Cloudsplitter

  Father smiled and said, “You’re a good man to wonder that and to want the same as Owen.” He placed one hand on John’s shoulder and the other on mine and looked at us with evident pride. “You, John,” he said, “you will be my political officer. I can’t limit you to a military role. You have too great an ability for dealing with people for that, and besides, we must keep the tasks separate. Owen will be my military officer, which is why I’ve made him a lieutenant. Boys, I tell thee, there will come a day when you will think back to these moments which have just ended, and you will see them as having begun a mighty thing. I promise thee. There is a plan behind all this. The Lord’s plan. And He has given me mine.”

  John shrugged, evidently still unsatisfied, but unwilling to pursue his point further, and departed from us to do as Father had asked, while I eagerly went a different way, also in search of recruits for Father’s company of Liberty Guards. To my surprise, I was immediately successful, as there were in Lawrence at that moment hundreds of men who were eager to follow the newly commissioned Captain Brown, for the nature of our arrival had thrilled the town and our reputation for valor and righteousness had swiftly grown large. It took me barely an hour of hurried conversations with men in the barber shops and stores and in the hotel lobby before I found myself walking the main street with forty or fifty of them trailing behind. When finally I thought I had enough, I turned back to take them to Father, and along the muddy street came John, leading an equal number.

  Father was at the earthworks, which was a ditch and a head-high bank of dirt heaped across the wide central street at the edge of town. Most of the town’s defenders had positioned themselves behind the bank with their rifles and were watching the fires of the enemy camp across the river with mild curiosity and not a little fear. Father was engaged in heavy discussion with several men, militia captains like himself, urging them to join him in a frontal charge against the Ruffians. Red-faced, stamping angrily and flailing his arms, Father was arguing strenuously with the gentlemen. “Those who don’t have guns can be armed with pitchforks!” he said. “If my company leads the charge, and the entire populace comes rushing out against them, the Ruffians will be terrified and will flee back to Missouri for their lives!”

  The other militia leaders would have none of it, however. But then Father saw me and John approaching with our flock of volunteers, and abruptly he turned away from his colleagues and led our troop towards our Roman wagon, where the other boys were lounging around, chatting like old veterans with various townspeople.

  The Old Man jumped up on the box and, placing his hands on his hips, surveyed the crowd of volunteers. “I can take no more than eight, for a total membership of fifteen,” he declared. “And you must be as willing to die for the cause as my sons and I myself are.” Quite a few drifted away at this. “We are here to slay the enemy of the Lord. I want bloodthirsty men at my side. No kittenish weaklings, no mild-mannered Garrisonians, no cowards who prefer peace with the slavers to war. And no men whose courage depends on whiskey. I want temperance men.” Here a number of men turned and strolled away. “And ye must be Christians,” he said. “True soldiers of the Lord is what I need! Ye must be armored by God, for we are going forth to smite His enemies down!” And now there were but a dozen remaining. “And ye must swear, as I and my sons have sworn, to wash chattel slavery off the map of this territory. Even if it be washed with thine own blood. Ye must swear to purge it from the nation as a whole. What we begin here will not end until the entire country is free!” Now there were only three men standing by the wagon, one of whom, it turned out, was the well-known journalist Mr. James Redpath, from the New York Tribune, who would follow us throughout the Kansas wars and make us famous all over the East but would not join us in battle. The two others, as it happened, we already knew and did not want—Mr. Theodore Weiner, a big, brutal Dutchman who kept a store on the Pottawatomie Creek a few miles below our camp, and an older man, Mr. James Townley, a longtime settler in Osawatomie, originally from Illinois, who had acquired a reputation for quarrelsomeness.

  From his perch, Father looked sadly down at them. “Well, if ye be all who remain... then I believe I have the men I need,” he said, and he bade them raise their right hands and swore them into the Liberty Guards.

