Cloudsplitter (75 page)
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 willing 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.”
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.