against the laws of the territory. At once, the governor mobilized the Kansas militia and put it under the command of the slaveholding senator from Missouri, Hon. David Atchison, a drunkard, who brought into his force the leaders of several other whiskeyed-up bands of Border Ruffians, and loudly vowing to exterminate that nest of abolitionists, the whole gang of them headed for Lawrence.

  We learned this the day following our protest meeting, when we were riding peacefully back from Lawrence. Nearing Browns Station, we met up with a breathless rider come from the Shawnee Mission over near the Missouri border, a Free-Soil settler who had raced all the way to Douglas County to spread the alarm. He told us that more than two thousand Missourians and members of the Kansas militia were taking up positions on the Wakarusa south of Lawrence, and they intended to burn the town to the ground.

  Angered and alarmed, we rushed on to Browns Station to round up Father, our brothers, and our weapons. When we arrived, we saw that Father had returned from the Ottawa Reserve and, unaware of what had transpired, was engaged in preparing to join us in Lawrence to protest the killing of the Ohioan Charles Dow. Quickly, John related what had happened, and the Old Man, I remember, reacted with what seemed like delight.

  “It’s come, then,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “The time has come at last.”

  First, however, we needed to run off another hundred bullets, he declared. Dutifully, Salmon and Oliver set to work.

  “Father;’ said I, “the Border Ruffians very likely have already placed Lawrence under siege. We must hurry.”

  “I know, I know. But our friends up there will need all the bullets we can carry,” he replied, and instructed us to fasten our pikes with the bayonets attached to the sides of the wagon box, to affix them with the blades pointed to the sky, so that we would impress the enemy with our machinery. An old Roman military tactic, he explained.

  “Come on, Father, let’s just toss everything into the wagon and get on to Lawrence now. We can do all this up there.”

  No, he thought that we might have to fight our way into the town, since the Ruffians had probably taken their position on the Wakarusa bridge, which lay between us and Lawrence. We would have to make all our preparations for battle here and now, he declared.

  Then there were provisions to pack. The siege might last a long time, he pointed out. And the broadswords wanted more sharpening. And then the wagon had to be loaded with exquisite care so as not to damage any of the weapons, and so on, until finally it was dark, and we still had not left Browns Station. Since there was no moon that night, it was too dangerous, Father thought, to travel up along the California Road to Lawrence with so many Missourians about, for we did not want our weapons and horses to fall into the hands of the enemy, did we? We had better wait till morning, he decided.

  John slouched off towards his lean-to, frustrated and angry, although Wealthy was not, and Jason was not, nor Ellen. Henry agreed with Father, of course, for no other reason than that Father had said it. Fred did whatever he was told, and Salmon and Oliver, gnashing their teeth, did, too, and followed the Old Man’s orders to empty the wagon once again and re-balance the load.

  Finally, after having pondered the matter awhile, I moved in close to the Old Man and said to him, “Father, listen to me. If we do not go now, many good, slavery-hating men will die because of it. And the Lord needs those men alive, Father. Not dead.”

  Slowly, he turned and gazed into my eyes; I thought he was angry with me and would sharply condemn my words. But, instead, he settled both hands onto my shoulders and sighed heavily, as if relieved of a great burden. In a low voice, he said, “I thank thee, Owen. God bless thee. I’m not afraid of this enemy,” he said. “But I am too much afraid of leaving things to chance. It’s my old habit of procrastination. I’m merely weak and don’t trust sufficiently in the Lord. Go and get the others, son. We’ll load the wagon and leave for Lawrence at once.”

  Getting up to Lawrence on a moonless night was not easy. It was a fifteen-mile ride, and we were obliged to ford the Marais des Cygnes River and several lesser creeks and then make our way over rough, pitted and gouged ground as we crossed the southeast corner of the Ottawa Reserve, until we reached the darkened cabin of the Indian trader Ottawa Jones and his white wife, where the California Road joined the Santa Fe Trail. From there, the route lay over mostly high, flat prairie on a trail that was little more than a track beaten into the thick, high-grass sod by the hundreds of westering wagons that had passed this way in the last few years. The horses needed no guidance then, and we began to make good time. Father was in the lead, up on his fine sorrel mare, Reliance, and Oliver drove the heavily loade
d wagon, our Roman war machine, which was drawn by our old North Elba Morgans. John and Jason each rode their horses, brought out with them from Ohio, but the rest of us, Salmon, Henry, Fred, and I, walked behind the wagon.