  But there was to be no battle that day, although the episode, thanks to Mr. Redpath’s lively, vivid dispatches back East, soon came to be known as the “Wakarusa War”—when the brave citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, under the courageous leadership of Captain John Brown, drove off a thousand Border Ruffians and afterwards forced the pro-slave leaders to accept conditions that amounted to total surrender. The reality was that, while Father railed in vain against the citizens of the town for their reluctance to follow him and charge the Missourians’ camp, Messrs. Lane and Robinson slipped out the back of the hotel and rode down to the town of Franklin, a few miles south of Lawrence, where they secretly met with the pro-slavery governor of the territory, Mr. Shannon, along with Senator Atchison and several other leaders of the Ruffians. These men had grown alarmed at having lost control of their supporters and consequently agreed to take their ragtag army back to Leavenworth at once, if the case of the shooting of the Ohioan Mr. Charles Dow was dropped by John’s protest committee of Free-Soilers. The committee, they insisted, had been an act of provocation. Its dissolution would restore the peace. Messrs. Lane and Robinson thought that a perfect arrangement. They drew up a treaty, signed it, and returned to Lawrence to oversee the quick withdrawal of the Missourians and to enjoy the gratitude and adulation of the Free-Soilers.

  Except for us, of course. We admired them not a whit and thought their treaty a surrender. Nonetheless, we stayed on in Lawrence for a few days longer. We were the only ones who had dared to confront the Ruffians directly and were much admired for it, especially by the younger men in town, and this puffed us up somewhat and took some of the sting out of Father’s failure to enlist more than two sorry men in his Liberty Guards, and it justified his anger at Lane and Robinson for having bargained with the enemy. Finally, though, we grew restless, and John and Jason began to worry about their wives and John’s son, Tonny, so Father, who had been spending much of his time giving interviews to Mr. Redpath and the many other journalists who were flocking into Lawrence, gave the order to depart for home.

  Home was then still our tents at Browns Station, John’s and Jason’s land claims, and at one point on our way back there, I had with Father a small conversation that turned out later to have large consequences. It was late in the afternoon, and we were a few miles past the old California Road and the cabin of Ottawa Jones, traveling along a broad ridge that curved slowly above the floodplain of the Marais des Cygnes River. I was coming along at the rear of our little train, deep in thought of home at that moment, which meant memories of Lyman and Susan Epps and the calamity at Lake Colden, when I was brought suddenly out of my dark, cold cavern of thought by the clatter of hoofbeats. Father had turned his red horse back past the wagon to the rear, and when he drew abreast of me, he dismounted and walked along beside me in silence for a ways.

  Finally, after a while, he said, “I had a most interesting word with Mister Lane before we left.”

  “You mean he granted you an audience.” Still smoldering with anger for having been betrayed by Lane’s cowardice and ambition, I could barely speak of him except with sarcasm and disdain. Popularity, that’s all these men cared about, top to bottom, from the traitorous New Englanders Franklin Pierce and Daniel Webster down to the pullets who ran the Committee for Public Safety of Lawrence, Kansas—these men sold their souls for the adulation of a mob, while the bodies of millions of Americans continued to be sold on the auction block. That’s how I reflected then: the second a subject was introduced to me, regardless of what it was, I would find my thoughts connected to a series of pulleys and belts, as if my mind were a factory, so that the mere mention of Mr. Lane’s name brought me in seconds to the grisly specter of permanent Negro slavery.

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sp; Father said, “I informed him that I intended to resume the fight that had been so unfortunately interrupted by his willingness to negotiate with the slavers.”

  “What did he say to that?” It was raining lightly, and the ground was muddy and dark, even up here on the ridge—hard going for the horses. Our company now included Father’s new recruits, one of whom, Mr. Weiner, had his own wagon, and the journalist Mr. Redpath, who seemed to think Father a moral and military genius, a view the Old Man did not discourage, for he knew that the man’s communiques were rapidly enlarging the reputation of John Brown back East and would encourage continued financial and logistical support for our venture, regardless of what the rest of the Free-Soilers wanted. Father now knew that here, as much as back in North Elba or Springfield, it was not enough merely to be against slavery. Too many Free-Soilers, in reality, only wanted peace. Thus, so long as we were allied with white people, we had enemies amongst our own ranks. Here, in the absence of free blacks, we were obliged to do the Lord’s work alone.

