Cloudsplitter

Chapter 16

That was the year of the terrible Ohio drought, when the hay burned in the fields, and the soil crumbled into dust and was blown into dunes, and so many farmers, especially the younger ones, were pulling up stakes and heading for the western territories to start over again. From Pennsylvania to Michigan, crops failed before they blossomed, and the fields lay fallow, and the cattle and the swine were killed and butchered early to keep them from starving to death. Men and women looked out at their parched fields and up at the clear, blue sky and shook their heads and said, Enough! We’ll go where there’s rain falling. And my brothers John and Jason and their young wives were among them that year.

It was the year that the copperhead Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the drunken Yankee minion of the slaveholders, became President, putting an essentially Southern, pro-slave government finally in place and setting up passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would turn an old-fashioned land grab into a holy war. It overthrew the Missouri Compromise and transformed the old western frontier, making it for all practical purposes into a foreign land, which in that year began to be fought over by the people of two distinct, bordering nations, the slaveholding South and the free North.

By converting the western territories into an object of conquest, the Kansas-Nebraska Act split the country more effectively than any of the battles and wars that followed. The North and the South competing for Kansas in the 1850s were like France and England at war over Canada a century earlier. Except that in Kansas the stakes were higher. Every American knew that if the pro-slavers captured the territory, they would at once make it a slaveholding state in a democratic union that would be governed from Washington by a slaveholding majority of the states, and as a direct result, three million Americans and their descendants would remain permanently enslaved. The North, hopelessly a minority, would have no choice then but to secede from the Union or commence a war of liberation against the South.

And would white Americans go to war to liberate black Americans? Unthinkable. At that time, before Harpers Ferry, with no real blood yet spilt in the name of the cause, the North would have merely shrugged and turned its back on the slaves and the Southern states altogether, and in a businesslike manner would have looked northward for expansion and marched into Canada.

It was also the year of the birth of Father’s last child, Ellen, named for the baby who had died in Springfield back in ’48. With the birth of this child, the Old Man had fathered on two women a total of twenty children. Of the twenty, only eleven were to live beyond childhood; and of those, three more would die in their youth, cut down in the war against slavery; which left, from the eldest, John, born in 1821, to the youngest, Ellen, born thirty-two years later, only eight who survived into adulthood.

It was the year that Lyman Epps and I finished our elaborate dance, and I went howling into the wilderness, leaving wreckage and smoldering ruin all around behind me.

And it was the year that I followed Father’s orders and went out to Ohio to put my brother Fred under my control and bring him back to the farm in North Elba, although in the end I did not bring him back. Instead, I disobeyed Father and took him with me to Kansas, following my brothers John and Jason into the battle there, and eventually by my actions forcing Father to do the same. It did not seem that way at the time, of course, but it does now.

It was autumn when I arrived in Ohio, and the drought had ended some months earlier, but the effects of its devastation were still all around, many empty, abandoned farms and storefronts and fields gone back to brush and weed — as if the landscape had recently been visited by a Biblical chastizement. It was like that for me, too. That warm October evening at Mr. Perkins’s large, prosperous farm a few miles outside Akron, with all the turmoil and madness of North Elba only a few weeks behind me, I was still trembling and distracted by considerations of my own recent proximity to murder and perversion. Otherwise, I might have been more astute in my dealings with Fred, whose nervous condition was, in fact, far worse than mine. I would have put my mission to him in a gentler way.

Unlike me, however, he seemed on the surface to be at relative peace with himself — sitting out with Mr. Perkins’s flocks of merino sheep all day long like an ancient shepherd with his crook and pipe, rounding them up at day’s end with his little black collie dog, and returning them at nightfall to the fold. Evenings, he retired to a small hut that he had built of cast-off lumber, where he prepared his modest meals over a tin stove and read by candlelight from his Bible and slept on a reed mat on the floor. In my agitated state, I envied him for the monkish simplicity of his life and thus did not see the turbulence it hid and anticipated nothing of what was coming.

Though not a large man, Fred was sinewy and tough and very strong, like Father. His face also resembled Father’s, with a hawk-beak nose and deep-set gray eyes under a heavy brow. His hair was stiff and straight, more brown than red, and he had grown a scruffy, wild beard. The last time I saw him, he’d been a boy — not a normal boy, to be sure, but more child than man. All that had changed considerably in the years between. I was not so much shocked or worried by the changes, because Father and my older brothers had prepared me, as I was intrigued by them. With his dark, leathered skin, he looked like a man of the desert, a bedouin or an ancient anchorite living on locusts and honey, an effect emphasized by his clothing — loose deerskin trousers held up by a length of rope, and a shearling vest with no blouse beneath it, and rough, Indian-style moccasins which he had evidently made himself. Artlessly, but all the more artful for that, Fred cut an impressive figure.

When I got to the Perkins place, it was nearly evening. A stable-hand pointed me to Fred’s hut, adjacent to the sheepfolds out behind the large white farmhouse, and I went straight there, intending to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Perkins the next day and inform them of my intention to take my younger brother away with me. I wasn’t especially eager to see them. Father was supposed to have written them of my mission, so I anticipated no trouble, but I did not particularly like Mr. Perkins and his wife. Despite his many years of generosity to Father, I somehow blamed Mr. Perkins for Father’s financial troubles. I saw him, at little cost or risk to himself, as having offered the Old Man the opportunity to develop his wild financial notions unimpeded until he had been overthrown by them. In the normal course of events, Father never would have gotten his warehousing scheme off the ground. But Mr. Perkins was a very rich man, a banker who had made a fortune in the canal business and speculation in the early ’40’s land-boom, which had bankrupted Father, and for him, the sheep business was only a distraction of his old age, a game played with idle money that allowed him to feel like a country squire and attend to something other than his many physical ailments. And I think Father’s skills as a breeder of merino sheep and his energy, earnestness, and honesty fascinated Mr. Perkins, who was in all these ways the opposite. Also, he knew that, however much of his money Father lost in the wool business, Old Brown would pay Mr. Perkins back, no matter how long it took. Meanwhile, he had the continuing benefit of having at least one of Brown’s sons to tend his flocks, which gave him an indentured, highly skilled worker with no fixed term, a hostage, almost a slave. Insensitive to these distinctions and similarities, the man was also definitely not an abolitionist, and Mrs. Perkins even less so, and we had long ago been instructed by Father, of all people, not to discuss or preach abolitionism around them. From the Book of Proverbs, he counseled us, “Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices with strife.”

But, happily, his relationship with Mr. Perkins was at last drawing to a close, he explained, and he no longer felt obliged to keep one or more of his sons tending the man’s flocks. More pointedly, however, the Old Man was alarmed. “Fred’s been showing some wildness,” he said, brought on, he assumed, by John’s and Jason’s leaving to go down into Kansas without him. So I was dispatched out to Ohio in order to “handle” Fred, as Father put it, and bring him home. With one remaining suit to be heard at trial, which would require him to go to Pittsburgh to defend himself and Mr. Perkins into the fall, Father, following the tragedy at Lake Colden, instructed me to depart from North Elba at once.

He wasn’t inventing this errand out of whole cloth just to get me away from Timbuctoo for a spell, although that was a benefit. Simply, the Old Man couldn’t leave Fred unattended in Ohio much longer, and he did not wish to have him placed as far from his personal supervision as Kansas. In Kansas at that time, the pro-slavery Border Ruffians were already pouring into the Territory from Missouri, with an equal number of Free-Soilers heading down from the North, and both sides were spoiling for a fight. But Father had no intentions of going out there himself, not even for cheap, abundant land and for an honorable fight. He had land in New York, and his warrior’s mind was still on Virginia and the Subterranean Passway. If he was going to fight the slavers anywhere, he insisted, it would be there.

In July, he had written to John, No, if you two boys and your wives and children must go, fine, do so. I’d go with you, if I could, but I can’t. You’ll just have to leave Fred temporarily alone at the Perkins place, until I can figure a way to get him home here in North Elba. Father thought it too dangerous in Kansas for Fred, who turned twenty-four that year and, according to John and Jason, had grown increasingly morbid and subject to unmanageable bouts of melancholia, which were often followed by inexplicable rages. His melancholy, I remembered from when he was in his teens, was a kind of heavy affectlessness and lassitude, driven, it seemed, by delusory convictions of his own sinfulness, which, after a period, shifted into a state of wild intolerance of the presumed sins of others. He, the most innocent of boys, the most trusting and honest, the most childlike, could not reside inside his body without despising it, and when he could find nothing more in himself capable of sustaining this loathing, he turned it onto the real and imagined sins of others, becoming suspicious, mistrustful, and wary.

Up to now, in Akron, the dark effects of his seizures had been mostly overlooked by John and Jason and their wives, not without some difficulty, however. But tending the flocks of Brown & Perkins (of Mr. Perkins alone, actually, now that the company had been officially dissolved), with or without John and Jason to watch over him, Fred was nonetheless in familiar territory, surrounded by neighbors and relatives who had known and liked him since childhood and who would not exploit or abuse him or take particular offense from his delusions. That was just Fred, people said. Sometimes he was worse, sometimes he was better; either way, everyone who knew him knew also that he was basically harmless.

When I first came up on him, he was drawing water from the well, and he heard me and turned and spoke to me in his old, slow way, as if we had never been apart and I had merely gone to the house for a moment and was now returned. “I believe it’s time to wash,” he said. “D’ ye want a drink of water first, Owen? You look like you could use it, brother.” He picked up a wooden ladle from the lip of the well and dipped it into the bucket and extended it to me.

I thanked him and drank. He was perfectly right, I was dry, and at that moment, although I had not known it, preferred a cool drink of water to just about anything else. Refreshed, I set down the ladle and grinned and laid my hands on his shoulders and said how good it was to see him, as indeed it was. I loved Fred — we had been boys together, and I had loved him and had felt protective and custodial towards him long before I was conscious of there being any basic difference between us. We shared the same mother, he and I, and had marched off to school together, and had played and then worked alongside one another for years. I knew the shape of his eye, his inner face, better than that of any other human being, except perhaps Father’s, and what you have once known so well you must love always.

Together we lugged water back to his hut, where we washed off the day’s sweat and dust, his from the fields and mine from the road, all the while talking in our old, laconic way. He was in adulthood like my childhood imaginary friend, his namesake, had been. It was only in Fred’s company that I did not feel tongue-tied and conversationally inept and thus could speak in the manner that felt natural to me. Freed of my usual vanity and fears of sounding dull-witted, ill-educated, and rural, I could speak slowly and obliquely, and by indirection say and find true direction out. In speech, Fred and I were both oxen, but unlike me, he was an ox who never tried running with the horses. He drew his load of thought and feeling at the same steady, slow pace and direction, regardless of who accompanied him or whatever rocks, stumps, and gullies got in his path.

One by one, he asked after Mary and Ruth and the younger children in North Elba, and I reported on each, honestly, if obliquely, for the direct truth about each could not be said without making a narrative the length of a novel. Mary is nursing Ellen, the new baby girl, I said, at her age more worn out by the pregnancy than the birthing and glad that her other female children are now old enough to take her place in the kitchen. I told him that Ruth was living nearby but was pretty much taken up with meeting her new husband’s needs, which I described as complex if inconstant. Watson was in love with a religious girl, a Methodist, had gotten religion himself, and was building a mill, which he hoped would make him rich. Salmon was improving the scruffy local apple trees with cuttings from trees from Connecticut, and Oliver, though barely fourteen years old, had gotten hot with antislavery fever and was running fugitives night and day, and when he was home he was usually asleep.

And so on down the line I went, until I had made small portraits of everyone, except, of course, for Lyman and Susan, whom I did not mention and of whom he did not ask. He knew about their presence in our life, naturally, but he had never met them. To Fred, they were like so many of the Negroes who had briefly resided with us at one time or another over the years, invited in by Father for asylum or merely to rest during their long, dangerous journey out of slavery. They were more the continuing context than the content of our lives, and since Fred could safely assume that our context was unchanged, he did not need to ask after it or be told.

He made the two of us a simple supper of cabbage soup and rivels, which was very good with biscuits, and while we ate, he reported to me about the sheep, which he referred to as his sheep. Afterwards, we were silent for a longtime, until finally Fred pursed his lips thoughtfully and furrowed his brow and said, “Why’d you come all the way out from North Elba, Owen?”

“Well, the truth is, the Old Man’s finished up his association with Mister Perkins,” I said.

“Oh. That right?”

“Yes. And he wants me to bring you back up there.”

“He wants me to leave my sheep and go with you?”

“Yep.”

“Oh,” he said, as if it mattered not in the slightest to him where he went or why. He lit a tallow candle and stretched out on his pallet and opened his Bible and began to read in it.

I sat by the stove on a three-legged stool, wondering how long it would take us to arrange properly for our departure from this place… if we would have to hang around until Mr. Perkins hired himself another shepherd… if it would be adviseable for me to go on down to Hudson for a few days to visit with Grandfather and our other relatives… if John and Jason had left any of their possessions with Fred, or did they take everything to Kansas with them, and how did one do that, transport so much so far… just letting my mind drift idly, when suddenly Fred shut his Bible and in a loud voice announced, “Owen, it’d be best if I didn’t go with you.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, the fact is, I carry within me a great many lusts. And so long as that is true, I do not care to place myself amongst other people,” he explained in his slow, careful way. “Especially amongst girls and women. Here in my cabin and out there in the fields alone, I ain’t so tempted as when I’m with other people. Particularly those of the feminine persuasion.” He opened his Bible again and read aloud: Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin. And sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. He leafed ahead to another passage, obviously much-read, and recited, Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. “You see, it’s because of my lust, Owen, that my seed doth not remaineth in me. I can’t keep it inside me. I am not yet born of God;’ he pronounced.

I did not know what to say then. We both remained silent awhile, until finally I asked him, “Do you pray, Fred? Doesn’t that help some? You know, with keeping the seed inside and all.”

“Yes, I pray a heap. But it don’t do any good. It’s been better since the others left, though. John and Jason and their families. Since then I’ve been able to move out here and be by myself and have mostly holy thoughts. No, I ought to stay right here where I am, Owen. It’s for the best. I know that.”

“Father won’t permit it” I said firmly. “C’m’on, Fred, you know if I go back without you, the Old Man’ll come hopping all the way out here to fetch you himself. And he’ll be mad at us both then. Up there in the mountains, you’ll be fine. The Adirondacks is still a wilderness. You can build yourself a hut there as well as here,” I told him, and gave him to understand that he’d be even more alone in North Elba than he was here in Akron.

“No, Owen, that ain’t true. All the whole family’d be around me. It’s the way we are. Remember, ‘Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’“

“Come on, Fred, you’re sounding like the Old Man;’ I said. “Thumping yourself on the head with the Bible. Ease up on yourself, brother. You’re the best of all of us.” Then I repeated Father’s charge to me and declared forcefully that we’d speak to Mr. Perkins in the morning and make our arrangements to leave here as quickly as possible. “They need us back at the farm,” I said, lying a little. “Not out here tending Mister Perkins’s flocks and arguing theology and sin all night.”