  By the time we crested the last rise before the Wakarusa River, a few miles south of Lawrence, it was nearly dawn, and in the pale, pinking light we could see the encampment of the Border Ruffians spread out below—not thousands of armed men, as we had expected, but many hundreds, with dozens of fires burning. The entire force was in disarray, however, with no one on watch at the bridge or guarding their scattered horses. Large numbers of men appeared to be drinking whiskey and carousing, while others slept in makeshift bedrolls or lay in heaps where they had fallen sometime during the night. A general debauch was still going on, with discordant strains of fiddle music coming up the slope, accompanied by obscene shouts, bawdy songs, and occasional, random gunfire. We held up in the shadows of a copse of cottonwood trees on the ridge above and for a long while studied them on the floodplain below. They did indeed look to our eyes like Satan’s own dispirited, disorganized army of volunteers.

  I came up beside Father, and he said to me, “Well, Owen, as I feared, they lie between us and the bridge. What say you?”

  “They look like a pack of drunken cowards to me.”

  John then moved his horse alongside Father’s and proposed that one of us sneak down on foot and cross the river above the bridge and slip into Lawrence, to inform the leaders there that we had arrived this far and ask for further instructions. “It might turn out that it’d be better for them if we stayed hidden here,” he said. “Outflank the Ruffians, you know?”

  “Useless,” said Father. “If we are to serve any purpose in this, we must get into Lawrence itself’

  “The Missourians are rabble,” I said. “Knockabouts. They haven’t the right or the will to stop us, if we simply go down there and cross over. The Lord will protect us.”

  I leveled my rifle at my waist and commenced walking downhill, the same as when I’d walked in amongst the wild boys and men in Boston. Immediately, the others followed, as I knew they would. Father rode to the front again and led our little band down the crumbly slope and straight into the rowdy encampment. We did not look to one side or the other but marched on a line across the broad, grassy floodplain that led to the river and the town of Lawrence beyond.

  The Ruffians got up and parted as we passed, then came forward and stared at us, their mouths open, evidently astonished by us and unsure of what we meant to do, cowed by our wagon rattling its tall spears and our heavy broadswords and revolvers strapped to our waists, our Sharps rifles leveled and cocked. A few hollered at us and cursed, but weakly, and we did not acknowledge them. Not one man made a move to stop us. In moments, we had marched through the stumbling, drunken throng of disheveled men, had crossed the narrow bridge to the other side of the Wakarusa, and were moving straightway on to Lawrence, where, as we rode and walked into town and made our way around the rough earthworks they had thrown up, we were greeted by the frightened citizens with huzzahs and much jubilation. Only then did we look at one another and start to smile. Even Father.

  The besieged townsmen gaped at our weapons—our broadswords and bayonets in particular, for they were formidable and implied on our part a desire for bloody close combat. And all the citizenry were mightily impressed by our having parted the army of Border Ruffians as if they had been the Red Sea and we the ancient Israelites coming out of Egypt. We were, at least for the moment, heroes. And we wanted to stay that way, especially the Old Man, who at once, before he had even dismounted, as if in a fever, began to harangue the leaders of the Committee for Public Safety who had come to welcome us, insisting that they brook no compromise with the enemy, make no peace treaty or agreement with them. “We should strike now,” Father declared, “whilst they’re still be-dazzled. Round up a hundred men, and I’ll lead them!” he commanded.

  No one obeyed. They merely kept telling him how pleased they were that we had joined them, giving little speeches, the way committees do.

  “Let me speak to the man in charge,” Father finally said, and he and John and I were immediately taken to address Messrs. Lane and Robinson, who were located in an upstairs room of the half-finished Free-State Hotel, a cavernous stone building on Massachusetts Street in the center of town, which the Committee for Public Safety had appropriated for its headquarters. Mr. Robinson, who had been a physician and was now the chief agent for the New England Emigration Aid Society and who eventually became the Free-Soil governor of the territory, shook Father’s hand with unctuous pleasure and nervously passed him on to his evident superior, Mr. Lane, a lean, blade-faced man in rumpled clothing with a red kerchief around his neck, a well-known radical abolitionist who’d been leading settlers into Kansas by way of Iowa and Nebraska all year. He was a natural leader of men, comfortable with his authority and a shrewd exhorter. His voice had gone raspy and hoarse, evidently from making too many speeches to the crowd of defenders outside, and he appeared to be greatly fatigued. He seemed not to have slept in a week and spoke to us while lying down on a horsehair sofa.

