Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Over the following months our deeds drew to our side as many Free-State men as were repelled by them. Those who stayed on and endured our hardship and deprivation and the almost daily risk to our lives were of necessity physically hardy fellows, but they were also the most courageous men out there then and the most dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. Father would have said it was because they were dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. “It’s a mistake,”he told me, “to think that bullies make the best fighters, or that violent, cruel men would be fitter to oppose the Southerners than our mild, abolitionist Christians. Give me men of good principles, God-fearing men, men who respect themselves and each other, and with a dozen of them I’ll oppose any hundred of such men as these Border Ruffians!” But this was a grinding, dangerous business after all, and those who undertook it had to be physically as well as mentally and spiritually tough: we were no regular army with a quartermaster and wagonloads of supplies, tents, and arms and plenty of fresh mounts following us around. We lived off the land, as they say, and alfresco, and were constantly on the move, armed, supplied, fed, and clothed strictly by what equipment and livestock we could liberate from our enemies.

  We went barefoot in camp, to save boot leather, and when it rained stripped off our clothes and packed them to keep them dry. For weeks at a time, we subsisted solely on skillet bread made from Indian meal and washed it down with creek water mixed with a little ginger and molasses. By mid-summer the rivers were so low and the water so stagnant that we had to push aside the green scum on the surface before we dipped our cups to drink, and many of us were much of the time ill with the fever and ague.

  Father said, “I would rather have the small-pox, yellow fever, and cholera all together in my camp than a man without principles.” Throughout, he was cook, nurse, and teacher for his men, to set us a clear example, that we would in turn act as cook, nurse, and teacher for one another; and he instructed us constantly as to the purpose and eventual aims of our work, so that we would understand that we were enduring these privations and risking our mortal lives to further a truly noble cause. He never tired of exhorting us to treat as a heinous, soul-damning sin any temptation to submit to laws and institutions condemned by our conscience and reason. “You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it oppose your principles and opinions.” He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved upon his mind. “The largest majority,” he explained, “is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority. What we’re building here is nothing less than the free commonwealth promised us by our Declaration of Independence and prophesied and ordained by God in the Bible.”

  He enjoyed making our camp into a philosophical and political classroom, and such were the power of his ideas and the force of his expressiveness that even though many of his men were either illiterate and unused to abstract disputation or else were agnostical, they were nonetheless, for the most part, eager students. He instructed the men as to the faults of both parties in Kansas, showing, of the pro-slavery side, how slavery besotted the enslavers of men and coarsened them and made them into brutal beasts. Of the Free-State side, he said that, while there were many who were noble, true men, unfortunately they were being led by broken-down, cynical politicians of the old order, timid men who would rather pass high-sounding resolutions than act against slavery with a force of arms. He insisted that a politician could never be trusted anyhow, for even if he held a decent conviction, he was ever ready to sacrifice it to advantage himself. Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it. Despite his earlier attempts to acquire wealth, he believed that all great reforms in the past, such as the Christian religion, as well as the reform which we ourselves were now embarked upon, were based on broad, generous principles, and therefore he condemned the sale of land as a chattel, for instance, and thought that it should be held in common and in trust, as had been practiced by the Indians when the Europeans first arrived here. Slavery, however, was “the sum of all villainies,” and its abolition was therefore the first essential work of all modern reformers. He was perfectly convinced that if the American people did not end it speedily, human freedom and republican liberty would pass forever from this nation and possibly from all mankind.

  Father, as always, slept little, as did I myself now, and often it turned out that only he and I would be awake keeping late watch, he having early dismissed the grateful regularly scheduled watch, and as he was, like many surveyors, a thorough astronomer, he enjoyed pointing out the different constellations and their clock-like movements across the deep, velvety sky. “Now,” he would say, “it is exactly one hour past midnight,” and he would show me which stars to separate from the myriad of lighted pinpoints overhead and how to line them up so that they resembled the hands on Grandfather’s old clock. He often turned rhapsodical at these times. “How admirable is the symmetry of the heavens! How grand and beautiful it is! Look how in the government of God everything moves in sublime harmony!” he declared. “Nothing like that down here with the government of man, eh?”

  Father was pretty easily brought to heightened emotion in those days, even to the point of shedding tears and sometimes to loud laughter as well, which was uncharacteristic and probably due in part to the generally high level of tension and excitement that we habitually and necessarily lived with out there on the plains all that year and into the next. It made him seem physically larger than he was and gave his personality added volume, too, and because of his acts of violence against the enemy and his growing reputation as a warrior and successful leader of men, notwithstanding the fact that he always went about well-armed, with twin revolvers and his broadsword at his belt, a Sharps rifle close at hand, and a dirk in a scabbard above his boot, he was never, as sometimes of old, an object of derision: his manias were widely regarded now as passions, his stubbornness as belief in principles, his willfulness as self-assurance, and his Bible-based strategies as brilliant innovations in the science of warfare.