I asked him if he had a blanket I could sleep in. Silently, he rummaged through his few possessions and drew out an old gray woolen blanket, and when I saw the thing, I recognized it at once from our childhood — one of the blankets spun and woven in the New Richmond house by our mother long years ago. He tossed it over to me, and I clutched it close to my face and inhaled deeply and grew dizzy with nostalgia. For a long moment, I kept it against my face, traveling back years in time, whole decades, to the long, cold winter nights in the house in the western Pennsylvania settlement, with me and my brothers and sister Ruth, all of us still innocent little children, huddled under our blankets in the big rope-bed in the loft, while below us, Mother tended the fire and cooked tomorrow’s meals, and Father sat on his chair by the whale oil lamp and read from his books, and all the future was still as inviting to me as it was unknown.

Finally, I stirred from my reverie and asked Fred, “How’d you come still to own one of these blankets?”

He didn’t answer. He just looked down at the packed dirt floor. “I’d have thought they were all lost or worn out by now. Did John give it to you?”

In stony silence, he blew out the candle and lay down on his pallet, his back to me, as if gone to sleep.

“Shall we take it with us?” I asked him.

“You can keep it, if you want” he murmured.

I couldn’t accept it from him; it was too precious a gift. But deciding it best now to leave him to his thoughts and, in fact, eager to be immersed in my own, I lay down on the packed dirt floor close to the stove, where I wrapped myself in the sweet-smelling blanket, and swooning with freshened memories of Mother and our childhood home, I was soon asleep.

While I slept, the terrible thing that Fred did to himself took place. Or, rather, he determined then to do it and had actually commenced, so that even though I was awake when it was done, I could not stop him. I thought it was the sound of an owl or a ground dove that had wakened me, a low, cooing noise coming from outside the hut, but when it persisted and brought me wholly out of sleep, I realized that it was something else, some night creature that I could not name. Lifting myself on my elbows, I saw that the door to the hut lay half-open, letting in long planks of moonlight. Fred’s cot was empty.

The cooing sound, Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, I realized, was being made by Fred outside. But I couldn’t imagine what it signified, so I unraveled myself from my mother’s blanket and stood in stockinged feet and peered carefully out the door, as if afraid of what I would see there.

He had his back to me and stood some five or six paces from the hut, and from his head-down posture, legs spread, both hands in front of him, I thought at first that he was making water. His trousers were loosened and pulled down a ways. Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo, he sang in a light voice, as if chanting a single pair of notes broken from a tune that he could not get out of his mind. Then I saw the knifeblade flash in the moonlight, a cold, silver glint that he held like an icicle in his right hand, saw it disappear and then re-appear streaked red, as he made a quick swipe across the front of him, as if he were facing the exposed belly of a ram lamb held from behind by a second shepherd, the way we had done so many hundreds of times for Father, who with that same swift, efficient stroke of a knife castrated the poor animal, severing the scrotum and releasing the testicles into his cupped hand.

I shouted Fred’s name, but it was too late. As if to answer me, he made a chilling little bleat, his only cry, and he turned and showed me the terrible breach he had made in himself. Blood spilled from the grisly wound and flowed in a thin skein down his bare legs onto the wet grass.

He hurled his testicles away into the willow thicket with great force, as if violently casting out a demon. On his face he had an expression of wild pride, as if he had come to the end of a long, exhausting day and night of mortal combat and had triumphed over an ancient enemy and had castrated the corpse and now stood over it all bloodied. He seemed dazed, stunned by the totality of his victory. It was as if, for a few seconds at least, the terrible pain of his wound had been erased by its very extremity and by the significance of its meaning.

Then his wild, proud expression disappeared, and he was possessed by a sudden placidity — a great calm. I rushed forward and embraced him and bloodied myself in doing it. I never felt such a sadness as I felt then, for it was in both of us. He relaxed in my embrace, and all the force seemed suddenly to go out of him. The insidious little pocketknife, for that is all it was, fell to the ground, and his knees buckled, and he began to collapse. I lifted him in my arms as if he were a bale of wool and carried him back inside his hut, where I laid him down on his cot and at once set about washing and dressing his wound.

It was a single, neat cut straight across the sac. He had a practiced, shepherd’s hand, which was lucky, for he had severed no big vein, and the bleeding, although bad, did not threaten his life and soon abated somewhat. This allowed me to wash his wound with water that I heated on his little iron stove and to dress it with strips of cloth torn from my shirt, wrapping him loosely about the groin in such a way that he would be protected from infection and accidental injury, and the healing could begin.

It would be several weeks before Fred could walk properly again and we could take our leave, finally, of the Perkins place. I wrote Father at once and told him of the incident — better for him to learn of it first from me than anyone else, I figured — although I feared that it might bring him hurrying out to Ohio, which I did not particularly want, nor, I thought, did Fred. In my letter, minimizing the degree of Fred’s injury, but admitting nonetheless that he had effectively gelded himself, I reassured Father that I could nurse Fred back to health myself, and he evidently believed me, for he remained in Pittsburgh, while I stayed by Fred’s side. During the weeks that followed, I tended him day and night, as Father himself would have done, and never left him alone, except for the few hours a day when I myself was obliged to watch Mr. Perkins’s sheep. Luckily, the collie dog was clever and needed little supervision, so it was not an onerous task to double as shepherd and nurse. Besides, when I informed Mr. Perkins that, as soon as he was able to travel, I planned to take Fred away with me, he promptly found himself a new shepherd boy from a family in town.

Right up to the morning we departed from that place, Fred believed that we were returning to North Elba, and I myself thought so, too. But then came that misty, gray dawn when we slung our rifles and our small bundles of clothing, food, and trail blankets over our shoulders and walked down the long driveway to the road that passed by the Perkins place. I had kept Mother’s blanket and viewed it now as mine from childhood and never spoke of it to Fred. It was my inheritance.

When we reached the road, without a glance or a thought one way or the other, I turned southwest, instead of northeast, and Fred followed.

For a few moments, we walked along in silence. “Where’re we going?” Fred finally asked.

“Well, to Kansas, I guess.”

A quarter of a mile further on, he spoke again. “Father wants us to go to the farm in North Elba. That’s what you told me, Owen.”

“Yes. But we’re needed more in Kansas.”

There was a long silence as he pondered this. Finally, “Why?”

“To fight slavery there.”

More silence. Then, “Doing the Lord’s work?”

“Right.”

“Good. That’s real good.”

“Yep.”

A little further down the road, he said, “But what about Father? He won’t like this, Owen.”

“Maybe not, at least at first. But don’t worry, he’ll come along soon to Kansas himself. He won’t let you and me and the boys do the Lord’s work, while he stays out east doing Mister Perkins’s. Anyhow, John says there’s going to be shooting in Kansas before long. That’ll bring the Old Man on. He hates it when he can’t give us the order to fine,”I said, and laughed, and he laughed with me.

So on we went, walking and sometimes hitching rides on wagons, barges, canal boats, moving slowly west and south into the territory of Kansas — a one-armed man and a gelded man, two wounded, penniless, motherless brothers marching off to do the Lord’s work in the war against slavery. In this wide world there was nothing better for us to do. There was nothing useful that anyone wanted us to do, except to stay home and take care of the place and the women, which neither of us wanted to do and neither could do properly, either. We had to be good for something, though: we were sons of John Brown, and we had learned early in our lives that we did not deserve to live otherwise. So we were going off to Kansas to be good at killing. Our specialty would be killing men who wished to own other men.

Chapter 17

At first in Kansas was the waiting — waiting for the Old Man to bring us the new-style, breech-loading Sharps rifles and horses and winter gear for waging war against the Border Ruffians, waiting for Father to raise abundant funds and supplies in Syracuse and Akron and decide to come out to Kansas after all — the same as when, after Kansas, we waited out the winter in Iowa; and then, still later, as when we huddled together in the cold, unlit upstairs room of the Kennedy farmhouse outside Harpers Ferry and waited for Father to return empty-handed from his final, fateful meeting with Frederick Douglass, so that the assault on the Ferry could begin at last. We were always waiting for Father in those days; and it was every time in the same, humiliating way — quarrelsome, disgruntled, in confusion and disarray, incompetent, undisciplined, often physically ill, and all our best intentions and his careful instructions gone somehow weirdly awry, as if we secretly meant to sabotage him, we the loyal, dependent sons and followers of John Brown lying in our cots, cold and damp, scowling up at the ceiling or into the walls, filled with dread at the thought of the Old Man’s arrival, and yet at the same time nearly giddy with impatience for him to come and darken the portal with his familiar shape and lower his head and walk into the tent, there to kneel down by one of us, the sickest, always the sickest, whom Father could identify at a glance, and which was John at that time when the Old Man first arrived out there in Kansas at the pathetic encampment we called Browns Station. My waiting, of course, was more colored by dread and impatience even than that of my brothers, for, in coming out here with Fred, I had disobeyed the Old Man and needed to know how he viewed me now.

John had gone down with the ague, but it had gotten worse, and soon he was taking short, shallow breaths, as if his lungs had gotten enflamed. Feverish and shivering, subject to visions and spurts of wild, incoherent speech, he had been sick for a month by the time Fred and I got there from Akron. We had taken the old river-route down the Ohio and up to St. Louis by the Missouri, and when we got to Browns Station, we found John unable to eat and barely able to sip water, despite the tireless, silent care of his wife, Wealthy. And it was not long before Fred and I, too, lay wrapped in all our clothes and blankets in the cots on either side of John, whom we followed close behind in the degree of our sickness, I, like him, with the ague, and Fred, weakened from our travels and still healing from his terrible wound, unable to act without being led by one of his brothers. Neither of us could provide leadership for him. Or perhaps, in our chilled despondency, neither of us wished to. So he had simply imitated me, as if I were imitating John. And perhaps I was.

It was not yet the dead of winter, it was, in fact and by the calendar, still autumn, and the snow was not so bad as it would have been by now in North Elba. Yet I had never felt so cold up there in the eastern mountains as out here on the western plain. It was as if in Kansas the sun had gone out permanently. The icy, relentless wind off the flat expanse of land blew day and night and froze our clothes and hair and the beards of the men and stiffened our faces and rubbed our hands raw and made our bones feel like iron and never ceased blowing against the tents, snapping them like sails in a hurricane, threatening all night and day to tear the canvas from the poles and rip the guy-lines and stakes from the hardened ground and expose our poor, blanketed bodies to the low, gray western sky, as if they had been put out there by the Indians for the coyotes and vultures to devour and for the old Indian gods to receive into paradise.

Was it true that I had not seen Jason and his wife, Ellen, for weeks? They seemed to have withdrawn permanently to their own tent, on their adjacent claim, not physically ill, as we were, but demoralized, withdrawn, selfish, and still stunned with seemingly endless grief over the death of their little boy, Austin, whose body they had been forced to bury and abandon back in Missouri. They had crossed the river en route from Ohio in late summer, and during the brief trespass upon a corner of the slaveholders’ evil land, as if under a curse, they had lost their only child to cholera. The disease had slain half the passengers of the boat, and with the exception of poor Austin, all the victims were Missouri Border Ruffians and their families coming across to Kansas to claim the territory for slavery. Jason’s and Ellen’s beloved little boy had been snagged by that rough justice and died, a compensatory price too high for them yet to comprehend.

When John and Jason and their matched families decided to come out from Ohio, after their farms had been ruined by the terrible drought of the previous year, it was in search of new, cheap land, so as to start their lives over. But they also came to wage war against the slavers and to capture the Kansas Territory for the North. Thus it was both a rational, opportunistic thing to do — and there were thousands like them from all over the North, doing it for no other reason — and one that glowed with abolitionist righteousness as well. This was the sort of venture that had always appealed to John, but it had the added benefit of allowing him, by emphasizing the moral aspects of the venture, to advertise it effectively to Jason, who had not been as quick to leave the dried remnants of his Ohio orchards as was John to abandon his scorched, hardcake fields. So while Jason and Ellen had gone out willingly, they had not gone eagerly, and perhaps for that reason, the death of their son, Austin, and the need to abandon his body in a shallow grave on a bluff overlooking the river in slaveholding Missouri had made the couple quickly bitter. And there was the painful, ever-present fact that John and Wealthy had their little son, John, whom they called Tonny, still with them. John’s and Wealthy’s good luck, then, might have contributed, too, to the sourish relations that prevailed between the brothers and their wives when Fred and I first arrived at Browns Station, bedraggled, like a couple of tramps, many months later.

In a flurry of letters to Father in North Elba and then to him in Pittsburgh and to me in Ohio while I was watching over Fred, John had written that, to survive the surprisingly violent Kansas weather and the rapid influx of Border Ruffians from Missouri, he needed soldiers, cohorts, reinforcements; he wanted up-to-date weapons and cows and swine, blankets, grain, dried beef and salt fish: he was awaiting the arrival of the makings of an invading army. What he had got instead was a pair of scrawny, exhausted refugees carrying no more than their blanket-rolls and their twenty-year-old muzzle-loaders. We must have been a disappointing sight, Fred and I, that morning when we arrived at the camp, one of us blank-eyed and struck dumb by the enormity of his self-mutilation, still hitching himself along with a rough crutch, and the other, me, a nervy man with a crippled arm glancing back over his shoulder with the wariness and guilt of a criminal, our clothes shabby and dirty from our arduous journey, bringing to our brothers in their place of brave settlement, this desolate place where they had chosen to make their permanent homes and take their self-defining stand against slavery, nothing but our craven needs for comfort and love.

But if we were disappointing to them, they and their settlement were just as much a let-down to us, for we saw, not the neat log cabins and lean-tos amongst the cottonwood groves and broad, fresh streams and high, grassy meadows of Kansas that we expected and that John had described to us in his letters. We saw instead a pair of tattered, flapping tents, a single, broken-wheeled wagon, cold firestoves outside, four bony horses nibbling at the frozen turf. And over all, a pervasive gloom and lassitude — an atmosphere worsened by John’s illness and by Jason’s and Ellen’s withdrawal to the privacy of their own tent, which they had pitched on their land claim several hundred yards down the draw from John’s and Wealthy’s towards the Osawatomie River.

On our arrival, Fred and I had visited and greeted them separately, as if they were John’s jealous and unhappy neighbors, instead of his beloved younger brother and sister-in-law sharing a calamity; afterwards, we had encamped up on the ridge in John’s second tent, and that made Jason and Ellen think that we had chosen John and Wealthy over them. And when, in a few days, I fell sick myself, it was simpler for me to move in with John, where Wealthy could the more easily tend us both, and then Fred followed, perhaps because he knew not what else to do and now hated being alone with his thoughts. He came into the tent and placed his bedroll on the other side of John, so that there were three of us lying there, crowded into a single small, dark space, whilst poor Wealthy tried to keep the fire going outside, despite the wind and the snow and the lack of good, dry firewood, caring for us as if we had been shot and wounded in battle instead of having declined spiritually into a muck of despondency and sloth and after a while had weakened and got physically sick as well.

Wealthy had her poor, confused son, Tonny, beside her at every step, clinging to the folds of her dress and whimpering all day and night about the cold and from constant hunger and showing even then the first signs of slowness that would later grow into retardation and cause her and John so much sadness and worry. But if she had not had him there, I believe that Wealthy would have walked on one of those long winter nights straight into the darkness that surrounded us then and disappeared, only to be found days later, frozen to death in some gully. For she was as angry then as any woman I have ever seen in my life. She was silent, and she fumed. And with every good reason. John, Jason, Fred, and I, we were all of us pitiful, shameful specimens of manhood. We were not worthy of her; nor of Jason’s wife, either. Here we were, the four eldest sons of the great John Brown, four sickly, miserable fools, foundering in gloom, gone all weak and cowardly. I confess it, it was the women who were strong and they who, to all intents and purposes, kept us alive, until the winter morning when the Old Man finally arrived and began to set everything straight.