  John, whom Mr. Lane already knew from his politicking, introduced Father and me, and after greeting us, Mr. Lane explained that, as he was pretty far along in his negotiations with the pro-slave governor, Mr. Shannon, and the leader of the militia encamped beyond the Wakarusa, Mr. Atchison, he did not want to disrupt things. “It’s all at a most delicate moment,” he said. But even so, he was glad to have reinforcements from Father, whom he referred to as “the aged gentleman from the state of New York.” He urged us to hold off from any violent action until or unless a peace treaty became impossible. “I don’t want anyone killed,” he said. “Least of all women and children. And that’s no army out there by the river, as you surely saw. It’s a mob, and their leaders have almost no control over them.”

  But there was no reasoning with Father. Nor with me, for that matter, although I stayed silent and let Father speak for me. He stormed up and down the lamp-lit room, declaring that we should launch an attack this very minute, time was wasting, we could achieve complete victory over these scalawags now and be done with it.

  “Father, for heaven’s sake,” John finally said. He was himself plenty relieved to hear that a peace treaty might be at hand. “Hear Mister Lane out.” But the Old Man’s blood was up for battle now, and he did not want to hear any talk of compromise with men who would enslave other men. He stated that a condition of war existed between the Free-Soilers and the pro-slavery men, and we must give no quarter, especially now that John Brown and his sons had shown everyone what cowards the Ruffians were.

  I was glad to hear the Old Man going on with such ferocity. I had never before felt as I did then, like a true warrior, invulnerable and powerful: a righteous killer. I felt, and evidently Father did also, a strange, new invincibility, which we must have obtained from having marched untouched through the ranks of the enemy. It was as if we were wearing invisible armor and could not be harmed by bullet or sword. I wanted to test that armor, to risk it against the guns and swords of the Border Ruffians, and Father’s words spoke for my desires. So go on, Old Man, I thought, rouse these people to fight! Don’t let them go maundering on about negotiations, treaties, and orderly retreats. We want to rout the slaveholders! We want to send them howling back to Missouri, leaving a trail of blood behind and a territory cleansed of the evil of slavery forever.

  Taken aback by Father’s furious declarations, Mr. Lane, a cynical man, evidently misunderstood the Old Man’s motives. It was as if he believed that what Father wanted was glory only, and not necessarily the immediate death of his enemies. He interrupted Father, and as if to placate and thus to silence him, abruptly proposed to commission him a captain in the First Brigade of Kansas Volunteers. He would give him his own command, he said, a company to be called the Liberty Guards, which would consist of the Captain’s own brave sons and other men, up to a total of fifteen, as were w
illing to volunteer to join the company under Captain Brown’s personal command.

  This seemed to surprise Father and to please him greatly, for he stopped his fulminations at once and thanked Mr. Lane and then begged to leave, so that he could quickly begin interviewing men who might wish to join him.

  “Captain Brown;’ Mr. Lane said. “I salute you, sir, and I thank you for your willingness, even at your advanced age, to join in the defense of the people of this poor town.” He lay back on his sofa, draped one arm across his chest, and closed his eyes, dismissing us.

  “I should like to make my son Owen here my lieutenant, if you have no objection, sir.”

  “Excellent, Captain. Fine. Whatever you wish,” he said, and Mr. Robinson officiously ushered us from the room.

  As we descended the rough staircase to the large, open hall below, Father instructed John and me to circulate in the town and recruit the best Christian men we could find and bring them to him out on the barricades, by which time he would have a battleplan. “I did not bring those rifles and swords all the way out here for nothing,” he pronounced.

  John hung back noticeably, until Father asked him what was the matter.

  He then stepped up to the Old Man and looked him straight in the face. “I want to know, Father, why didn’t you ask Mister Lane to make me a lieutenant, too? This is no criticism of Owen,” he said. “I just want to know your thinking on the matter.”