by Jane Smiley
It got to be afternoon. Thomas, Louisa, Frank, and I had done only one thing, which was to move the mules, horses, and wagons out of the center of town, We were threatened only once, and not very seriously, by two very young men. We just pushed past them and went on. Because of this, we were away from Massachusetts Street when the arresting party under their marshal decided to disband themselves and join the men on the hill. We did see Senator Atchison (Louisa knew what he looked like) ride toward town with some men. Senator Atchison had acted as our enemy throughout the spring, agitating his constituents and promoting our conquest. I remember thinking that it wasn’t good to be seeing him right there on a downtown street. And he looked drunk, too.
Once the arrests had been made in the morning, the huge posse of Missourians that had gathered on Mount Oread began streaming into town, and who was at its head but the miraculously resurrected tyrant Jones, proclaimed as dead and memorialized by all of Missouri not two weeks before!
The first thing they did was go over to the offices of the Herald of Freedom, one of the Lawrence newspapers, which was on the second story above a shop. They threw out all the type, smashed the press with a couple of sledgehammers, and carried as much as they could in the way of supplies and equipment down to the river and threw it in. Another band was doing the same thing over at the office of the Kansas Free State, the other newspaper.
Late in the afternoon, they bombarded the Free State Hotel. They told the residents to get out, then they drew five cannon up across the street from it and started firing. We all ran from wherever we happened to be and watched as best we could, though there was a fair amount of smoke. The noise was fearsome if you’d never heard cannon before, a loud cracking roar followed by the whistle of the ball leaving the barrel of the cannon, then a great whump as the ball hit the stone wall of the hotel, a noise that was also a feeling of the hotel shaking the ground, shaking the world, shaking you, standing there. Had the hotel been built as a fortress? It withstood the cannon with hardly any sign of damage. "Got to build for the ages," Mr. Eldridge was heard to say. "If something’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing properly." Women and children were crying for a while, but as the hotel continued to stand, that seemed a little beside the point.
When the cannon had little effect, the attackers carried in kegs of powder, intending to blow the place up. After they had taken them in, they made time to carry out whatever they could find, like bits and pieces of furniture and draperies and clothing, not to give to the owners but to keep for themselves. Then they found the liquor, and they came out with bottles and kegs and cases. They opened them right there and got into it. As for the powder kegs, when they got around to lighting them, the onlookers backed away, imagining the four-story stone walls blowing outward in a great hellish boom and light, but Eldridge kept smiling a little, and shortly we knew why. Some windows that had withstood the cannon fire shattered, but the hotel stood. Now the southerners were drunk, and angry. They started screaming, "Fire it! Fire it! D—n, it will burn!" I’d hardly been in the hotel since the winter. I remembered the rickety wooden stairs, four floors of them, and you could see all the way to the cellar if you cared to look. The roof was wood; the interior was all wood, with wooden furniture. I knew it would go up, and it did. Soon enough, flames were shooting from every window and from the roof, and smoke was driving us back toward the river. When I saw him, Mr. Eldridge still had a little smile on his face, fixed there and forgotten, perhaps. Certainly, the sight of our beautiful hotel going up in flames was a great shock to me, but I couldn’t tell what it did to him. At last, the walls began to fall. I heard later that one of the southerners was killed by a piece of falling rock, because he was too drunk to move away from the conflagration. Behold the moral stature of our conquerors!
