Cloudsplitter (83 page)

John, as I later learned, went insensible and nearly mad and remained so for many months, even while a prisoner of the United States Army, his condition having been exacerbated greatly by the terrible cruelties inflicted upon him by the soldiers after they captured him, hiding nearly naked and babbling, in the gorse bushes several miles behind Uncle’s cabin, where, following my brief visit, his delusions had chased him. Jason declined into a passive, self-accusing grief, which, though it later passed and he did indeed, finally, although only for a while, come over to our side in the war, drove him actually to seek out and surrender himself to the United States troops. His release was quickly arranged, unlike John’s, which took until the following spring. I think Jason’s personal safety and the safety of his wife, Ellen, were his main concerns and motives in all that he did from then on, for as soon as he was able, he sent Ellen back to Ohio, along with Wealthy and Tonny, and well before the end of the Kansas War followed them there himself.

Oliver and Salmon shortly came round to their normal senses, as did Henry Thompson, but they, too, were different people than before: they were warriors now, men who no longer questioned first principles or premises or Father, and consequently they fought like young lions, as if every new war-like act were an erasure, a justification, of the Pottawatomie killings. Thus it was for them no longer so much a matter of making Kansas a free state as it was of killing and terrorizing the pro-slavers, purely and simply. Strategy, long-range goals, overall plans—these were not their concern. For them, the war was merely a day-to-day killing business, work organized and laid out by Father and me, as if we were laying out farmwork in North Elba.

As for Fred, poor Fred: he was now even more wildly religious than before, and if Father was not an actual mystic and speaking privately with his God (which, as I said, he may well have been), Fred surely was. Happily, however, Fred’s God merely confirmed what Father’s was saying and released him to follow Father’s orders with murderous enthusiasm.

Father was changed, too. It soon became clear, and surprised even me—perhaps especially me—that Pottawatomie had been a great gift to him: for it returned him to his purest and in many ways most admirable self, the old, fervent, anti-slavery ideologist, and added to it a new self, one that up to now had existed only in his imagination: the brilliant tactician and leader of men at war. All his years of studying the science of war suddenly came into play and of necessity were being put to good use out here on the rolling plains of southeastern Kansas. And with each new military success, from the Pottawatomie killings on, with Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie and all the lesser raids and ambushes and breathless escapes from our pursuers, his confidence swelled and his enthusiasm for the work increased, so that before long it was no longer required of me to goad or brace him in the least, and in fact I found myself barely able to keep pace with him. This was a most welcome development, for it restored to us our relationship of old. We were once again in proper balance. He was once again Abraham and I was Isaac.

Yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, I myself was not changed by the Pottawatomie killings. No, I remained the same man who had migrated out to Browns Station from Ohio with his self-mutilated brother, the man who had watched in silence and did not stop his beloved friend from killing himself that day in Indian Pass, and who loved his friend’s wife in order not to love his friend. I was still very much he who had carved the farm in North Elba out of the wilderness while running escaped slaves north to Canada, the fellow who had sailed off to England and in the crossing found his heart and spirit uplifted and enlarged by a woman bearing a sorrow and a wound he did not wish to comprehend. I was still the man whose spirit one moment rose to the ceiling like a hymn in a Negro church and the next insinuated its way towards a perverse brawl in a nighttime park, the man who when still a boy humiliated himself and demeaned a poor Irish girl of the streets in the back alleys of Springfield: all the way back to the boy, the very boy, who stole his grandfather’s watch and lied about it and for his lies was made to chastize his father’s bare back with a switch: I remained him, too.

Yet was it not due solely to this strict, stubborn persistence of my character that, in point of fact, I, too, was now a different man than I had been before? For I now inhabited a world in which I was no longer seen as the outcast, the grunting, inarticulate, crippled Owen Brown whom everyone easily loved but no one feared: a man not half the man his father was. If instead I now found myself twice the man my father was, as indeed betimes I did, it was not because I had changed but because, after the Pottawatomie killings, whether they were with us that night or not, my father and everyone else had changed.

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 helped 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.