  Even the enemy regarded him that way. They were not wrong to do so, of course, but it helped that, compared to us, our Free-State allies were timid and that our enemies were disorganized, ill-trained, often drunk, and inadequately armed. And as the Border Ruffians were mostly natives of Missouri rivertowns and did not live or work in Kansas, they did not know the countryside as well as we. The federal troops, though well led and equipped, were young, frightened conscripts and few in numbers, too few by far to patrol that vast a region effectively. And it was helpful, too, that Father, for the first time in his life, was lucky.

  The famous Battle of Black Jack is an example. It has been written about often and described as a turning point in the war against slavery, but certain defining elements of the story always get left out. A bright, sunny Sunday morning in early June it was, and we had all gathered in a field out on the Santa Fe Trail near the tiny, mostly burned-out, Free-State settlement named Prairie City. Father had led us there to confer with a Captain Samuel Shore as to the possibility of combining our force with Captain Shore’s so-called Prairie City Rifles, one of the few Free-State militias aggressive enough to merit Father’s approval. We were also there to attend an outdoor service led by a popular itinerant preacher by the name of John Moore, two of whose sons had recently been captured and hauled off by a large band of marauding Border Ruffians led by the Virginian Henry Clay Pate. Pate would in time become a well-known colonel of the Fifth Virginia Cavalry in the Civil War, but in Kansas, though at bottom a pro-slavery Ruffian, he was a deputy United States marshal and had assisted the federal forces in the recent capture near Paola of brother John and had helpe
d take in Jason also and had been pushing on into Kansas with his pack of Ruffians in search of us remaining Browns.

  We had close to a dozen men in our group at that time, not including the journalist Redpath, who afterwards wrote up the story for the Eastern newspapers. Having arrived late, we stood on horseback at the edge of the crowd close by the road, which was more a rutted wagon track there than a proper road, when Fred drew first my and then Father’s attention to three riders approaching from the east, the direction of Black Jack Spring. As we had intelligence that Pate’s band of Ruffians had recently been seen encamped out there at Black Jack, and as the riders were strangers to all, Father decided to grab them. “Owen, take five of the men and run those fellows down,” he said, and returned his attention to Preacher Moore’s ongoing peroration.

  With Fred, I gathered together Oliver and three others (I think including August Bondi, who after Harpers Ferry was said, first by the Southern press and then by the Northern press as well, to have been a Jew, but who, as far as I knew, was merely agnostical and of Austrian parentage) and rode out to meet the strangers. As soon as they saw us coming, they broke and ran like rabbits across the plain in three different directions. Like rabbit hunters, we split into two parties of three, enabling us quickly to cut off and capture two of the men, whom we marched at gunpoint back to the service, which had by then ended, thus freeing Father to interrogate the terrified fellows.

  “I am Captain John Brown,” he announced to them, and needed little more to obtain their swift confession that they were from the camp at Black Jack. But not of the party of Henry Clay Pate, they insisted, which no one believed, so we bound them and turned them over to Captain Shore, who had one of his Prairie City volunteers march the two back to town, there to await negotiations with the Ruffians for an eventual exchange of prisoners—a useful, widespread practice among the warring parties that, for a while, until the Ruffians started executing their prisoners, helped keep the bloodshed down on both sides.

  Immediately, most of the congregation called for a raid on Pate’s camp, their ardor being somewhat heated, perhaps, by the reported presence in the camp of the two sons of Mr. Moore, a man whom they now loved, and by Pate’s having aided in the capture of John and Jason, which was widely seen by Free-State people as unwarranted. Father, however, advised the excited crowd to wait till nightfall, so they could arrive in Black Jack at dawn, when least expected. This was wise, because the delay allowed those who had been merely carried along by the enthusiasm of the moment to separate themselves from men who, like the Gileadites, could be relied upon in a fight, which ended up being all of our group and most of Captain Shore’s militia.

  Around four o’clock the next morning, we arrived at the copse of black oak trees for which the spring had been named. We were situated on a long slope a half-mile north of the Ruffian encampment and could see in the gray dawn haze their line of covered wagons below, with the tents pitched behind them and, on the wooded slope to the rear, their picketed horses and mules. As there were no fires and no other activity evident in the camp, we assumed they were still sleeping, so we dismounted and, leaving Fred in charge of the horses, made our way stealthily downhill through the brush, where we split into two groups, Father’s nine men and Captain Shore’s fifteen. At this point, about sixty rods from the wagons, we were discovered by a sentinel who had been posted up by the picketed animals, and he fired his musket and shouted the alarm: “We’re under attack!”

  Like bees swarming from a hive, the half-dressed Ruffians ran from their tents and commenced firing on us. Instantly, Captain Shore and his men, who were in a somewhat more exposed position than we, laid down a barrage of return fire, while Father led us on the run off to the right a ways, ordering us as he ran not to fire yet. “Hold your fire, boys, and remember, when you do shoot, aim low!” That was always his advice: get to close quarters and aim low. And aim for the body, not the head. “Every one of us would be dead by now” he often said, “if our enemies had aimed low.”