When we were driven as far back as Louisa’s place, we ran up and checked our things. The booming and crashing had broken her windows, so we swept up the glass and gave thanks that we had put quilts over them and had wrapped the dishes and cups and set them away. Then the smoke drove us out of there. We grabbed our shawls and a few necessary belongings and ran out again, intending to take refuge with the Bushes, who were at the other end of town from the hotel, in a newer section of buildings that were built just that spring. We covered our mouths and noses and made our way around to the west—Thomas, Frank, Louisa, and myself. It was very late, almost dusk, which meant it must have been seven-thirty or eight o’clock. I was running along with my head down and my hand to my face when Thomas plucked my sleeve. "Look over there." He gestured upward, toward Mount Oread. We stopped and gaped at the sight of the Robinsons’ new house, all black walnut, full of books and old writings and furniture and family treasures, we’d heard, going up in a great bonfire on the brow of the hill. And even from where we were, we could see the Ruffians dancing around the place, black figures against the yellow brightness of the fire, and we could hear them shouting and screaming drunkenly, jubilant at the destruction. Later, we heard that they hardly bothered to steal anything but burned it all, just to show Governor Robinson a thing or two. "Look at the devils," said Louisa, "howling with glee!" It was fascinating, but darkness was falling fast, the smoke was thick, and there were little bands of drunken Ruffians everywhere, so Thomas pushed us onward; we had to practically drag Frank by the ear.
The Bushes had seen nothing, as they had huddled inside all day, expecting the worst, so they were appalled and shocked by the news we had for them—all the more appalled and shocked for, of course, being totally unsurprised, according to Mrs. Bush. "Nothing you tell me can turn a hair on my head," she said, her face white as the moon. "I don’t put anything past those animals. And mark my words, they won’t stop there! They’ll burn us all out before morning! There are twenty-four thousand of them, haven’t you heard? Three thousand Missourians and twenty-one thousand real southerners, with slaves saddling their horses and making up their food in camp. I heard all about it! Five thousand from South Carolina alone, and every one of them came to K.T. with a thousand dollars in his pocket, from the sale of slaves down the river—don’t you know? A cabal of planters got together, and each of them sold ten slaves for a thousand dollars apiece, and that’s five hundred slaves! I swear you don’t know which is worse, sending that trash to burn us out and kill us, or selling those poor slaves away from their wives and husbands and children in order to send them. Oh," she said, "their souls are black indeed! Blacker than the blackest skin on the darkest African!"
Mr. and Mrs. Lacey and their boys came, saying that the Ruffians had come knocking and then thrown them out into the street and told them to go back to Massachusetts and let them all know back there what a Kansas tea party was like! Then, as they ran off, they heard the drunkards smashing things and even saw them running out of the house. "Two low types were carrying some chairs, and the captain, or so he had styled himself, had my dishes in his hands!" exclaimed Mrs. Lacey.
Then we all got into a discussion of whether the southerners would be punished by the Lord for their iniquities, and all except Thomas agreed that they would, with only Louisa disputing the grounds of the discussion, saying that "the Lord" was actually a diffuse higher presence in the universe that manifested itself as positive or negative energy, and that of course the Missourians might find themselves afflicted by an excess of negative energy in years to come but they wouldn’t have the wit or the spiritual education to understand what was happening to them. Everyone fell silent for a bit, pondering these remarks, and I knew that Louisa felt that she had put the capstone to the discussion; but everyone else rather felt that these ideas were too embarrassing to go on with, especially as we were all worried about Charles, whom Louisa had last seen in the late morning, with the arresting party, when they took him up to their camp.
We prepared for attack. Or rather, the house was as prepared as it could be, which wasn’t much—the door was locked and the window was covered and there were pails and pots of water for dousing flames, and once these measures h
ad been taken, we sat about a single candle and drank tea and deplored the Missourians. There were four Sharps carbines and forty rounds among us. We agreed that the Laceys, unsure of what the Ruffians wanted, had been hesitant to fire, but we wouldn’t make the same mistake. In the event, our resolution wasn’t tried, for we sat up all night, and at dawn, which came before five, we realized that the Missourians had in part decamped and in part keeled over where they stood, but at any rate, they were satisfied with what they had done, and there would be no more destruction for the time being.
We should have been fatigued but were not, at all, so eager was everyone of our party to view the aftermath. We drank our tea and went out, Thomas and Mr. Bush, each armed, in the lead, and the rest in the middle, with Frank and me, also both armed, bringing up the rear. But the Missourians were gone. The only people in the streets were ones we recognized, either because we knew them or by their grieving and incredulous countenances.