  “Mister Lane urged me to hold my fire but to keep my powder dry.”

  “That old saw.”

  “Yes. But he also revealed to me that he had met with Governor Shannon a second time, after the Ruffians had withdrawn back to Leavenworth. They got the governor so drunk that the man signed a document which authorizes the Free-Soilers to use force the next time the Missourians enter our territory.”

  “What does that mean to us?”

  Father laughed. “Why, it’s a legal license, son! A license to shoot Missourians. Or anyone else who would obstruct us in the work. We would do it anyway, I know, but this makes it legal.”

  “Well, good,” I said grimly.

  “I thought that would pleaseyou,”he said, and slapped me on the shoulder. Then he mounted his horse and rode to the front of the line and led us home.

  With the death of Lyman Epps, I had crossed a line that I would never cross back over again. I could not: Lyman’s death at Lake Colden had made me permanently a different man. It froze me at the center of my heart, gathering ice in layers around it, so that, in a short time, I had become outwardly a hard man, a grim, silent warrior in my father’s army, soon to be a killer more feared by the slavers for his cold, avenging spirit than any Free-Soil man in all of Kansas. More feared even than Father, Captain John Brown himself, Old Brown, who, at least until Pottawatomie, was viewed by the slavers and even by most of the abolitionists as dangerous mainly because of his peculiar, but not especially long-lasting, influence over the young, idealistic men coming out from the East and because of his refusal to work in concert with the regular Free-Soil militias, even the one led by his son John, and with the legally instituted authorities in Lawrence. Oh, Father stamped his feet and grew nearly apoplectic with rage against the regulars, as he did against the President of the United States, the Democrats, and even the Republicans, against the abolitionists back East who were now and then reluctant to send him money and arms, against the timidity of the Free-Soil authorities in Lawrence and Topeka, and, always, against the pro-slavers, the Missourians, the Border Ruffians, the drunken Southern Negro-hating squatters down along the Pottawatomie River who were threatening in their newspapers and meetings to wipe the Yankees, and especially us Browns, off the face of the earth. But in most people’s minds, even in the minds of our enemies, the Old Man was, indeed, an old man, “the elderly gentleman from the state of New York” a man in his middle fifties. His rage and spluttering, given his radical abolitionist ideology and his old-fashioned, Puritanical form of Christian belief, were understandable, if not quite coherent.

  No, the man that people on all sides worried about was me, the red-headed son, the one with the crippled arm. My brothers told me this with a mixture of pride and mild concern. They reported that of all the Browns, I was viewed, as much in Lawrence as among the pro-slavers in Atchison, as the most dangerous. They said it was because I spoke to no one, except Father and my brothers, and showed no human feeling, except for a single-minded desire to exterminate the man-sellers. They were right to fear me. I was an assassin with no principle or ideology and with no apparent religion, save one: death to slavery.

  My brother John, widely admired for his probity and his physical courage, had succeeded in being elected to the Free-State legislature and had been commissioned a lieutenant and given command of a militia unit, the Osawatomie Rifles, a defensive force meant to include all able-bodied anti-slavery men in and around the town of Osawatomie and Browns Station, our home territory. Father, however, insisted on withholding himself from the Rifles—no one could imagine him taking orders from John anyhow, but it was a lifelong pattern for him to keep himself separate and distinct from another man’s army. Except for Jason—who, by following John into the Rifles, had chosen the route least likely to lead to violence—the rest of us stuck with Father and viewed ourselves strictly as his men and subject to no other authority than his.