And it happened just as I imagined it would. Just as I hoped and dreaded it would. The tent flap was drawn suddenly away, and against a milk-white sky loomed the dark, familiar shape of Father in his broad-brimmed black hat and his greatcoat. He entered the tent, glanced quickly around in that expressionless way of his when he has come upon something complicated and unfamiliar, surveying the scene with as little emotion as possible, until he has acquired from it all the information necessary for a proper response, which in this case was to go straight to John, who in his delirium and fever had neither seen nor heard the Old Man enter, whereas both Fred and I, like startled rabbits, had sat up at once.

In silence, the Old Man felt John’s forehead and then bent his head to his eldest son’s chest and listened to his clotted lungs and his heart. Behind him I saw shades flitting beyond the thin canvas, rough profiles of other people moving about outside, and heard the creak and clank of saddles and harness and the low voices of my brothers Salmon and Oliver, which surprised me, for I had thought Father was coming out alone, and I heard a male voice that I did not at first recognize, then the voices of the women, Wealthy and Ellen, and Jason, too, as if a crowd had gathered out there.

In a somber voice, Father said his first words to us: “We’ve got to place a fire in here and set a kettle of water to steaming and clear his lungs. I don’t suppose you boys have any stovepipe handy, or you’d have already done that.”

I shook my head no, and Father stood up and passed by me without saying anything more. For a second, he paused over Fred and looked down at him with great sadness. In a thin, apologetic voice, almost a child’s, Fred said, “It’s John and Owen who are sick, Father. Not me so much.”

“Yes, I know. And I know about your injury, son. Owen wrote me of it. We’ll sit and have us a proper talk later,” was his response, and he went directly out. He said nothing to me then of my having disobeyed him, nor did he speak of it afterwards. It was as if his silence on the subject were my punishment, for it did, indeed, feel like one.

Things changed quickly then. Father set everyone to work at once — even me and Fred. Even, in a sense, John, who was obliged, with Wealthy’s help, to change out of his filthy, damp clothing, and after washing himself from a basin of water heated on the fire that Salmon had quickly got blazing outside, he put on some of Salmon’s and Oliver’s extra garments, which were his size and, more importantly, were dry and clean, and then Wealthy wrapped him in several of the fresh blankets that Father had brought and propped him up in his cot, so that his lungs could expand somewhat, Father said, and still following the Old Man’s instructions, she shaved her husband’s scruffy beard and combed out his matted hair.

Father gave few explanations; he merely gave orders, and then set to work himself. “Jason, you and Salmon pack in from yonder grove of cottonwoods as much deadwood as you can find in an hour. Then start a greenwood smokefire and cut and dry us a few of those old oaks.

“Ellen, you go on down to your stake there below and empty out your tent. Fumigate and scrub it clean, air out all your blankets, and tighten those slack ropes up a mite. And when you put your things back inside, leave the rear wall clear, as we’ll be setting a campstove there.

“Wealthy, when you’ve finished shaving John, you do the same as Ellen with these two tents up here. And why’n’t you put little Tonny to work right away at carrying out as much as he can lift by himself? The lad needs to know he’s useful.

“Oliver, here’s the money and a list of items to purchase in town. Start now and be back before midday, so we can have our stoves set up by nightfall. Unload the wagon first, my boy, we’ll be needing some of those goods and tools right off’

He helped Oliver wrestle down a barrel of salt, another of corn meal, many new gray woolen blankets, a large supply of dried Adirondack venison mixed with berries, Indian-style, and axes, spades, half a dozen unmarked wooden crates, and a pine box, carefully fitted and sanded smooth, which I thought might contain rifles, for it was the right size and Father himself lifted it from the wagon and carried it with considerable delicacy to a knoll a short ways off, where he set it down on the ground and then for a short time stood motionless over it, as if in prayer, before returning to the encampment.

To my surprise and pleasure, besides having recruited Salmon and Oliver, Father had brought out from North Elba our neighbor and brother-in-law Henry Thompson. Henry was the most fervent abolitionist of all the sixteen Thompson sons, a tall, strapping, young fellow who idolized Father. The Old Man instructed him to begin at once building a proper corral for the horses, and he told me and Fred to take ourselves off with him and give him what help we could. “A little movement and fresh air will improve you,” he said, and we instantly complied, and of course he was right — in a short while, quite as if we had been able-bodied all along but merely had not known it, both Fred and I were cutting and dragging poles from down by the river up to a narrow defile close to the camp where Father had determined was the best location for a corral. Later on, by midday, as ordered, Oliver returned from the town of Osawatomie with stovepipe and three tin campstoves, and Father promptly installed one in each tent, and when he and Oliver had them properly working, he sent Oliver off to commence digging a proper privy and then turned to educating Wealthy as to the best care and treatment of John, whose color, now that he was breathing more easily, had already begun returning to his face.

In half a day, Father had turned Browns Station from a place of desolation into a proper frontier settlement. The tents were tightened against the wind, and with sweet-smelling streams of woodsmoke flowing from their tin chimneys, they looked secure and warm, even cheerful, situated in the protective crook of a narrow, forested cut that switch-backed down a long, grassy decline to the meandering river below. Spade and crowbar scraped against dirt and stone, hammers pounded stakes and drove nails, and axes and handsaws bit into wood, sending blond chips and sawdust flying. The air was filled with the bright clatter of leafless trees falling, of brothers calling to one another through the cold afternoon as the light began to fade — the sound of men happily at work, eager to finish their tasks before dark. There were the startled neighs of horses suddenly released to pasture inside a temporary corral made with a rope strung between trees, the bang and scrape of pots and pans being washed, the snap of wet laundry hung to dry in the breeze, and someone down in the cottonwoods even began to sing — Salmon, I realized; of course, it would be Salmon, for he had the best-pitched, clearest voice of us all and the sharpest memory for the old hymns — and first Father joined in with him, and then one by one the others picked it up, even Fred, even me.

Who are these, like stars appearing,

These, before God’s throne who stand?

Each a golden crown is wearing;

Who are all this glorious hand?

Alleluia! Hark, they sing,

Praising loud their heavenly King!

Towards evening, Oliver came marching proudly into camp with his old Kentucky rifle in one hand and, in the other, four fat prairie chickens, low-flying ground birds somewhat like our partridges, which he delivered over to Wealthy and Ellen, two to each woman. After praising the lad in such a way as to goad the rest of us to go and do likewise every day from here on out—”For I have seen considerable game on our way here,” the Old Man said — he then bade us all to cease our labors now and follow him out to the knoll, where he had earlier laid the mysterious pine box. Even John, with Salmon and Oliver half-carrying him, was obliged to come out to the windy hilltop.

Now, I thought, now each of us will be given his own Sharps rifle! I had come to despise my old muzzle-loader: it didn’t suit my fantasies or my intentions in the least; it was a boy’s smooth-bore gun, suitable mainly for shooting birds and raccoons; I wanted a weapon that would let me slay men. I wanted one of the famous new-style, breech-loading Sharps rifles that fired with deadly accuracy ten times a minute. Manufactured in the armory at Harpers Ferry, they were the so-called Beecher’s Bibles which that winter had commenced appearing all over Kansas in the hands of the more radical Free-Soilers. First sent out in crates marked Bibles by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s congregation in Brooklyn, New York, they were being purchased and shipped to the Free-Soil settlers now by churches all over the East. I was sure Father would not have come out without at least one case of weapons from the Church of the Holy Rifles — he was not in Kansas, after all, to farm.

But when we had all gathered there on the knoll, I saw that, sometime during the day and without my having observed him, Father had dug a deep hole in the ground next to the box, and for the first time I began to see that it was perhaps not a crate of Sharps, but something else, for the box resembled nothing so much as a finely carpentered coffin. Father looked down the line of us and reached out and drew Jason and Ellen forward to the center, where he stood, so that the three of them were now standing before the box, and at that I understood finally what was inside the box and why we were gathered out here.

The sky was darkening down in the east and cream-colored in the west, and the chilled, late afternoon breeze blew into our faces. Without looking at any one of us, staring instead down at the box before him, Father said, “Children, when I rode out from the east I carried with me a whole set of maps. A whole passel of maps, and overlapping they were, and one of’em, Jason, was sent to me by you, as you know. That was the very detailed map that led me to the grave that you dug in slaveholding territory, where you wrapped in a blanket the body of your poor little boy, Austin, and buried him whose soul has now gone on to God in heaven. But whose body lay buried in Missouri soil.

“Among my other maps, Jason and Ellen, and above all of them, the master map, as it were, is the one that guides them all — the map that is given to me by the Bible. It is God Almighty’s plan of these United States, which I carry with me wherever I go, and on that map this Kansas Territory is still free and will remain free so long as I draw breath. Children, I mean to lay those two maps over one another, Jason’s very detailed drawing of where his child lies buried, and God’s equally detailed plan, and align them.” He then looked straight at Jason and Ellen and said to them, “I know, my children, that you were surrounded by the enemy back there in Missouri and were afraid therefore and were maybe somewhat confused as to what was fitting and proper. I don’t mean to scold or upbraid you, children, but I myself could not abandon that boy’s body in slaveholding territory.

“I went there to my grandson’s grave, to pray over it, as you asked me to do, but then, when I had completed my prayers for his soul, I realized that I could not tolerate the thought of anyone with my blood and name lying under a little wooden cross in a potter’s field in a slave state. The very thought of it enraged me. So I retrieved Austin Brown’s body from that tainted ground, and Henry and I built it a proper coffin and placed it inside and put it into my wagon, and now we have carried it here to Kansas, where men and women and children are not chattel, here to bury it properly, here to place and mark his gravesite on God’s map of this land and not Satan’s!”

Then, with the darkness coming slowly on, Father handed ropes to Henry Thompson and me, which we draped beneath the pine box, and holding to them, we lowered the coffin slowly into the earth. Jason and Ellen held each other and wept. Wept with grief, but I am afraid also with shame. For Father had shamed them terribly with what he had done.

When the box had gone down into the hole, we filled the hole with dirt and moved from the gravesite one by one in a kind of confused browse, as if we were both reluctant and eager to get away from it. Last to leave were Father and Jason and Ellen, and I heard him say to them, “Tomorrow you will make a cross with your boy’s name and dates on it. And you will set it at the head of the grave, there,” he pronounced, and placed his foot firmly on the ground at the place beneath which he knew the boy’s head lay. Directly, then, he departed from the knoll, leaving Jason and Ellen alone at the gravesite. Thus ended the harsh, sullen division between Jason and his Ellen and the rest of us. We were all one family again.

Chapter 18

And yet I felt, in a new, peculiar, or maybe just unfamiliar way, alone again. Not an isolato, as I am now, or merely lonely, as I had been before Kansas, but solitary in the way of the devious Iago in the famous play about the Moor by William Shakespeare. Iago is the man who remains, no matter how crowded the stage, incommunicado, unknown, locked inside himself as if inside a dungeon. And while, certainly, in all matters I did as Father wished, I nonetheless became under him in Kansas, like Iago, my own man. Not Father’s. Father was my white-skinned Othello.

We did not go straight to war against the Border Ruffians. We could not, due to John’s lingering illness and the need to set our tattered, windblown camp straight and make rudimentary householding possible. Also, at that time the Border Ruffians were still holding their fire and were confronting us and our Free-Soil neighbors with little more than loud, drunken talk and empty threats. The Kansas War was something that was happening mostly in the newspapers of the Southern states and back East. And for a spell Father seemed more intent upon finding surveying work for himself than in leading us into battle against the slavers, and consequently he spent a considerable amount of time away from Browns Station, in Topeka and Lawrence and up on the Ottawa Reserve, surveying town sites and claims and marking the borders of the Indian territory.

It was a good place and time to be a surveyor. There was much confusion and controversy then concerning the settlers’ claims and legal title to lands, thanks to the rapid influx of impoverished squatters and the large-scale purchases of land by outside speculators like the New England Emigrant Aid Society, whose shareholders, despite their stated ambitions to settle Kansas with Free-Soilers and keep the West from becoming part of the Slavocracy, were in it to make a profit and did not mind if they made it off Indian land, government land, or land claimed by some poor grubstaker from Illinois with a single, sorry ox and a wife and five hungry children, a man too illiterate to register his claim properly.

To the east and south of Browns Station, the Southerners for months had been pouring across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers into the territory in ever greater numbers than the Free-Soilers. Not three miles from us there were slaves owned. With the encouragement and connivance of their dough-faced President, Franklin Pierce, the pro-slavers had already elected themselves a bogus legislature and governor situated in Leavenworth and had passed their disgusting “black laws” which made it a crime to read and write or even think and speak as we Browns did every day of our lives, laws which we now took special pleasure in breaking every chance we got, not only to express our contempt for them, but also to goad the Ruffians into trying to enforce their laws, which, so far, they had been reluctant to do. We, of course, had few dealings with them, anyhow, and did business mostly with folks who were allied with us, especially those who, like us, counted themselves radical abolitionists, at that time a distinct minority even amongst the Free-Soilers. Even so, most of our presumed allies, like most Northerners then, were as anti-Negro as they were anti-slavery: they wanted to keep Kansas soil free, all right, but free and white. To them, slavery was little more than an unfair labor practice imported from the South.

In his capacity as surveyor, despite his politics and principles and his usual inability to keep them to himself, the Old Man nonetheless passed unimpeded through the lands controlled by the pro-slavers, for they were as eager as the Free-Soilers to ascertain the limits and extensions of their land-claims, certain as they were then of outnumbering us and fearful, therefore, only of our encroaching on their lands illegitimately. Father was just the scrawny old Yankee surveyor with his wagonload of instruments and lines traveling across the plains of eastern Kansas looking for work.

Once again, as he had for a spell back in North Elba, the Old Man called himself Shubel Morgan. The name of John Brown was pretty famous by now and daily growing more so, especially out here, where he and his sons were known these days to be armed with Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers. He had indeed, as I’d hoped, lugged out from Ohio two unmarked crates that turned out to be packed with weaponry, and he had distributed a Sharps and a Colt revolver and a sharpened broadsword to each of us. All that winter into the spring, whenever we rode into Osawatomie or up to Lawrence for supplies or to send mail and messages east, we brandished our new weapons, like our politics and principles, with unabashed pride, and soon all around the region John Brown and his sons came to be regarded by both sides as potentially troublesome.

As the surveyor Shubel Morgan, however, and with his rifle and Colt and broadsword tucked out of sight in the wagon box, Father was able to put himself on friendly terms with most everyone he met. Thus did he quickly gain wonderful intelligence of the meandering rivers and sparkling creeks, the densely wooded gullies, washes, ravines, and gorges that criss-crossed the vast, grassy plains like the lines of a flattened hand. Also, he learned the names and locations of the cabins of every pro-slave settler in the region and in short order knew them as well as the names and locations of the Free-Soil settlers. He observed and tallied up the pro-slavers’ weaponry, too, and the number of horses they had, and he discerned something of their general character, which he thought little of. “Cowards” he reported, “and drunkards. Illiterate, ignorant fools with no taste for a real fight, unless it’s over a woman or a jug of corn liquor.”