The citizens of Lawrence hadn’t, in the end, been hung, shot, knifed, dismembered, or cleared out, but our houses had been robbed and damaged (the Missourians loved more than anything to shoot out a pane of glass or leave bullet holes in a wall), our furnishings had been left in the street, smashed, ripped, and broken, our crockery and dishes lay in fragments, our bedclothes and hangings and blankets and sheets, even our nightgowns and commodes, had been tossed in the street; our flowers were trampled and pulled up by the roots. Here’s something—the streets were full of papers blowing everywhere: these were not only "contraband" sheets of newspapers from the north or old copies of our local sheets, but also family letters and legal papers, diaries and cookery books and novels and schoolbooks, scattered and torn by angry hands, precious photographs sundered in two or three pieces. I saw a wreath woven of some beloved person’s hair, cut and destroyed in a way that only those who desired above all things to hurt you in your heart would think of. That was what was shocking—you could stoop down and pick up some papers out of the dirt and see that they were just letters from someone’s sister or father, and yet some stranger had taken the time and effort to tear them up and toss them. They had put real thought and real effort into their hatred.
There were those who started looking on the bright side of things at once—Thomas was one of them. No Free Stater killed or wounded, the Robinsons thankfully absent, all damage to buildings other than the hotel and the Robinsons’ house superficial. Better than that, as far as we knew (and this turned out to be true), no Free Stater had perpetrated anything that might be construed as an offense. The attack on Lawrence could not be called a war but had to be called a sacking, a depredation, a crime. "You wait," said Thomas. "The men from the eastern newspapers will be here by balloon if they have to. Remember that fellow from New York, Brewer-ton? And there are plenty of others. They’ll turn Lawrence, K.T., into a woman in a white dress, lifting her pale arms and pleading for mercy! It looks worse than it is."
At Louisa’s place, the lower shop had been wrecked and my last length of rope stolen. Someone had taken our ax to the stairs and hacked three of them out, so it wasn’t easy getting to the upper story. And a fire had been set, though, lacking fuel, it had gone out—we could still smell the smoke. Upstairs, the rosewood bedstead had been shorn of its clothes and jerked about; it had one ax cut in the footboard. The bedstead we’d used was intact, but the ticking was torn, and good New England feathers lay in white bunches here and there. Our things that we had packed for going to the claim were rifled and spread around, but the only things missing were Thomas’s red flannel shirt and his shaving brush. A dress of mine had a big rent in the skirt. Louisa’s clothes, being richer, had suffered more—two of her dresses were gone, and a shawl and a pair of shoes. Her jewelry— two necklaces and two sets of earbobs—was missing, too. And odd things were gone—a candleholder, a worked pillow, one of Charles’s boots. But they hadn’t touched the books or the little guitar, and my sister’s last letter lay open on the floor, as if someone had read it and then not bothered to tear it up. We looked, but we didn’t even begin to clean things up, as it was imperative to look for Charles.
Louisa, having sensed on the spiritual waves no disruption in her connection to Charles, was not especially worried. Nevertheless, Thomas and Mr. Bush went over to the site of the burned-out hotel to see if there was news of the arrested men. Frank and I set out to find our animals. The first thing we saw was Senator Atchison, much changed from the day before. He rode at the head of his men, sober now, or possibly not, his coat buttoned up to the chin and his hat pulled down over his eyes. Did he look ashamed? I wanted to think so. His band looked dirty and rather sick, and they dragged one of their cannon with them.
"I could shoot him," said Frank.
"You left your gun at the Bushes’."
"Don’t need my own gun. Any gun would do. I could borrow one and follow along behind them and shoot him when he crosses the river."
"You are not going to shoot a man."
"I know, but I’m just saying I could. Saying I could feels better than just letting him go by."
Well, that was true. All around us, the people of Lawrence stared frankly at the Missourian. Everyone knew who he was, since he was tall and striking, and his picture had been in the papers when he was Vice President. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones talking in such strains. But the senator and his weary group trudged past unmolested, got to the river, crossed it, and vanished into the trees.