  Counting Father, then, we were now a band of six: brothers Fred, Salmon, and Oliver, our brother-in-law Henry Thompson, and me. Watson was still back in North Elba, taking care of the farm and family—my old job. Here and there, at different times, we were joined by some of the more radical, quarrelsome, old-time settlers, like the Austrian Weiner and James Townley, and by the newcomers to Kansas who had heard of Captain Brown back East and wanted to fight slavery alongside him and his sons; they were mostly young hot-bloods who made their way to Lawrence and came down to Osawatomie and found our camp and rode with us awhile and then drifted over to one of the more regular militias or grew discouraged by the rigors of the life and took out a land claim and built a cabin on it and began to farm. A few stayed on with us, or came and went and came back again—those who could comply with Father’s ban on whiskey-drinking, swearing, and tobacco, who were willing to honor the Sabbath with him by listening to him preach and pray all day, and, most importantly, men who were able to subject their wills entirely to his, for he brooked no correction or argument, and he consulted no one. No one except me—who had the Old Man’s ear now and knew when to whisper into it and urge him on to action, who knew when and how to suggest retreat, who knew exactly the way to buck him up when his spirits flagged and how to calm him back to reason when his temper made him intolerant and his frustration with the peace-making cowardice and caution of others turned him into a sputtering dervish.

  There was that spring greatly increased, widespread provocation amongst the pro-slavers, and threatening noises from the clans of Border Ruffians down along the Pottawatomie, and at Browns Station, especially, we were increasingly agitated and kept ourselves in a constant state of alarm, if not readiness. All the Free-Soil militias were pledged to participate strictly in defensive action, but it was growing less clear by the day as to what that term meant. Particularly in the face of constant death-threats from the settlers on the Pottawatomie—the Dutch Sherman faction, as we thought of them. They had settled that narrow, eroded gorge several years back, well before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and thus they were mainly concerned with land-grabbing, not politics. We knew that they were using the slavery issue only to justify burning and driving us out and capturing our claims up on the more fertile open floodplain of the Marais des Cygnes, which, in their ignorance, they had passed over when they first came out from Arkansas and Tennessee.

  Then one day late in April, the pro-slavery Sheriff Jones rode over from Atchison to Lawrence with a small posse of U.S. troops and apprehended six Free-Soil citizens and charged them with contempt of court for refusing to identify the leader of the party that had rescued John the previous month, that brave adventure which had led to the first Lawrence siege and stand-off. That same night, an unknown person shot Sheriff Jones outside of Lawrence as he and his troop of federal soldiers were leading their six prisoners off to Atchison. The prisoners did not flee, however, and Jones did not die of his wound. In fact, to my and Father’s astonishment, the entire town of Lawrence and its leadership were aggrieved by the shoo
ting and publically apologized for it and condemned the unknown shooter outright.

  The shooter, of course, was me. In company with the Old Man and my brothers. We had learned of the sheriff’s mission and had ridden over towards Lawrence to help oppose it, and at nightfall, a mile north of Hickory Point, had come up on the posse and prisoners on their way back to Atchison, where the six were to stand trial. There were but four soldiers in the posse and the Sheriff. The Old Man was all for throwing down on them at once and seizing their prisoners in person and delivering them safely back to Lawrence, where he said we were sure to be acclaimed as heroes, recalling, perhaps, our previous miraculous intervention.

  I said to him, “No, it’s near dark. They’ll hear us coming and will run. Or else they’ll use the prisoners as hostages and put up a fight. The prisoners may be killed and the slavers escape.”

  “But Jones and his men are cowards at heart;’ the Old Man argued. “They’re just conscripts. And the Lord will protect His children.” We were perched unseen in the growing darkness on a rise, hidden in a stand of black walnut trees, and Sheriff Jones’s party was heading slowly along a draw below, which led south to the crossroads of the Santa Fe Trail and the old California trail, thence north and east to Atchison. The sheriff was in the lead, and his prisoners were seated in a trap driven by one of the troopers, while the others rode along in a line behind.

  “Look, it’s almost too dark to do anything at all” I pointed out. “But I can bring down the sheriff with a single shot now. The soldier-boys will panic, and the children of the Lord can escape in the confusion. We’ll pick them up later for return to Lawrence.” I got down from the wagon box and took a position behind a tree and leveled my rifle.

  In a second, Father was at my side. “Hold up, son. Maybe we should think on this a bit.”