There was down on the Pottawatomie River, not far from Browns Station, a particularly nettlesome settlement of Border Ruffians that Father liked to complain of, the Shermans, the Doyles, and the Wilkinsons, our nearest neighbors, in a sense, although to call them neighbors was a gift, for they despised us as much as we them. They were landless farmers who’d drifted up from the Southern hillcountry and built tippy, dirt-floored cabins where they made their babies — angry, poor, ignorant people who took their greatest pleasure in puffing up their sense of their own worth by making drunken threats of violence against Northern abolitionists and against us Browns especially. So far, they had not delivered on any of their threats, and none of us thought they could stay sober long enough to carry it off.

There were not many Negro slaves in the region, half a hundred perhaps, rarely more than one or two attached to a single owner, as most of these pro-slavers, like our Pottawatomie neighbors, were failed, landless farmers come out from Tennessee and Missouri and parts of the deeper South, many of them without families, even, and with almost no livestock. And Father was right, there was amongst all of them a surprisingly high proportion of reprobates, whiskey-sellers, thieves, prostitutes, tramps, gamblers, scamps, and other parasites who had followed the Southern settlers as if they were a conquering army instead of a migrating mob of ignorant farmers desperate for cheap land.

In fact, the motives of the pro-slavers for coming out to Kansas were no less mixed than those of us Free-Soilers: like us, they had come for land, for pecuniary advancement, and to wage war over slavery, usually in that order. And, to be truthful, their wild, violent, racialist, and pro-slavery rhetoric was no more incendiary than ours. The difference between the two sides was that, whereas their rhetoric was Satan’s, ours was the Lord’s. They shrieked at us from Satan’s camp, and we trumpeted back from the Lord’s.

That is how Father saw it. We were not superior to the pro-slavers by virtue of our intrinsic morality or our intelligence or our farming and animal husbandry skills or our weapons or even our courage, he daily preached to us. No, we were made superior solely by virtue of Him whom we had chosen to follow. The stinking darkness of institutionalized slavery had made the Southerners into a foul and corrupt people. It had stolen their souls and had made them followers of Satan. For centuries, they had resided in a permanently darkened pit, and thus, to them, the world was a dimmed, low, pestilential place. We, however, when we gazed onto the world, we stood as if on a peak bathed in the bright light of freedom, which enabled us to see the true nature of man, and therefore, simply by following our own true nature, we were able to follow the Lord God Almighty. And after much scrupulous examination, having confidently discerned the Lord’s will, we naturally had determined to make all men and women free. If, to accomplish that great task, we must put to death those who would oppose us, then so be it: it is the will of the Lord: and in this time and place, He hath no greater work to set before His children than that they stamp upon the neck of Satan and crack the jaw of his followers and liberate all the white and black children of the Lord from the obscene stink and corruption of slavery. Simply, if we would defeat Satan, we must first defeat his most heinous invention, which was American Negro slavery.

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.

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.

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.

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 shooting 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.”

“If we think on it, the opportunity will be lost.”

I did not say it, but we both knew that if I did not drop the sheriff now, Father would once again be jumping up and down in a foaming rage, crying that nothing had been done to oppose this outrageous illegality, and he’d be blaming the men in Lawrence for their failure of nerve, instead of himself for his. I was as weary of his complaints as I was of their inaction.

He nodded approval, and I turned back to my task, aimed, and fired. Done. Sheriff Jones toppled from his horse.

A simple act. But instantly, with that shot, much changed.

With that one shot from my Sharps rifle, we shucked our identity as defenders of freedom and became full-fledged guerilla fighters. I knew it beforehand and intended it and recognized it when it happened.

Having finally gone on the offensive this way, we could no longer claim to ourselves or to anyone else that we had come out here to Kansas to farm or even to make Kansas a free state. No, it was now inescapably clear to all, but especially and most importantly to the Southerners, that we Browns were here in Kansas solely to wage war against slavery. The Missourians and pro-slavers all over the South who had been screaming for abolitionist blood, who had cried in the headlines of their newspapers, War to the knife, and knife to the hilt! were justified now. Their very lives, as much as their foul institutions, were under attack. We were their enemy now, as much as they had been ours all along.

The sheriff had gone down. But then he crawled to the wagon, and to our surprise, the Free-Soil prisoners from Lawrence helped him aboard and laid him out and appeared to be tending to him, while the soldiers got off their horses and drew close around the wagon and waited to be fired upon. “Did you kill him?” Father asked in a tense whisper. “Did you kill the man?” He was at my ear and had a hand on each of my shoulders. The others, Fred and Salmon, had come forward and were crouched behind us.

“No.”

“You bloodied him, though,” Salmon said. “They’re ripping off his shirt.”

“But why are they helping him and not escaping?” Father asked. “All they’ve got to do is run, right?”

No one answered.

“I think we should go down there and I should address them,” Father announced.

“No;’ I said. “Better they don’t know who has shot at them or from where. Make them think we’re everywhere. A single, well-aimed shot can be more terrifying than a fusillade.”

The Old Man pondered that for a second, and then he smiled. “Yes. Good. That’s good, Owen. Very good. Come on, boys,”he said, suddenly in charge again, although I detected a new note of apprehension in his voice. Certainly, Father understood the implications of this act as well as I did. “Let’s ride on to Lawrence. And we’ll say nothing of this to anyone. Nothing. All either side needs to know is that there are some abolitionists who are not afraid to shoot, and that such men are everywhere — nowhere and anywhere. They don’t need to know the names of the shooters. Not yet anyhow. You look down there, boys, look,” he ordered, and pointed into the arroyo below at the sight of Free-Soil prisoners and federal troopers scrambling to protect and aid a fallen proslavery sheriff. “See how little we can trust even our own kind. Traitors;’ he pronounced them. “There below, children, there are the Israelites who betrayed Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, gone to worship the golden calves of Jeroboam. Look at them, boys. Let us, from here on out, keep completely to ourselves,” he said. “Completely.”

And so we did. There were, of course, immediate and serious consequences to my shooting the sheriff, but they were not by us particularly unwanted. Although we were widely suspected, by both sides, to have been the hotheads who wounded Sheriff Jones, Father neither admitted nor denied the charge and said only that he himself had not fired on the man but it was a shame he hadn’t been killed. The pro-slavery newspapers went wild, and rumors of imminent war flew across the territory, exciting and frightening everyone on all sides. Missourians and other Southerners gathered together in packs along the border, as if ready to invade. Mobs in Atchison and Leavenworth captured a pair of prominent Free-State men there on business and tarred them and stuck tufts of cotton all over their bodies, tied the men to their horses, and sent them down the Santa Fe Trail, where they were found the next day a few miles north of Lawrence.

It was around this time that, with John and Jason spending so much time up in Lawrence with the Osawatomie Rifles and the Free-State legislature, Father decided that we had better send the women and Tonny over to Uncle Sam Adair’s place in the village of Osawatomie. He also decided to abandon Browns Station and move to a temporary camp in the trackless brushland along the Mosquito Creek, a camp that every few days we could shift to a new location. We were free as the wind off the plains now, able to appear and disappear almost at will. Everything we owned we carried in one wagon, and most of what we owned was weaponry. We were all of us on horseback by now, thanks to stock we had liberated from the hands of the slavers, although we had not saddles for everyone, and Fred and Oliver, when he wasn’t driving the wagon, rode bareback. Roaming the rolling, treeless hillcountry and slipping along the dark river-bottoms where black walnut, oak, and cottonwood trees grew in lush groves, we were more like a roving Indian band than a company of white guerillas. Our chieftain, who was Father, of course, always Father, set policy, but I decided day-to-day on how best to implement that policy.

Then, on the second of May, when we were encamped in the woods just south of the old French trading post on the Marais des Cygnes, a rich Missouri planter named Jefferson Buford, who had rounded up close to four hundred men from all over the South, led his mob straight across the border into the territory. Not ten miles from us, men were flying banners that cried, The Supremacy of the White Race! and Alabama for Kansas. A day later, we heard from a local Free-State settler that, out on the Peoria Indian lands, fifteen miles from our old camp at Browns Station, a company of some thirty or so Georgians loosely attached to Buford’s force had pitched their tents and were carousing, working up their courage with whiskey and insults. It was country that we knew firsthand and well, so on a cold, overcast day, Father and I rode out there in the wagon to reconnoiter and see what we could learn of the character of Colonel Buford’s force. We pretended to be government surveyors running a line that happened to lie in the middle of their squat. Calling ourselves Ruben Shiloh and his son Owen from Indiana and pretending to have no opinions on the struggle over Kansas, Father and I stopped for a while by the Georgians’ cook wagon, where most of the men had assembled to drink corn whiskey and lounge idly by the fire, two of their favorite activities, it seemed. We secretly counted the number of their horses and weapons, sidearms mostly and old, single-shot hunting rifles, and we talked a little and listened a lot, as they loudly cursed the abolitionists and swore to kill every last one. They loved their leader, Jefferson Buford, and called him Colonel Buford, although, when Father asked, they could not say in which army or militia he had been commissioned.

They were a staggering, loutish bunch of poor, ignorant, landless Southerners, men who bragged that they had come over to Kansas to help themselves first, by seizing abolitionists’ land-claims, and the South second, by killing as many Yankee nigger-lovers as they could find. “Especially those damned Browns,” whom they’d been hearing about from the Shermans and Doyles down on the Pottawatomie. “Them Browns’re goin’ first!” they declared. We tipped our hats and rode on.

Later, in the wagon on the way back to our camp, for a long time Father and I were silent, each of us lost in his own thoughts. Finally, when we were four or five miles from the Georgians’, Father turned to me and said, “You know, Owen, the real problem here isn’t what it seems. It’s not our differences from those fellows. The real problem is that those men truly don’t understand us.”

“How’s that a problem?”

“It just came to me, so I’ll have to say it as I think it. But the pro-slavers, all these Border Ruffians coming over from the South — fact is, they think we’re just like them except that we’re Northerners, that’s all. They think that, like them, we’ve come out here at the behest and in the pay of a gang of rich men and politicians. In their minds, we’re out here following some Yankee version of their Colonel Buford, and, like them, all we want out of this for ourselves is a piece of free land. Strange. But that is the problem.”

“What’s the solution, then?”

“I’m not sure. I think we have to show them somehow that they’re wrong about us. We should figure out how to show these Southerners the true nature and extremity of our principles. We have to show them the difference between them and us. Mainly, they have to see that we are willing to die for this. For they are not. And more to the point, because they are not willing to die for their cause, they have to see that we are willing to kill for ours. There it is! That’s our secret strength, Owen. All those poor, drunken fools and thieves, they really do believe that we are cowards, no different than they, and that Kansas, since they presently outnumber us, is easy pickings. And if they cry bloody murder and threaten to burn down our houses, it’s only because they think that as soon as the battle starts, we’ll pack up and run north and leave them our land.”

“They’ll see otherwise;’ I said.

“Now is the time, I believe. It’s time, Owen, time to buckle on our swords and wade straight into their midst. It’s time to wreak bloody havoc. We need to slay so many of them with a single, terrifying blow that the rest will start having sobering second thoughts.”

“Fine by me. I’d kill every last one. Give them only enough Kansas soil to lie down dead in.”

“You would, but maybe you won’t have to. I know men like this. I’ve seen them everywhere, even in the North. It’s a basic human type. These fellows are only the degraded, pathetic pawns of other men, who are much more evil than their pawns. Oh, sure, these poor, deluded fellows hate Negroes, all right, and they love slavery. But not because they themselves own Negro slaves or depend upon them to work their puny farms. You don’t see any slave-traders amongst these fellows, do you? And no cotton planters, either. No, these are poor men, Owen. And like most people, North and South, but especially South, they’re landless and slaveless and ignorant and illiterate. They’re serfs, practically, but with no lord of the manor to protect them. And it’s because they’ve been taught for centuries to love and envy the rich man who owns slaves that they hate the Negro, and now they have come out here to conquer Kansas for slavery. That’s all. Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin’s as white as the rich man’s, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”

“Very nice” I said. “But how do you propose to show them this?” I asked, out of politeness more than interest. Father’s endless, convoluted theories concerning slavery and Negroes frequently strengthened my brothers’ resolve, and even from time to time charged up the Old Man himself, but they had long since ceased to motivate me. I had my own motivations, which needed no firming. Iron hardeneth iron. For me, the soft, warm days of pusillanimity were long gone.

“Well, there’s only one way. We must strike pure terror into their hearts, Owen. Pure terror. Pure! We must become terrible!” he growled. We had to make the Border Ruffians understand that they had to be ready to die miserably for this. If we showed them that their bits of Kansas Territory would not come to them otherwise, they’d go galloping straight back to Alabama and Georgia, where they could lie and boast in the taverns and bawdyhouses all they wanted. All we cared was that Kansas be left a free state, so that we could go back to Father’s old plan of breaking the rich slaveholder’s back by drawing off the Negro labor force with the Subterranean Passway, his plan to turn the Underground Railroad into a north-flowing river of fugitives. Then, to get their sugar and cotton and corn and tobacco grown, the planters would be forced to turn to their fellow whites and would start enslaving them. And when they did that, poor white men would know their true enemies at last. They’d see that their true allies all along had been us abolitionists and the freed blacks living up North and the Southern Negroes who still remained in bondage. With its main supports gone, Satan’s temple of slavery would come tumbling down, and then the Negro would no longer be despised in the land. The poor, landless black man and the poor white would fall into one another’s arms.

“Sounds good, Father,” I said. “Sounds real good.” I cracked the reins and moved the wagon a little more smartly along, as it looked like rain in the west. The huge, milky-white Kansas sky had gone all yellow near the horizon and then had suddenly darkened overhead. Long grasses riffled and swirled in the wind like the soft surface of the sea, changing from pale blue to green to steel gray in the broody, late afternoon light. Our trail was an ancient buffalo road, a grass-covered depression through the high, flat, endless field, which we followed as if in the wake of a westering ship, and I half-expected to see eddies of foam and bubbles out there before us. Ragged sheets of lightning shook down from the southern sky, and a few seconds later, the rumble of thunder rolled across the plain like distant cannonfire.

“What say you to that, son?” Father shouted over the wind. He was holding on to the seat with both hands, as the wagon bucked and dipped across the rough, grassy plain towards the long, purple line of cottonwoods in the river-bottom ahead, where our camp was located.

“To what?”

“To my thoughts!”

“Oh, I like it!” I shouted back.

“Like what?”

“Becoming terrible! I like becoming terrible!”

He loosened one hand from the box and flung his sinewy arm around my shoulders. “Oh, thou hast lately become a true soldier of the Lord, Owen!” He pulled me to him and laughed. Then suddenly the sky opened up, and a cold rain poured down, silencing us for the rest of the way into camp.

Once there, when we had climbed down from the wagon and come into the flapping tent, Salmon, Fred, Oliver, and Henry greeted us with great excitement and gave us news that set us immediately to loading the wagon with our weapons, and with Oliver up on the box driving the team and Father and the rest of us on horseback, we six headed on through the downpour straight on to Lawrence.

