Cloudsplitter (74 page)

I believed this. All of us at Browns Station believed it, regardless of the differences amongst us regarding religion. In our little army of the Lord, John and Jason were positioned at one extreme, freethinkers, downright agnostical skeptics; and at the other were poor Fred, tormented by his visions of a punishing God who now spoke to him personally on a regular basis, and Father, who appeared to believe that he himself was sometimes allowed to speak for God; the rest of us fell in between the two extremes at various places, which felt temporary, like stops for rest on a long journey. Nevertheless, every one of us, even the women, Wealthy and Ellen, and our brother-in-law Henry Thompson, believed that we were now about to devote our lives to the very best work we could imagine, so that if God indeed existed, it was His work that we would be doing here. And if God did not exist, then it did not matter. For, regardless of our differences, all of us believed in a law higher than any passed by a bogus or even an authentic and legal legislative body of men, and belief in that higher law required us to dedicate our lives to the overthrow of chattel slavery and racialism. And perhaps it was only chance that had placed us here in Kansas, or maybe Father was right and it was in the end God’s will, but either way, here we were, situated precisely where the battle could no longer be avoided, where the enemy had pitched his tent virtually in our very dooryard, and where we would be obliged to rise up at last and slay him.

My older brothers saw that and trembled with fear or sadly anticipated grief. Although he accepted its inevitability, Jason, especially, did not want war. The man was preternaturally sensitive to the suffering of others and could barely watch the slaughter of a hog, but even he no longer believed that there was a way to end slavery without killing people. He, more than any of the rest of us, had originally come out to Kansas strictly to farm. He had even brought along cuttings from his Ohio vines and eight sapling fruit trees, and while the rest of us sharpened our swords and ran bullets for our revolvers and Sharps repeaters and attached bayonets to long poles, Jason merely watched with a terrible sadness in his eyes, planted his vines and little trees in the newly thawed ground, and kept mostly to himself. His wife, Ellen, and John’s wife, Wealthy, were naturally as reluctant for us to go to war as was Jason, but the women, too, knew that it could not be avoided now, unless the Lord Himself intervened, and there was no sign of that. They seemed to accept it as their fate, although Ellen was starting to talk about returning to Ohio in the autumn, with or without Jason, if fighting broke out.

Brother John had always been an anti-slavery firebrand, certainly, but he was also an ambitious, somewhat worldly man and still seemed to hold out hopes for a political victory, as we would soon have in the territory a sufficient number of Free-Soilers to establish a legitimate Free-Soil legislature and governor of our own and pass an anti-slavery territorial constitution that would get Kansas admitted to the Union as a free state. Well-spoken and more educated than the rest of us, John had it in his mind to get elected to the Free-Soil legislature in Topeka. There was a significant number of radical abolitionist settlers in and around Osawatomie and Lawrence who were eager to support him, and every day hundreds of Eastern radicals who honored the name of John Brown were coming down into the territory by way of the new Iowa-Nebraska trail, settlers who back home had regularly read
The Liberator
and
The Atlantic
Monthly and would be proud to vote out here for the son and namesake of Old John Brown, the famous abolitionist from New York State, friend and associate of the even more famous abolitionists Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Dr. Samuel Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Salmon and Oliver both were hot-blooded boys eager to test their mettle in a good fight, and they had long ago grown used to following, if not Father himself, then me. They were wholly reliable, therefore.

That left to constitute our little army only Henry Thompson and brother Fred. Henry was newly married to Ruth, his wife back in North Elba residing during his absence with the Thompson clan, but despite that—because he believed in Father’s wisdom and moral clarity even more than Father’s natural sons did—if the Old Man let him, Henry would follow him straight into the jaws of hell. And then there was Fred, poor, wild Fred, whose dreams and visions seemed to have become so thoroughly intermingled with his daily reality that he thought we had already gone to war against Satan: with Fred, the main difficulty for us lay in holding him in check until such time as we needed him to start firing his Colt and laying about with one of the terrible, ancient, double-edged broadswords that Father had brought out with him from the East and which Fred wore strapped to his waist day and night.

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 loaded 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.