I dreaded what we would find when we came to the corral where we’d left the animals, thinking it was out of the way and safer. Clearly, from the destruction, there had been enough of the Ruffians so that they had sought out most corners of Lawrence and done damage everywhere. We knew a lot of horses and mules had been stolen, not to mention the cattle they had "pressed" into the service of their stomachs, because people we met complained of missing animals. When we got there, in fact, there was no corral, only broken rails and knocked-down posts, evidence of many trampling hooves in the dirt, and no animals to be seen. This, after everything else, caused me to burst into tears. Some men were standing nearby, and when they saw us looking at it all, they came over.
"Well, they drove ’em off, don’t you know?" said one of them. "I guess there was twenty hosses and mules here for a bit, but they rode in and drove ’em off in the middle of the night. There was screamin’ and yellin’, let me tell you."
Another man said, "Laban, here, and myself, we come out and shot a few times into the air, but it was just for show. We couldn’t do a thing. There was ten men, anyway, and they was far gone into their cups."
Laban sighed. "I had me the best team of mules I ever had here. Just bought ’em a couple of weeks ago. They shone! Cost me a hundred dollars apiece. Gone now."
I walked away. It just seemed like Jeremiah had to be somewhere, that if I looked I could find him. It had to turn out with Jeremiah as it had with our other things—a bit of damage, but nothing serious. For a few minutes, I wandered around, looking among the houses and buildings in this part of town. There was the same destruction here as elsewhere—interiors of homes broken up and turned over on the street, men, women, and children picking through things, looking for things, talking and crying. I was like one of them. I saw a woman pick up a cup and grin, then call to her husband, "Here’s one that’s not broken!" and I expected to turn a corner and find Jeremiah looking at me, his dark, large eyes in his pale face intelligently recognizing me, his ears swiveled forward. Never once had Jeremiah failed to approach me when I came for him, never once had he ducked my grasp or tried to get away or run off. But of course they would have been yelling and hooting, shooting in the air to panic the horses and mules. The animals in the pen would have been rolling their eyes and snorting, tossing their heads in that terrified equine way, and Jeremiah, who was an intelligent and responsive horse, but still a horse, would have been one of them, as terrified as the others. It hurt me to think of it, all the whinnying and bumping up against one another, the flailing of hooves
and the danger, and then they would have been running, and I didn’t know how to think of that, where or how they had gone, so my imagination went dark.
Well, sentiment was a cruel joke in K.T.
And practically, of course, now we had no horse, and Louisa and Charles had no animals, either, and so how would we get our things out to our claim, and how would Charles, should he return from his imprisonment, make an income, and how would we all, in Lawrence, go on from this and recover even what we had had two days before, which was little enough in any case, if you thought of Susannah Jenkins’s letter, and how she counted up the losses she’d incurred in K.T. and settled happily for any sort of life at all, if only it wasn’t in K.T?
Everyone we knew was worse off than a year before: Mr. James had lost his wife and children; the Jenkinses had lost their husband and father and, it appeared, most of their means. The Bushes lived in a tiny fragment of a house, far humbler than what they’d left in Massachusetts, and were grate-ful for it. Louisa, for all the good face she put on it, had lost a husband and now, perhaps, another one. The Laceys? After she came, he was absent more and more, and now the rumor was that he was staying with a woman at the other end of town most of the time, but of course no one spoke of it, and all pretended that he was just very taken up with business. The Holmeses? They had barely made it through the winter on the charity of their friends, and any hopes he had had of forming a congregation had been dashed—no one in K.T seemed to cotton to his fiery brand of Christianity. The Smithsons? They were farther from their publishing project than they’d been in the fall, and old Mr. Smithson had broken his arm, to boot. Thomas and myself? We had little money, few hopes, and now had lost our most valuable possession. And who had not seen the waves of men and women who were worse off than ourselves and our friends, who’d died of fevers and other illnesses far from all friends and far from their homes, at the end of their funds and without their names being known to those caring for them? Even the Robinsons. There was the model for us all. They had risen the highest and had now fallen the lowest—he taken by the authorities, their house burned to the ground. The Kansas prairie was full of graves where people had buried everything they loved, everything they knew.