In our absence, the boys had learned that the Missourian Colonel Butord and his four hundred Southerners and hundreds more in smaller gangs of Southerners were headed for Lawrence from several directions, and this time they were coming in determined to burn the town to the ground. To justify their attack, the pro-slavers now had a legal pretext, in that, a few days earlier, a grand jury in Atchison had indicted all the Free-State leaders for high treason and the editors of the Herald Freedom, the Free-State newspaper, for sedition. This time, the Border Ruffians meant to stamp out the abolitionists once and for all. They meant to take our citadel and burn it and sow salt where it had stood and wipe all memory of Free-State resistance from Kansas forever.

The possibility of this occurring brought Father to a fever-pitch of excitement. As usual, it was the idea of battle more than the reality that made the Old Maris blood boil and his tongue wag. In some surprising ways and more than he thought, Father resembled the very Southerners he claimed to be at war with. Up to a point, it made him an effective leader of more conventional men than he, which was most men, of course, but that point was where the battle itself actually began.

He was not afraid exactly; Father was a courageous man. Simply, it was as if he could not cease controlling a situation, and whenever he reached that moment when he no longer was able to shape and determine things, he backed off. Which was why, I suppose, he needed me. I made no show of this and do not think that I tricked him into depending on me or moved him in any way contrary to his essential desires, even though he never quite said outright that, once he had properly positioned himself at the edge of battle, he needed me to bring him over it. Rather, it was our unstated agreement, our tacit understanding, that he was the one to lead us to the precipice, and I was the one to carry us across.

Out on the California Road, where it joined the Osawatomie Road down to our old, abandoned camp at Browns Station, we met up with two companies of volunteers, about thirty men, parts of John’s Osawatomie Rifles, as it turned out, who were milling about and apparently going nowhere. The rain had let up, and the men were shaking off their clothes, drying their weapons, and scraping mud from their horses’ shoes. They had built a huge fire, as if they meant to stay awhile or even overnight, for it was nearly dark by then.

They were more concerned, it seemed, with organizing themselves into a regular troop of soldiers than with riding straight on to defend Lawrence from the invaders. John explained to Father that they had lately received contradictory reports from Lawrence and wished to wait for further orders before leaving this part of the territory undefended against the numerous bands of Buford’s Ruffians who had been roaming the region for weeks, threatening to shoot, hang, and burn Free-Staters. Their first responsibility, he said, was to protect the Osawatomie section of the territory, not Lawrence.

This infuriated Father. He had moved to the wagon, where, to address the group, he stood up on the seat, with Oliver at the reins beside him and the rest of us on horseback. Earlier, back at the camp, we had loaded the wagon with the usual sheaf of pikes and sharpened broadswords, and we were armed in addition with our Sharps rifles and our revolvers. Though we were but six men, or five men and a boy, we had the weaponry of a dozen. “The Missourians are all at Lawrence, burning it down!” the Old Man shouted at John and the others. “It’s only you boys and your women and children who are left here!”

“We don’t know that,” John coolly answered.

“Well, then, you’re welcome to stay put until you do!” the Old Man snapped, and he leapt to the ground and took the bridle of Reliance from me and signaled for us to depart. At once, Oliver drew the wagon back onto the muddy road, and we headed at a gallop northward across the darkening plain towards Lawrence.

I remember two more meetings out on the road that night, before we went to Pottawatomie and did the terrible things there. The first was a rider who had been sent down to Osawatomie from Lawrence by the Free-State authorities, Colonel Lane and Mr. Robinson. He was a screw-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, his horse all lathered from the long ride, and he at first mistook us for the advance contingent of the Osawatomie Rifles and thought that Father was John himself, Lieutenant Brown.

“No, I am Captain Brown;’ Father said to the lad. “His superior officer and his father. What news have you?”

The Osawatomie Rifles, the boy said, were instructed by Colonel Lane to return to their homes and not to come on to Lawrence.

“And why is that?”

“Because it’s all over, sir. No need to come in now, Cap’n Brown. And they ain’t got any food, except barely enough for the folks as is already there. President Pierce’s federal troops are running the entire town,” he said. “They come in and parleyed awhile with the Missourians and sent ’em back peaceful.” The Free-State leaders, he explained, had decided not to oppose Colonel Buford and his four hundred Border Ruffians when they first appeared at the edge of town, and the Southerners had then proceeded to ride into the town and sack it. They had broken up all the printing presses and had gotten drunk on as much whiskey as they could find and had burned several stores and even shot the Free-State Hotel full of holes with a cannon. “But they didn’t kill nobody, Cap’n Brown. They just did whatever they wanted, and all the folks stood in the street and watched ’em like it was a circus, and then the Federals come down from Leavenworth and got ‘em to agree to head back to Atchison.”

The boy smiled, as if he had brought glad tidings, but his news made Father crazy, and when the Old Man drew out his revolver and started waving it around, I thought he might shoot the boy. Instead, he leapt down from his horse and seized the lad by his collar and dragged him off the road a short ways into the high grasses, where he shouted into his face that he would put a bullet in the boy’s head here and now if he was not who he said he was and if what he had told us was a lie. “Because it sounds like a perfect lie!” he declared. “Designed to hold us out of the battle!”

The boy crumpled to his knees and began to cry, which seemed to soften the Old Man, or at least to convince him that the boy was not lying, for he holstered his gun and lifted the lad to his feet, brushed the mud from his trousers, and brought him back to us. Then he instructed him to ride on to where John and the Rifles were camped and give them his unfortunate news, which he was sure they, at least, would welcome. Glad to be released, the boy mounted his horse and left us at once.

We ourselves did not know what to do then. Go on to occupied Lawrence, or ride back to our camp on the Marais des Cygnes, southeast of Osawatomie? Neither route took us where we had hoped to go, which was straight into the noise and smoke of battle. Ride back and pitch our tent with John and his Rifles and our pacificist brother, Jason? That seemed somehow shameful, embarrassing, at the least, although none of us said it outright. Our blood was all heated up; we could feel it coursing down our arms to our hands and pounding in our necks and ears. Even Oliver, I realized, as I looked up at him on the wagon box, was caught up in it: his hands were locked in white-knuckled fists, his boyish jaw was clenched tight as a vise; and Henry and my brothers Salmon and Fred, they, too, were poised to ride straight into battle.

Father stood by the wagon alone and breathed heavily in and out, as if re-gathering his strength, like an ox after a long pull. Finally, I said to him, “I’m for riding into Lawrence and finding Colonel Lane and the others who are responsible for this betrayal. Then we should take them out and execute them for it. Put an end to this constant accommodation.” I meant it and, if Father had agreed, would have done it. But he did not agree.

“No, no, this is not over yet,” he said. “Keep in mind the story of Joab, who slew Absalom, causing King David such a lamentation and dividing the Israelites against themselves, which greatly weakened them against their enemies. No, boys, we must let the Lord decide this.”

“Decide what? Our cause is lost, Father! Lost without even a whimper from those cowards in Lawrence, and now the whole territory, it looks like, is ruled by Franklin Pierce’s soldiers. We’re ruled by Washington turncoats in league with the Atchison pro-slavers and Buford’s mob of Southerners.”

“We might yet upset this neat arrangement. Something must be done, though. Something dramatic and terrible,” Father said, and when he said that word, “terrible,” I knew what he meant.

“Who shall we do it to?” I asked. The others — Salmon, Fred, Oliver, and Henry — were silent and wondering; they did not yet know what Father and I were speaking of.

“I guess it’ll have to be the Shermans and the Doyles and so on, the men down on the Pottawatomie!’ he said.

“That’s fine. But we better do it quickly, while the hornets are out of the nest. Do you think Dutch Sherman and the Doyle men are at home anyhow? They might have ridden with Buford’s army.”

Father thought not — they were pro-slave and anti-Negro, all right, and plenty loud about it, but they were family men and had their land claims already settled and had built cabins and weren’t likely to be running with that crowd. “We will go down there tonight” he said. “And we shall treat with the men only, and make quick, bloody work of it, whilst the surrender and the sacking of Lawrence are still in the air, so that everyone in the territory on both sides will know why it was done.”

My brother-in-law, Henry Thompson, then spoke up. “Mister Brown, do you mean for us to Ml the Shermans and the Doyles?”

“Yes, Henry, I do,” Father replied. “Boys, Owen has seen it straight. After the debacle in Lawrence, if we don’t do this, our cause here in Kansas is wholly lost, and lost without a fight.”

“But do we have to kill these men? They don’t own any slaves. They’re just loudmouths.”

Fred said, “Shut up, Henry! You have to do what Father says. He has spoken with the Lord all these years, and you haven’t. It’s what the Lord has told him to do.”

“Are these men not our sworn enemies, boys?” Father asked. “Have they not hundreds of times sworn to kill us?”

They all four nodded agreement — slowly and reluctantly, however. Henry said, “But we have never thought they would ever actually do it. I mean, kill us outright. You know, unless they were provoked or something.”

“This will provoke them,” I said. “Either you’re with us on this, Henry, or you’re against us.”

“What about John and Jason?” Salmon asked.

“The choice hasn’t been put to them,” I said. “So they’re neither for nor against.”

Father added that, as officers in the Free-State Militia, John and Jason were obliged to follow the orders of their superiors, even if their superiors ordered them to capitulate to the enemy, which, in a sense, they had already done. As irregulars, we were not so bound. Besides, John was a member of the Free-State legislature and had sworn to uphold the laws of the territory. The only laws we had sworn to uphold were the Lord’s.

“And the Lord wants us to do this thing?” Fred asked.

“He does,” Father pronounced.

“Good,” Fred replied, and the others nodded agreement again, this time with firmness.

This may seem strange to one who was not there on that May night out on the plain — to us it was apposite and just, and not at all strange — but at that moment, when we had reached our decision to go to the cabins on the Pottawatomie and kill the men who lived there, a single rider came out of the darkness from the direction of Lawrence, bringing news which, although it was awful news, seemed nonetheless to have been sent by the Lord Himself, sent with no other purpose than to give us permission to do this thing and do it now.

Oddly, we did not hear him approach, perhaps because our attention was so taken up with our wrangle. He seemed to emerge from the darkness like a ghost — but it was only a man, a man in a long white duster, riding a pale gray stallion, and although we were startled by his sudden appearance, we were not frightened by it, as he seemed to bear us no enmity. We did not know him, had never seen him before, and he did not introduce himself or ask who we were. He was a tall, well-built man of early middle-age, blond-haired, with a full beard. I recall him exactly. He pulled up beside the wagon and touched the broad brim of his hat with a gloved finger.

With no further greeting, he said to Father straight out, in an even voice, “You may wish to know, sir, that early yesterday it was reported in Saint Louis that Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber. You may also wish to know the name of his assailant, Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina. The senator from Massachusetts, a strong supporter of the abolitionist cause, which I take to be your cause as well, was beaten unmercifully by the Southerner. He was clubbed on the head with a stout cane, and it is very likely that he will not survive the attack.”

I had never seen Father as wild as he was then. He pulled off his hat and threw it on the ground. His face reddened with rage, and his brow darkened down as if his brain were on fire. He lifted his arms into the air and cried, “How can this be! How can such a thing happen!”

I said nothing, but the others, too, cried out their shock and anger at this latest outrage by the slavemasters. Then the messenger, if that is, indeed, what he was, said to us, “I bid you good evening, sirs” and, touching his hat a second time, rode slowly off, disappearing into the darkness as silently and swiftly as he had come.

For a long while after that, Father and the boys acted crazy, as if trying to outdo one another in their ranting and their wild promises to avenge this heinous crime against one of our heroes. I waited until they began to calm somewhat, and when I thought they could hear me clearly, I said, “It’s time now to go down along the Pottawatomie, where we can sharpen our swords and commence to use them.”

That silenced everyone, even Father, who seemed to break out of a trance. He shook his head violently, as if ridding it of evil spirits or bad dreams, and suddenly he was scrambling up on Reliance and shouting for Oliver to get the wagon moving. He took his own reins in his hands and slapped them against the flanks of the Morgans. The horses leapt forward, and Oliver was obliged to run and grasp onto the rear of the box and clamber aboard whilst it was moving. We watched for a minute longer, saying nothing, and then the others, Salmon, Fred, and Henry, mounted their horses — I had never got down from mine — and we took off at a full gallop, chasing after Father and Oliver, the wagon rumbling in the darkness ahead of us and ahead even of Father, racing along the rough old buffalo-track, the California Road, that led down from the heights of the Ottawa lands to the winding, narrow Cottonwood valley of the Pottawatomie.

Who can say which event is accidental and which is not? Or even if there exists such a thing as a true accident, a purely causeless event? When you take away belief in God’s will, then every untoward event and every blessing is viewed as merely the result of history; or else its origin is said to be a mystery; or else we lamely and with extreme insecurity reason backwards from effect to cause — from consciousness of guilt, for instance, backwards to the sinful act. Thus, if my feelings of guilt were made a measure of my intention, I have to concede that, even though I was not aware of it at the time, I nonetheless fully intended to kill my beloved friend Lyman Epps and only arranged for it afterwards to resemble an accident, in my own eyes as much as in the eyes of others. And thus it would, indeed, be as I felt it (but did not believe it) afterwards — a crime. A murder. By the same token, by the weight of guilt, I fully intended to go down there along the Pottawatomie Creek that night with my father and brothers and haul five men who claimed to love slavery and hate Negroes out of their cabins and butcher them for the sheer, murderous pleasure of it. For afterwards that is how guilty I felt, as if I had done it for the pleasure of it.

But if events are driven not by a man’s unconscious desires, and not by pure mystery, and not by some deep, unknown historical force — then what? After all, I was not obliged by circumstances or by any other man to go there with my sword and brandish it the way I did. No, I hold myself responsible for my own bloody acts. And I believe that I am further responsible, and to nearly the same degree, for the bloody acts that night of my father and brothers, too. For without my having instigated the attack and then goaded them when they grew timorous and frightened by the idea, they would not have done it.

Simply, I showed them at the time and afterwards that if we did not slay those five pro-slave settlers and did not do it in such a brutal fashion, the war in Kansas would have been over. Finished. In a matter of weeks, Kansas would have been admitted to the Union as a slave-state, and there would have been nothing for it then but the quick secession of all the Northern states, starting with New England, and the wholesale abandonment of three million Negro Americans to live and die in slavery, along with their children and grandchildren and however many generations it would take before slavery in the South was finally, if ever, overthrown. There would have been no raid on Harpers Ferry, certainly, and no Civil War, for the South would not have objected in the slightest to the break-up of the Union. Let them go. We will happily keep our slaves.

When we went down to the Pottawatomie, I believed all that. And in spite of my guilty feelings, I believe it still. No, I swear, I did not go down there for the pleasure of killing my enemies, nor did Father, nor my brothers, despite what the writers, North and South, puzzling over the causes of that event, have said in the intervening years. On that dark May night in ’56,1 truly thought that we were shaping history, that we were affecting the course of future events, making one set of events nearly impossible and another very likely, and I believed that the second set was morally superior to the first, so it was a good and necessary thing, what we were doing. We could slay a few men now, men who were guilty, perhaps, if only by association, and save millions of innocents later. That’s how terror, in the hands of the righteous, works.

And we were right, after all. For it did work. The terror and the rage that we caused with those murders ignited the flames of war all across Kansas, to be sure, and all across the Southern states and in the North as well. We turned Kansas bloody. With a single night’s work, we Browns made the whole territory bleed. The Missourians came flying back across the river determined anew to kill every abolitionist in Kansas, and the Northerners were forced to return blow for blow, until both sides lost sight of the possibilities of a short-term peace and were instead engaged in a fight to the death. Which was exactly as Father and I and, to a lesser degree, the rest of us Browns wanted.