  After a few moments, we had made our way to a protected position in a ravine to the right of the wagons. From there, we could get clear, covered shots on the Ruffians, so we laid down our own barrage, which drove them to the backside of their camp into a further ravine, where they kept up a steady fusillade against both Captain Shore’s men in front of them and us on the flank.

  As Captain Shore’s men had commenced firing earlier than we and more recklessly, they were soon out of ammunition and could no longer return fire, and because they were the more exposed, they started taking on injuries, and several of his men cried out, “I’m hit! I’m hit! Someone help me, I’m a dead man!” One fellow over there was sobbing like a sorrowful woman. I saw three of Shore’s men—one of them the preacher Moore—break and run back up the long slope towards the grove of black oaks. Then three more fled.

  We were trapped, with no alternative to seeing it through to victory or death; and the men knew that now. Father prowled back and forth behind us, scolding us and bucking us up and pointing out targets as they appeared, making of himself a most obvious target in the process, but seeming not to care, as if daring the enemy to shoot him. Several times I shouted, “Father, stay down!” but he only scowled at me, as if I were being cowardly. There was shooting coming from all directions and from both sides: terrified men were firing their weapons randomly at targets made invisible and everywhere by simple human fear: our boys were firing as much at Shore’s men as at Pate’s, and both those bands were shooting in our direction also, and we all may even have fired sometimes at ourselves, so that when Henry Thompson took a bullet in the thigh and rolled away from me, slapping at his wound and hollering, “Damn! Damn! Damn!” as if he’d been stung by a red-hot coal, I didn’t know if he’d been hit by a Ruffian’s bullet or a Free-State militiaman’s. I couldn’t even be positive that I hadn’t accidentally shot him myself. Father rushed to Henry’s side and ripped a strip of cloth from his own shirttail, took out his dirk, and with it and the strip of cloth made a tourniquet for him.

  Somewhere in here I remember Captain Shore appearing in our ravine with a small number of his men, those who had not cut and run: he was telling Father that they were out of ammunition and would have to retreat or else go for reinforcements. He had one man dead, five who were wounded, and six who had deserted. The Ruffians had dug in good, he said, and could wait us out, unless we got more men and ammunition quickly. He seemed much discouraged. Father was disgusted and told him to go on back for reinforcements, then, and take the dead man and the wounded with him, including Henry Thompson.

  Then, when Shore and his men had left, Father told us to open fire on the Ruffians’ horses and mules, which were picketed in a rope corral a short ways uphill from the tents. “It’ll distract them so Captain Shore can get his men out, and maybe it’ll even draw a few of them out of their hole to where we can pick them off,” he said. He told us this time not to aim low but to shoot at the animals’ heads, because he wanted them to die, not to suffer, and they were easier to hit than men anyhow.

  We obeyed and shot into the wild-eyed herd of animals. The horses and mules neighed and brayed loudly when they were hit, and they tripped and trampled upon one another in the dust, as first one poor beast went down and then a second and a third. It was an awful sight, and I had trouble going along with it, but I said nothing and fired away with the others. I shot horses and mules and men that day and had very few thoughts of what I was doing or why, but at one point, in the midst of this carnage, I suddenly saw us all, almost as if I were not a part of it: bands of terrified white American boys and men killing each other and screaming bloody murder into one another’s faces and shooting down poor, dumb animals, slaying one another and our livestock and terrorizing our mothers and wives and children and burning our houses and crops—all to settle the fate of Negro Americans living hundreds and even thousands of miles away from here, a people who were much unlike us and who were utterly unaware of what we were inflicting upon ea
ch other here on this hot June morning in amongst the black oak trees of Kansas. It was no longer clear to me: were we doing this for them, the Negroes; or were we simply using them as an excuse to commit vile crimes against one another? Was our true nature that of the man who sacrifices himself and others for his principles; or was it that of the criminal? You could not tell it from our acts.

  Firing on the horses and mules evidently surprised and distracted the enemy sufficiently to cover Captain Shore’s retreat from the battle– field, but it drew none of the Ruffians from their cover, and as soon as all the animals were down, they started in again on us. From their ravine behind the tents, they kept us huddled under a blanket of rifle-fire, and as we could get no good angle on them, we were obliged to lie low and prepare for their final charge, which we figured was coming next. Father instructed us to have our broadswords and revolvers at the ready. “Wait till they close on us, boys, and pick your targets carefully. If their leaders go down at the start, the rest might flee, even though they hugely outnumber us.”

  But then an astonishing thing happened. I was lying with my back to the ravine, facing uphill towards the grove by the spring, so I saw it all: Fred, alone on horseback, appeared at the edge of the trees and was surveying the scene below with mild surmise, when suddenly he raised his broadsword over his head and came galloping full speed down the long slope straight towards us and the enemy beyond, shouting loudly as he neared us, “We have them surrounded! We have them surrounded!” All firing ceased, as Fred rode across the cleared space that divided us from the Ruffians, still waving his cutlass and bellowing, “We have them surrounded!” Then he disappeared into the bushes off to our left, and we saw him no more.