If we had learned anything over the last decade, it was that there was no other way to defeat slavery, except with a willingness to die for it. We had learned what the Negroes long knew. And thus we merely did what the Negroes themselves had done over and over in the past — in Haiti, in the mountains of Jamaica, and in the swamps of Virginia — but could not do out there on the plains of Kansas. We did what we wanted the Negroes to do in Kansas. By slaying those five pro-slavers on the Pottawatomie that night, we placed hundreds, thousands, of other white men in the same position that we alone amongst the whites had held for years: for now every white man in Kansas, anti-slaver and pro-slaver alike, had to be ready to die for his cause.

If Father wanted to believe that it was the Lord’s will we were enacting, fine. I had no argument with him on that, not anymore: out here, living our lives in public, what Father called the will of God I now called history. And if history, like the will of God, ruled us, then whatever moral dimension it possessed came not from itself or from above, but from our very acts, and that it would show us our true fates, for good or for evil.

That is why we killed those men.

I remember we drew the wagon into a narrow cleft in the steep, rutted ridge on the north side of the trail, with the rain-filled creek below us on the left, the land claim and cabin of James Doyle of Tennessee a quarter-mile or so dead ahead, and the others, Sherman’s and Wilkinson’s, a short ways beyond. It was pitch dark, but we lit no torches. I instructed the boys and Father to hitch our horses here and place our rifles in the wagon and leave them, explaining that, as the three cabins we meant to strike were all within a half-mile of one another, we could not risk a gunshot. Then I handed out the heavy, razor-sharp broadswords, one to each. No one else spoke a word, not even Father.

By the time we reached Doyle’s cabin, it was close to midnight, and the clouds had broken open, floating across the satiny sky like soldered rags. There was now a quarter-moon in the southeast quadrant, casting a shifting, eerie light, glazing gray the low trees and scrub alongside the trail. We could see the rough, pale wooden shingles of the roof of the cabin below, when suddenly we heard a low growl, and out of the shadows a pair of huge mastiff dogs came charging towards us, all fangs and ferocious, yellow eyes. With a single swipe of my sword I sliced the first animal across its neck and shoulder, and it fell dead at my feet, nearly decapitated. Fred struck at the other, injuring it in the haunch, sending it howling into the woods behind us, away from the cabin.

Father, who had been next to me in the lead, stopped in his tracks. “Ah, we’re done for! The Doyles’ll be up and armed now.”

“No,” I said. “Just keep moving fast; don’t hesitate. They’ll likely think the dogs are chasing deer. Come on!” and I stepped in front of him and jogged down the scumbly trail to the front door of the cabin. The shutters were bolted, with no light visible inside and no sign of life, except for a thick rope of silver smoke rising from the fireplace chimney. When the others, panting more from excitement and fear than from exertion, had arrived at the stoop with me, I reached forward and banged roughly on the door with the handle of my sword.

A man’s voice inside drawled, “Who’s there? What d’ yer want?”

I looked to Father, whose leathery face had gone white. His cheek twitched, and his lips were dry and trembling. I was afraid he would not speak to the man; and I could not. Finally, after a few seconds, the Old Man cleared his throat and asked in a thin voice the way to Mr. Wilkinson’s cabin. Friend Wilkinson, he called him. Words were Father’s saving grace. I would not have thought to say that.

I heard someone push back a chair and walk across to the door and lift the bolt away, and when he had opened the door a crack, I kicked it and swiftly put my shoulder into it, throwing the door open and tossing the man, James Doyle, for that is who it was, back across the tiny room, and we all burst into the cabin, filling it completely, sending the Doyles, a family of six people, back against the further wall, where they cowered in fright. They were a dry little old bald-headed man, his plump wife, and four children, two of them bearded men in their twenties, the others, a girl and a boy, very small, under fifteen.

They were frightened and astonished by our sudden, huge presence, and when Father shouted to Mr. Doyle that we were the Northern Army and had come to capture him and his sons, Mrs. Doyle at once commenced to weep, and she cried to her husband, “I told you what you were going to get! I told you!”

“Hush, Mother!” Mr. Doyle said. “Hush, for God’s sake! This here’s Mister Brown, ain’t it? From over to Osawatomie. We can reason with him.”

She wept profusely and for a moment dominated the scene, mainly by begging Father not to take her son John, who was only fourteen, she said, a mere boy with no notion of these things.

Father said to her, “The others, your elder sons, are they members of the Law and Order Party?”

“Never mind that!” bellowed Old Doyle. “What do you want with us? We ain’t but farmers like you, Brown!”

“Thou art the enemies of the Lord,” Father pronounced, and he ordered the two grown sons, named Drury and William, and Old Doyle, the father, to come out of the house with us, which they did, leaving wife and mother, son and daughter, and sister and brother weeping and wailing behind in the doorway, for they knew what was about to happen.

Quickly, we marched the three men, coatless and hatless, back up the narrow, curving pathway to the moonlit road. The two younger men were barefoot and walked gingerly over the stony trail. Oliver, Fred, and Henry were in front of the prisoners, Father, Salmon, and I coming along behind, and when we reached the level plain above the creek, a hundred yards or so from the cabin, where the dead dog lay, Father said to stop now.

One of the Doyles, William, saw the dog and cried, “Oh, Bonny!”

Father said, “The Law of Moses states that the fathers shall not be killed for the crimes of the sons, nor the sons for the crimes of the fathers. But here father and sons both are guilty.”

“It’s not necessary that they understand what’s happening to them,” I said. “Let’s just get it done.” I was suddenly afraid that we had come this far and now the Old Man would once again end it too soon with palaver and prayer. I remember raising the blade of my sword over my head with my good right hand, the moonlight glinting off its edge like cold fire, and then I brought it down and buried it in the skull of James Doyle, splashing the son next to him, Drury, with his father’s blood. Fred and then Henry Thompson and Salmon joined in and began hacking away at the brothers, chopping them apart at the arms and slashing them in their chests and bellies, and even Oliver got in some blows with his sword. I heard several of us shriek during the slaughter, but I do not know which of us did that, except that it was not I who shrieked, and I remember that the Doyles themselves never uttered a single sound, not one cry, but fell silently to the ground like beeves being butchered in a stockyard. Sinew, muscle, bone, and blood flew before our eyes; the bodies of our enemies were slashed, cracked, and broken. Human beings were sliced open by our swords, and there the darkness entered in.

And Father? Where was Father? All the while, he stood away from us, and he alone did not use his sword. He watched. And when we were done with our murderous work, when the three Doyles were stilled at last and lying at our feet in bloody chunks and pieces, making huge puddles of blood on the ground, Father stepped forward and drew out his pistol. He leaned down and placed the barrel against the cloven head of Old Doyle and fired a bullet straight into the man’s brain, as if into a rotted stump.

“The others will hear that,” I said to him. Oliver was weeping, and Henry, who suddenly, in the midst of the killing, had commenced to vomit, was now hiccoughing violently. The two of them staggered in small circles in the darkness, pounding their feet against the hard ground in a slow, furious dance, whilst Salmon and Fred stared down at the bodies of the slain men in silence, as if they had come upon them unexpectedly and did not know how they had died.

“Let them hear it,” Father said. “It will make no difference. Come, boys,” he said, and led us away from the place where we had slain the Doyles, down the trail towards the Wilkinson cabin, which was located on the claim adjacent to Doyle’s, in a grove of old oak and cottonwood trees closer to the creek.

Here the Old Man for the first time took charge completely. He banged on the door, and before anyone inside had a chance to answer, he demanded to know the way to Dutch Henry’s cabin, which was widely known as a meeting place for pro-slavery settlers. Someone, presumably Mr. Wilkinson, began to answer, but Father interrupted and told him to come out and show us the way.

When there was no reply, Father waited a moment and then said, “Are you of the Law and Order Party?” meaning, was he pro-slavery.

Wilkinson answered forthrightly, “I am, sir!”

“Then you are our prisoner! I order you to open your door to us at once, or we shall burn the house down around you!”

“Wait! Wait a minute. Let me get a light,” Wilkinson said.

Father replied that he would give him thirty seconds and commenced counting, but before he had reached twenty, the door was opened, and we all marched inside the cabin. Here, again, there was a terrified wife and four children, all of the children small, however, little more than babies. Wilkinson was in his mid-thirties, a tall, gaunt Southerner with a great jaw, standing in his underwear and stockinged feet. His wife, also tall and thin, in a flannel nightgown and cap, stood by the fireplace, with the children huddled close around her.

“Who are you!” the woman screamed at Father. “Are you the devil? You look like the devil!”

“My wife is sick” Mr. Wilkinson said. “Let me stay here with her till morning. Post a man here, and you can come for me then, when we’ll have someone to tend the babies for her. We got us a woman coming then.”

Father ignored his drawling pleas. He set Oliver and Fred to search the house for weapons, and they quickly turned up a rabbit gun and a powder flask. “Bring them with us,” the Old Man said. Salmon and Henry he told to pick up the pair of saddles that were lying on the floor next to the door and carry them up to the road. We were short two saddles, and I had spotted them myself when we entered the cabin. To Mr. Wilkinson, Father simply said, “Come along now” and he pointed the tip of his sword at the man, whose face went rigid at the sight of it. He made no answer and walked stiff-legged from the cabin, and Father followed.

The wife called after him, “Dad, you’ll want your boots!”

“He won’t be needing them,” I said.

“What are you going to do to my husband?” Her deep-set eyes, her small, round mouth, her nose, her whole face, were all circles inside circles, a great, concentric, plaintive whorl that threatened to draw me out of myself and towards her, and I stepped backwards as if afraid of her.

“Nothing,” I said. “We ain’t gonna do nothing to him. Just make him our prisoner.”

“Why? What’s he done?”

“For exchange. We’ll exchange him with the Missourians for one of ours,” I said, and stumbled backwards from the cabin and turned and ran to catch up with the others, who had disappeared into the darkness ahead.

By the time I reached the place where the path joined the main trail, they had already killed Mr. Wilkinson, and he lay on the rough ground in a splash of moonlight with his throat slashed, a huge, toothless yawn from one side of his massive jaw to the other, and he had a great, raw wound on his skull, as if he had been scalped by Indians, and one arm had been nearly severed from the trunk.

“All right, now,” Father said. “Let’s get on to the Sherman cabin.” He told us to hide the saddles and the rabbit gun in the brush so we could pick them up later.

But then Oliver began to cry. “I don’t want to do any more of this!” he wailed. “I can’t!.”

As if reminding the Old Man of something he had forgotten, Fred leaned in close to Father and said, “He’s not a grown man yet, you know.”

I said, “Maybe Oliver should go back for the wagon and come down along the trail, pick up these here saddles and so on, and meet up later with us below.”

“Yes, fine. Do that, Oliver. The rest of you follow me,” Father said, and we went from there down to our final stop, the cabin owned by Dutch Sherman, the Missourian who, of all the pro-slavers settled along the Pottawatomie, was the most outspoken and threatening. It was he whom we had most particularly gone looking for that night, and as it turned out, he was the easiest to kill. Not because we hated him more than the others, but because he physically opposed us, fought us furiously until he was finally dead.

Evidently, he had heard the gunshot from up above, where Father had fired his revolver into Mr. Doyle’s head, and had come out to investigate, for we met him up on the road a short ways from his cabin. Father, Fred, and I were in front, with Henry and Salmon trailing behind, and we came upon him suddenly before he knew we were there. He was standing by the side of the road, urinating, and had not heard us approach. He was a muscular keg of a man, red-faced, with a bull neck and thick arms, a mustachioed Dutchman of about forty, famous for his temper. We threw down on him with our swords and Father’s revolver, and Father said that we were capturing him for the Northern Army. “You are our prisoner, sir.”

He buttoned himself up slowly, methodically, and glared at us, all the while muttering in his hard accent, “So it’s you damned Bible-thumping Browns, is it? You are worse than the niggers. You are a bunch of god-damn Yankee trash come down here for stealing our niggers and our horses and then to go off feeling all good for it. You are a pack of god-damn hypocrites, coming around here in the dead of night like this for robbing a man and to terrorize him. Tell me what in the hell do you think you are doing!”

When Father answered, “The only thing we’re robbing you of tonight is your life,” Mr. Sherman understood the dire situation he was in, and he went wild. He exploded in fury, grabbing the barrel of Father’s revolver with one hand and punching him repeatedly in the face with the other. He was very strong, and when Father could not get the weapon loose of his grip or protect himself from his pummeling fist, I was obliged to bring my sword into play and, with a single stroke, severed the man’s hand at the wrist. Both hand and revolver fell to the ground. He howled in pain and rage and charged at me with his head lowered and butted me in the face, bloodying my nose and knocking me backwards onto the ground. With his remaining hand, he grabbed my dropped sword and swung it like a scimitar in a wide circle, clearing a space to stand in and hold us at bay. His severed hand lay on the ground, and his chopped wrist sprayed blood, draining him white, yet still he staggered in a circle, flailing the sword at us, causing us to leap back from him and look for an opening to take him down without being injured by him. I had scrambled back to my feet, my face covered with blood, and when I saw Father’s revolver lying on the ground next to Mr. Sherman’s hand, I darted over to it, grabbed the weapon, and, from a crouching position, looked up into the maddened face of Dutch Sherman looming over me. His sword, my dropped sword, was about to come down on my head. At the same instant as I shot the man in the chest, Henry caught him from behind across the mid-section with his sword, and Fred sank his sword into the man’s shoulder. He was dead before he hit the ground.

No one said a word for a long time after that. Void of feeling and thought, we stumbled down to the creek and washed our swords and our hands and faces in the cold water and waited there, seated on the rocks, for Oliver to arrive with the wagon. Each of us had withdrawn to a chamber deep inside his head and had locked himself in there alone. When, after about an hour, Oliver still had not come, Father abruptly got up and walked back along the road a ways to Dutch Sherman’s cabin and soon returned, leading a pair of Mr. Sherman’s horses, bridled and saddled. So we would be called horse-thieves, as well as murderers, assassins, cold-blooded executioners. He gave the reins to Salmon and Henry and in a somber, low voice instructed them to ride back along the ridge and see if anything had befallen Oliver.

But just then we heard the familiar sound of the wagon creaking down the road towards the creek, and a moment later it appeared, with Oliver looking terrified and aghast. He had passed all the sites of our killings, had observed the mangled corpses on the ground from his seat up on the wagon, and the bloody spectacle of it had changed him.

Father said to Oliver, “Are you all right, son?”

“I feel dead,” he said in a flat, cold voice.

“I feel like I’m dead.” “Then you are all right. You can’t feel otherwise, son, after a thing like this. There will be no more of it, I promise thee,” he said, and climbed up onto the wagon and took the reins. Fred and I climbed up behind Salmon and Henry on the stolen horses, and the six of us quickly rode out of that ghastly place, heading southeast from the Pottawatomie creek-bottom to where we had left our horses tied, and thence on to our camp on the Marais des Cygnes.

Before us, the darkness had faded from the night sky, and we traveled over the tall-grass plain beneath a pale blue canopy. The moon had set, and the last stars, like silver nails, had pinned the canopy overhead. Behind us in the east, the rising sun would soon crack the black, flat line of the horizon. There long, ragged strips of silver-blue clouds lay banked in tiers, tinged with red, as if the heavens were bleeding.

Let them bleed, I thought. Let the heavens rain down on us in gob— bets and pour rivers of blood over the earth. Let the sky bleed all its color out, and let the earth be covered over with gore — I no longer care.

Let the soil here below stink and turn to a scarlet muck, and let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils fill with it and we drown in it with our hands on each other’s throats — I no longer resist this war. I relish it.

Chapter 19

Dear Miss Mayo, I have again, as it were, mislaid you: days, weeks, possibly whole months, have passed without my clocking them, whilst I’ve scribbled away at this, my long-withheld confession, page after page. And when I have finished covering yet another page or chapter of it, I reach for a fresh sheet of paper or an unused tablet, and finding none at hand, I write on the backs of old, filled sheets (which once again I realize that I have somehow neglected to send to you), and I go on setting down my tale in the margins and even between the lines of passages that, for all I know, I must have written to you sometime last spring or winter — passages, pages, entire tablets that, in my urgency to continue writing, I have elbowed to the edge of my little table and have let get lost amongst the pages and tablets previously heaped there and that now slowly tumble to the floor. They clutter there at my feet and pile like autumn leaves and scatter and drift across this dim room in the cold winds sifting through the cracks in the walls of my cabin and blowing beneath its flimsy door.

I have gotten lost inside my confession, as if it were my very self — my only remaining self. I am alive, oh, yes, but my life is long over, and thus I am no more now than these words, sentences, episodes, and chapters of my past. Yet from time to time, at moments such as this, I do rise, like an old, befuddled bear who wakes reluctantly from hibernation and breaks off his unbroken, winter-long dream, and I stumble blinking from the cave of my narration into blinding sunlight, where suddenly, forcibly, I recall the now long-past occasion and need that brought me in the first place a willingness to speak of these things. Which is to say, I remember thee, Miss Mayo, way out East in New York City, poring with steady perseverance over the hundreds of accounts of Father’s life and the numerous interrogatories that you have no doubt taken from the still-living men and women who knew us back before the War and whose tattered memories, though rent and shot through with age, provide them, and now you and Professor Villard, with varying versions of the same events that I dreamed clearly in my cave, as clearly as if they actually occurred there, and that I have been setting down for, lo, these many, unnumbered months.

But I do remember thee, Miss Mayo, and my promise to compose for you my own account and place it safely into your hands, so that you in turn can aid and advise the distinguished Professor Villard in his composition of what you and he surely hope will become the final biography of John Brown. And if I have been too distracted and confused and enfeebled, if I have been too disembodied by the act of telling this tale, to sort and order these pages and arrange to have them placed into your hands somehow, if, in other words, I have been too much a garrulous ghost and too little a proper respondent, then I apologize, Miss Mayo, and ask your forgiveness and understanding, for there is no other way for me to have told what I have already told and to say what I have yet to say. For though a man trapped in purgatory, if he would escape it, may seem betimes to speak to the living, he speaks, in fact, only to the dead, to those who in hurt confusion surround him there, awaiting his confession to set them free.

These things which I alone know — of the death of Lyman Epps and of the brutal massacre down by the Pottawatomie and the turbulent, bloody events that followed, of the climactic raid on Harpers Ferry and the martyrdom of my father and the cold execution of my brothers and our comrades — these things, when I have finished telling them, will not alter history. They will not revise the received truth. That truth is shaped strictly by the needs of those who wish to receive it. No, when I have said them, the things that I alone know will release from purgatory the souls of all those men whom I so dearly loved and who went to their deaths believing that they held their fates in their own hands and that they had chosen in the fight against slavery to slay other men and to die for it.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. But I am no longer silent. I am saying that those men did not so choose. I chose for them. Their fates were in my hands alone.

There is much, of course, that I am leaving out of my account, much that need not be told here by me. Most of what happened back then occurred in full public view, anyhow, and is known to the world; it needs no corrective from me: I’m not writing a history of those years or a biography of my father. I leave those high tasks to you and the professor. I have neither the mind nor the training for them, nor the inclination. As for the wider events across the nation and in Washington during those years, when the slaveholding South like a gigantic serpent slowly wrapped the rest of the Republic in its suffocating coils: I leave to others the obligation to set straight that record; and for the most part they have already done so, the journalists, the historians and biographers, the memoirists, and so on. The fact that nearly all of us then engaged in the war against slavery believed in the late ’50s that the war was all but lost, that much today, if little noted by the world, is nonetheless collected and recorded there. I needn’t recount these highly visible public events, although I do wish you to know how, over time, they made us believe that our entire government and even our nation’s destiny itself had been stolen from us, as if we had been invaded and all but conquered by a foreign, tyrannical power.

We were enraged by this, to be sure, and howled at it, but when the slavery-loving, Negro-hating mobs gathered legitimacy in Washington and in the Southern press, when the Border Ruffians were portrayed as legitimate settlers and the overseers of human chattel as statesmen, when our leaders, like Senators Douglas and Webster, sold us out for a handful of silver coins and our heroes, like Senator Sumner, were clubbed down in the Capitol building itself, our rage turned suddenly to cold desperation. We who early on had been merely anti-slavery activists and who, slowly over the years in defense of our own rights of protest, had evolved, almost unbeknownst to ourselves, into guerilla fighters and militiamen — we now became terrorists. And having become terrorists, we found ourselves almost overnight made emblematic to those remaining white activists who mostly sat in their parlors or at their desks grieving over the loss of their nation. We inspired them, and they encouraged us. And so we waged their war for them. Unwilling to do more to regain their nation than write a poem or a cheque to help arm, clothe, and feed us, they were often objects of scorn and derision to us, although we were, of course, grateful for their poems and monies and used both to solicit still more monies and, with our purses thus fattened, purchased more Sharps rifles, more horses and supplies, more of the terrorizing broadswords and pikes.

Ah, but you know all this. You are an educated woman, who has sat for years at the foot of a wise and learned historian, a man whom I know also by reputation as the illustrious grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. The grandsire, of course, I was myself, through Father, personally acquainted with, and his nobility of purpose and great personal courage I hope I have not impugned in these pages. It’s just that, in the heat of battle and in the face of imminent death, I habitually bore towards Mr. Garrison and most of the other white abolitionists my father’s long-held resentment and impatience. And even today, these many years after, it still rankles that, whilst I and my family and our comrades were laying about in Kansas with our broadswords, bloodying ourselves and our enemies and putting at ultimate risk our lives and our immortal souls, Mr. Garrison, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Whittier, and all those other good men and women back in Boston and Concord and New York were adjusting their sleeves so as not to spot their starched cuffs.

I hear you protest, and I apologize; I concede: it was not the fault of those good men that we risked our lives and butchered the men and boys down on the Pottawatomie and in the ensuing several years raised homicidal havoc across the Kansas plain and even into Missouri itself, or that later we marched into martyrdom in Virginia; these things we did, not because others did not, but because we ourselves almost alone could not bear to see the war against slavery come to an end there. Out there on the old California trail, we understood what no one else in the country could have known, not in Boston or New York or Washington or even in the capitals of the South. We were on the battlefront, and that night in May of ’56, with the news of the abject sack and surrender of the town of Lawrence to the Border Ruffians still drumming in our ears and barely hours later the sudden arrival of word of the near assassination of Senator Sumner in Washington, we believed that the war was all but over and done with. On that night, we saw Satan settle comfortably into his seat and commence to gather his slaveholding minions in to serve and honor him.

Though it’s not my intention here to explain or excuse our acts, mine or Father’s or those of any who followed us, I do want you to understand that we were desperate men. And of all of us, I suppose I was the most desperate. We were made so, me especially, by three inescapable realities: our position on the ground out there in Kansas; the clarity of Father’s understanding of the true nature and scale of the war against slavery; and our principles. We could not be where we were, know what we knew, uphold what we honored — and do other than we did. And joining us were other men for whom these same three circumstances applied as well: not many, a dozen, twenty, usually one at a time and on occasion arriving in groups of three or four, but enough of them quickly came forward and joined our band, especially after Pottawatomie, that we were before long no longer a small, guerilla force made up only of Old Brown and his sons but an actual, insurrectionary army that was well-armed and was growing rapidly in size and fearsomeness.

Sometimes as many as fifty men, sometimes as few as ten, we stayed on horseback day and night almost continuously and, all that summer and into the next year, conducted swift, daring, terroristic raids against the Border Ruffians and their supporters amongst the settlers, moving our encampment every few days from one tree-shrouded river-bottom to another. We burnt down the cabins and barns of the enemy and liberated their property, their horses and cattle and supplies and weapons, and although some men, even amongst our allies, called it looting or simple horse-stealing, for us it was merely a necessary and legal continuation of our war policy, for it weakened our enemy on the field and frightened him everywhere, whilst us it strengthened and our allies it encouraged.

During this period, dozens of journalists came out from the East by way of St. Louis, Leavenworth, and Lawrence, or down from Iowa to Topeka, and entered thence into the war region of southeastern Kansas. The more intrepid among them, like Mr. Redpath and Mr. Hinton, would eventually make their way to the marshes and ravines and the cottonwood groves along the Marais des Cygnes and the Pottawatomie or out onto the high, grassy plains of the old Ottawa Reserve, where they would find and follow our band for a few days or a week until, exhausted by the pace of our steady marches and raiding and by Father’s night-long monologues and preachments, they would head back to Lawrence or Topeka and dispatch back to the East vivid accounts of Old Brown’s indefatigable and brilliant campaign against the pro-slavery forces. Soon they had made him a heroic figure out of some old romance, like a legendary Scottish Highlands chieftain leading his doughty clansmen against the British invader, and by summer’s end his name was on the lips of nearly every American, North and South. To all, he had become a figure perfectly expressive of the antislavery principle.

And naturally, as his fame spread across the nation, brave, reckless, principled young men itching for battle began to join our ranks. You know the names and reputations of many of the best of them, I’m sure, for they were later with us at Harpers Ferry and entered history there: the fierce, intelligent, and well-spoken John Kagi; and the kindly, black-eyed giant, Aaron Stevens; and poor John Cook, who was a genial man but dangerously indiscreet; and Charlie Tidd from Maine, a man with a terrible temper but withal an almost feminine sweetness; and Jeremiah Anderson, the guilty grandson of Virginia slaveholders; and young Will Leeman, barely seventeen when he first showed up at our camp: these men and numerous others whose names and fates you know were with us, but also over time a hundred more, who were just as steadfast and brave and who remain nameless, they were with us, too, and sometimes fell in battle and ended in unmarked graves or beneath humble, forgotten, untended wooden plaques in an overgrown Kansas field or back yard — farmers, carpenters, and clerks, they all, in their churches and meeting houses in Ohio and New York and New England, heard about Old Brown and his men or they read about us in their newspapers, and they dropped their hoes and spades or put aside their pens and eye-shades and, like the Minutemen of their grandfathers’ generation, picked up their rifles and made their way west and south to Kansas, where they got passed along, one to the other, by our growing number of supporters and allies, until they finally one morning walked through the trees into our camp and presented themselves to the lean, leathery old man seated by the fire going over his maps, the legendary John Brown himself.

There were, of course, some young men of a quarrelsome and wasting nature who joined us and stayed awhile as regulars in our Army of the North, as Father sometimes called his force, men who were taints and whose reckless, violent behavior caused many amongst the antislavery residents of Lawrence and Topeka and even back East privately to condemn our work, despite the continuous hosannas in the press. These were fellows who could not keep the pledge they made against the use of alcohol and tobacco or would not subject their wills to Father’s and would have been more at home in the bands of marauding Border Ruffians or brawling with each other in the saloons and muddy alleyways of the shabby border towns along the Missouri River. They did not last long with us. If Father or I found one of them drunk or if, on his or my command, a man did not at once rise from his blankets and mount up with the others at midnight and ride out in the cold rain to make a dawn raid on a pro-slaver’s farmstead twenty miles away on Ottawa Creek, Father was fiercely adamant and had me drive the man from camp like a dog.

I spoke for Father in all matters, except when he chose to speak for himself, which occasions were rare and made all the more impressive by their rarity. Even my brothers Salmon and Fred and Oliver and my brother-in-law Henry Thompson addressed Father through me, and it was through me that he spoke back to them and to the other men. To the journalists, of course, he spoke for himself, for no one, certainly not I, was as articulate and clear and poetical as he when it came to defining and justifying his grand strategy. With his actions in Kansas, Father wished to inspire a similar set of actions by other men all along the thousand-mile border between the North and the South, from Maryland to Missouri: by his and our example, he wished to make warriors of abolitionists and freedmen, and insurrectionists of slaves.

Your researches must have made known to you by now that after the night of the Pottawatomie Massacre, as it quickly came to be called, my elder brothers, John and Jason, were no longer with us. They were not purged from our band by Father, however; they took themselves from it. And it was just as well for them and for us, for they were not cold enough.

When, on that morning in May, we had finally washed all the blood from our hands and faces and had cleaned our broadswords in the waters of the Pottawatomie, we then came somberly, silently away from Dutch Sherman’s place, ascending from the dark, gloomy river-bottom in the wagon and on horseback along the winding, northerly trail to the grassy plateau above. Swaths of ground-fog hovered over the trees in the distance, where the Marais des Cygnes meandered eastward towards the town of Osawatomie, and the tall grasses glistened in the morning sunlight. We came over into the open, newly green meadows and leafy copses outside the settlement and after a while arrived at the crossroads where John and Jason and the Osawatomie Rifles still lay encamped, waiting for instructions from their superiors in Lawrence.

The men of John’s outfit were mostly young fellows, husbands and sons, Osawatomie homesteaders mustered abruptly into a militia company to defend and protect their homes against the Missouri marauders. Thus they could not have joined us in our work anyhow and still retained their commission under Colonel Lane and Mr. Robinson. It was not that Father had mistrusted them, especially John and Jason; it was merely that he respected their charge and mission and knew its difference from ours.

Our arrival at their encampment that morning, however, was met with grim silence by them, which puzzled us. They were mostly standing together near their low, smoky breakfast fire, and as we drew near, they watched us and said nothing and did not even raise a hand in greeting. It was as if we were a painting of six travelers, three on horseback and three in a wagon, being hung on a wall in a museum, and they were a group of silent, thoughtful observers standing ready to examine it. I remember, as we neared the fire and dismounted, that it was Jason who first separated himself from the men and came forward, while John looked on woefully, and the others merely gazed coolly in our direction as if from a great distance.

Jason glanced over the horses and saddles we had taken from Mr. Wilkinson, then abruptly took Father’s hand in his and led him a short ways off. I followed, while the other boys stayed in an isolated knot by the wagon.

Jason said to Father, “Did you have anything to do with that killing over to Dutch Henry’s Crossing?”

Father looked surprised by the question. “What’ve you heard?”

“A few hours ago, just after sunup, one of the boys from over there rode through, all distraught and weeping in a panic,” he said. “We got out of him that his father and two brothers and some other men had been savagely murdered. He said they’d all been chopped down by swords and cut horribly. It was an uncalled-for, wicked act!” he pronounced. Then he looked down at the broadsword I wore on my belt and was briefly silent. “The lad was pretty confused,” he went on, turning back to Father. “But he claimed it was the Browns that did it. He was clear on that. Then he rode on to Osawatomie. To raise the alarm.”

We were all three silent then. At last, Jason said, “Did you do it, Father?”

“I slew no one,” Father declared. “But I do approve of it.”

“I’ll go the route for you, Father, if you’re innocent. But if you did this, you know I can’t defend you. It’s a despicable act. I must know where you and the boys have been all night.”

Father said simply, “No, Jason, you don’t.”

Jason looked at me then. “Do you know who did this?”

I hardened my face and showed him its side. “Yes, I do. But I shan’t tell you.”

His voice lowered almost to a whisper, Jason said, “This is mad.” Then, harshly, he shouted towards the wagon, “Fred, come over here!”

Fred obeyed and came forward and stood beside me with his head hung low, and at once he said to Jason, “I didn’t do it, but I can’t tell you who did. When I came to see what manner of work it was, I couldn’t do it, Jason!” Tears were streaming down his face.

“You realize that now we’re all going to suffer!” Jason said to Father. “Do you realize that?”

“No, you’re wrong” said Father. “Those men were the enemies of the Lord, and they deserved to die, no matter who did it. For without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. I will tell you this much, son: I myself killed no one. But if the slavers think I killed their kith and kin, that’s fine by me. All the better. Now they will know our extremity. Now they will know what they’re up against,” he said.

But Jason was no longer listening. He had stepped unsteadily away a few paces, and he turned and, nearly staggering, walked off from us and the men of the militia.

The sight of him, shocked and clearly appalled, pointedly separating himself from Father and me and Fred and making his way along a zig-zag path over the rise and down the ravine towards the river, told the others that the boy’s dawn account had been true, and it seemed to release the men. At once, they busied themselves with breaking camp and bridling and saddling their horses. A few seconds later, John was left standing alone by the fire — a captain overthrown and abandoned.

He looked first at us and then at his men, then back at us again, as if torn and dismayed by the choice that had been forced upon him. Finally, he called out to his men, who were mostly already on horseback by now and were clearly prepared to depart: “Wait up! Hold up a minute! This business isn’t settled yet. You fellows are still under my command.”

Henry Williams, a storekeeper in Osawatomie, a big-shouldered man with a dark, rubbishy beard, said, “No, we’re electing us a new captain, John. We ain’t riding under no Brown.” The others nodded and murmured agreement, and Mr. Williams turned in his saddle and said to them, “Who d’ you boys want for a captain? Any nominations?”

One of them said, “You’d do fine, Henry.”

Another man, a tall, raw-boned man in a canvas duster, said, “My vote’s for Williams. He’s got sense. And he’s got family and his store to protect. He ain’t going to do anything so stupid as killing off folks at random,” and he glared first at Father and me and then directly at John.

John said, “I’ve got family.”

“Yes;” the man said, “so you do,” and he turned his horse and rode out from the camp, onto the crossing.

Mr. Williams said, “Listen, Browns, if I was one of you, Id find me a hole and stay in it till winter. Then maybe I’d light on out of Kansas and go back to the states. All across the territory now there’s going to be hell to pay. You damned Browns,” he declared, “you’re plain crazy. Even you, John. Jason, too. I like you and him well enough, but your name is Brown, and we can’t be under you no more. Not now,” he said, and clicked to his horse and went out from the camp to the crossing. There he took his place at the head of the gathering column of men, and when they were arranged in a military line, he led the troop down the road towards Osawatomie.

Soon they were gone from sight, and we could no longer hear their hoofbeats. A crow circled overhead and cawed. Seconds later, another crow appeared beside it, and the two carved wide loops against the cloudless sky. Shortly, Jason returned from the river-bottom, looking aghast and pale, as if he had been gazing at the corpses of the five men we had slain barely three hours and five miles away from here. Fred moved back towards the wagon. John had not spoken once yet to Father or stepped from his spot by the dying fire.

Father put a hand on my arm and said, “What d’ you thinks best now, son?”

“Attack.”

“You think so, eh?”

“Worst thing we could do is what Mister Williams said, hide in a hole. We’re instruments of the Lord, are we not? So let the Lord lead us. To teach when it is unclean and when it is clean: this is the law,’“ I quoted to him.

He made a small smile. “And if the plague be in the walls of the house!” he came back, “‘then the priest shall command that they take away the stones in which the plague is, and they shall cast them into an unclean place without the city.’“

“Should we be stones cast out? When we can be the priest’s men, instead?”

Father nodded, and then he called to Salmon, Oliver, Fred, and Henry, who leaned by the wagon. “Mount up, boys. We’re riding on over by Middle Creek a ways.”

“What for?” Salmon asked.

“To find us a camp where we can rest in peace a day.”

“What then?” Henry wanted to know.

“Then we’ll see some action. From here on out, we’re going to be on the attack, boys.”

Jason sat down heavily on a nearby log and, placing his forehead against his knees, wrapped his head with his arms, as if hiding his father and brothers from his sight and hearing. John remained standing by the dwindled fire, all disconsolate and downcast.

I said to him, “You coming?”

He shook his head no.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Jason?”

He didn’t answer.

“You boys maybe ought to think about moving your wives and Tonny permanently into town or down to Uncle’s place!’ I told them. “It’s going to start getting plenty hot around here now,” I said, and climbed up on the wagon seat next to Oliver. Father had mounted Reliance and was out in front of the wagon. “Okay, Father,”I said to him. “Let’s move.”

He nodded, and we rode off across a broad, high meadow north— west of the crossroad, away from our old settlement at Browns Station, away from the town of Osawatomie, away from poor John and Jason. I remember I turned in the wagon and peered back at them, and my elder brothers were standing with their arms around each other, as if both men were weeping and trying to console one another.

I did not think then that what later happened to John and Jason would occur, but when it did, I was not surprised. By then, Father, Old Brown, had become the feared and admired Captain John Brown of Kansas, had become Osawatomie Brown, the victor of the Battle of Black Jack, the one nationally known hero of the Kansas War, and he was back in Boston, working his way across the entire Northeast, raising funds and making speeches to thunderous applause. And through it all, from that May day forward, the cold, silent man at his side, the large, red-bearded fellow with the gray eyes who spoke to no one but to Captain Brown himself, was me. My two elder brothers had been all but removed from Father’s life, and I had replaced them there.

Chapter 20

I’m trying to recall it: how I came to be knocking at the rough plank door of Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin in the nighttime; and when exactly it occurred, that same night or the next. Things happened so quickly back then that, although I can with ease summon them to my mind in sharp, vivid detail, sometimes their sequence blurs. But I do know that it was right after we had made our first secret campsite over on Middle Creek in amongst a clutch of black oak trees, and had slept awhile and rested our animals and prepared our weapons for battle, that I went to my uncle’s cabin. I have no diary at hand, for none of us kept one, and of course I have no calendar from those days. But I do remember that, towards the end of our first night in camp, while the others were sleeping, on Father’s orders I rode one of Dutch Sherman’s liberated horses out to the Osawatomie Road, intending to slip into town under cover of darkness to be sure that Jason’s wife, Ellen, and John’s Wealthy and little Tonny were safely ensconced with friends there.

Yes, it was not until the second night that I made it over to the Adair cabin. For, when we had first got to Middle Creek, the boys, Oliver, Salmon, Fred, and Henry Thompson, were exhausted — oddly so, it seemed to me, despite the fact that we had all been awake for nearly forty hours straight, for Father and I were not in the slightest fatigued. Quite the opposite: he and I were exhilarated and filled with new and growing plans and stratagems for raiding and terrorizing the Border Ruffians and pro-slave settlers. The boys, though, were all but useless, at least for a while, until they could begin to put the killings behind them. Fred wept, and he declared again and again that he could not stand to do any more work such as that, and Oliver wrapped himself in his blanket on the ground and would not speak to any one of us, while Salmon and Henry huddled together and read in their Bibles.

Father sat on the ground beside Fred and said to him, “God will forgive thee, son. I have prayed and listened with all my mind and heart to the Lord, and I know that we have done His will in this business. You can let your conscience rest, son” he said, and stroked poor Fred and comforted him tenderly, while I went to the other boys and made my rough attempt to do the same, although they were not inclined to be comforted by me or Father and in a listless way said for us to just leave them be, they were tired and wished only to sleep.

So while the others slept or sulked or read, Father and I busied ourselves throughout the afternoon into the evening, constructing a crude lean-to of brush and a corral for the horses; and after dark, when we dared finally to set a small fire, we made a little wicker weir and caught and cooked us some small fish from the creek and ate and talked in low voices until late. Father was worried, I remember, about the women and Tonny, his only grandson, and when I volunteered to go into town to be sure they were safe, he at first said no, it was too dangerous, but I persisted, and finally he relented and gave the order. He said he would write some letters and send them with me and that I should try to get them to Uncle Sam Adair, his brother-in-law, for posting. “I want to have my own say-so on this business,” he said. “To get the truth out, before folks hear erroneous reports of it first. I don’t want the family at home fearing for our lives. Or for our souls, either;’ he added.

I agreed and said that I would also try to speak with John and Jason, to see if they would now change their minds and come in with us, for we would be much stronger with them than we were without. “True. True enough,” Father said. “But remember, son, it’s we who have made the blood sacrifice. They haven’t. This war’s no longer the same for us as it is for them.”

I asked if he thought they might betray us, for Jason was at bottom pacifistic and John a political man, but he assured me they would not: he had asked the Lord how he should treat with them, and the Lord had told him to trust all his sons equally. “The Lord saith, ‘Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.’” He often spoke of the Lord in this familiar way, for it was around this time that Father had begun his practice, later much commented upon, of withdrawing from camp to commune alone with God, more or less in the manner of Jesus, for long hours at a time, returning to us clear-eyed and energetic, full of intention and understanding. I can’t say what that was like for him, whether he was during those hours an actual mystic or was merely deep in solitary prayer, but the practice brought him a piercing clarity and a regularly freshened sense of purpose, which suited my private desires ideally, so I did not question it.

“You may ask them if they wish to join us here under my command,” he told me. “But don’t press them on it, Owen. I don’t want to force them into choosing against us. A time will come,” he said, “when events and the cruelties of men will bring them over on their own, and when that happens, John and Jason will prove our strongest allies.”

He drew out his writing kit and for an hour or so was absorbed in writing several letters, one to Mary and the children in North Elba, I later saw, and others to Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, and hurried me out of camp then, instructing me to return quickly, for we would now be obliged to return to action at once, so that the other boys could get the Pottawatomie killings behind them, he explained.

“They’ll need to stare some of these slavers in the face again and relearn what sort of beast we’re dealing with here.”

It turned out that, for the moment, at least, all was calm in Osawatomie: Ellen and Wealthy and Tonny had on their own fled our decrepit tents and half-built cabins at Browns Station for the town, evidently on the advice of friends who had heard about the Pottawatomie killings. I spoke briefly there with Wealthy at the door of the little house owned by the Days, distant relatives of hers from Ohio. It was close to dawn, still dark, and I had come in stealthily on foot, with my mount left hidden in a grove of trees by the west ford of the river, and had knocked quietly at the door, waking the dog, which someone inside quickly shushed.

Then I heard Wealthy’s voice on the other side of the door: “No one’s here but women and children,” she announced.

“It’s me, Owen. Are you all right?”

“I can’t let you in. The Days are very afraid.”

“I understand. Father just wants to know that you’re safe.” Opening the door a crack, she showed me in a slat of candlelight her worried, pale face and said, “We’re safe, so long as we keep from you boys and Father Brown.”

I asked her then if John and Jason were out with Uncle at his cabin, but she said that she could not tell me. I knew then that they were with Uncle. They were safe, she said, but in hiding. The Ruffians burned Browns Station to the ground this very night, she said, and stole all they could carry. Among the Free-State people, John’s and Jason’s innocence was well-known, she told me, but no one was eager to risk protecting them. “Please stay away from them, Owen, until this thing calms down,” she pleaded.

I said that I understood her fears and that my report back to Father would comfort him, and, bidding her good night, slipped out of town and reached my horse without being seen. All that day, I hid in the tall grasses atop a rise out by the road to Lawrence, with my horse grazing well out of sight in a nearby ravine, and watched riders in the distance heading back and forth between Osawatomie and Lawrence — hectic armed men of both sides gathering in bands to search for us: one side, the Free-Staters, to capture us and no doubt turn us over at once to the federal authorities as a peace gesture; the others, pro-slave marauders, to shoot us on the spot. And I knew that there would soon be a third side: federal troops from Forts Leavenworth and Scott, sent on orders from the President himself to capture us and march us up to Lecompton for trial or else to turn a blind eye, as they had done so many times before, and hand us over to the Ruffians and let them avenge themselves on us.

When darkness had fallen, I rode down to the Lawrence Road and turned east towards town and sometime after midnight pulled up before the Adair cabin. I was frightened, certainly, but I was unattached and free, and all manner of men were trying to kill me: I was like a hawk or a lone wolf or a cougar. No one had a claim on me but Father, and though he did not know it, his claim had been given him by me, so that, in a crucial sense, the claim was reversed and was mine, not his at all.

The cabin, a two-room log structure that had been serving as Uncle’s parsonage until he could get a proper house finished in town next to his church, was dark and appeared abandoned, for there was no smoke rising from the chimney. I knocked on the door, but no one answered, so I knocked again, but still no one answered. There were no horses about and no dog. Maybe the Adairs have fled, too, I thought, and knocked again, loudly, and called, “Uncle! It’s Owen here! I’m alone, Uncle!”

“Get away!” my uncle shouted back from inside the cabin, startling me. “Get away as quick as you can!”

“I just want to talk some with John and Jason.”

“No! You endanger our lives! They won’t speak with you. You and your father have made them into madmen.”

I told him then to unbar the door and let me see for myself how mad they were, but he said he would not and told me again to leave at once. “You are a vile murderer, Owen, a marked man!” he said.

“Good,” said I. “Because I intend to be a marked man!” And stepping away from the door, I mounted my horse and headed off down the road again, west and then south to our camp on Middle Creek, where I knew Father and the others were impatiently awaiting my return. Father, at least, would be impatient, for I was sure that he would not commence raiding without me. The others I could not be so sure of. For we had all been changed.

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.

“I am Captain John Brown,” he announced to them, and needed little more to obtain their swift confession that they were from the camp at Black Jack. But not of the party of Henry Clay Pate, they insisted, which no one believed, so we bound them and turned them over to Captain Shore, who had one of his Prairie City volunteers march the two back to town, there to await negotiations with the Ruffians for an eventual exchange of prisoners — a useful, widespread practice among the warring parties that, for a while, until the Ruffians started executing their prisoners, helped keep the bloodshed down on both sides.

Immediately, most of the congregation called for a raid on Pate’s camp, their ardor being somewhat heated, perhaps, by the reported presence in the camp of the two sons of Mr. Moore, a man whom they now loved, and by Pate’s having aided in the capture of John and Jason, which was widely seen by Free-State people as unwarranted. Father, however, advised the excited crowd to wait till nightfall, so they could arrive in Black Jack at dawn, when least expected. This was wise, because the delay allowed those who had been merely carried along by the enthusiasm of the moment to separate themselves from men who, like the Gileadites, could be relied upon in a fight, which ended up being all of our group and most of Captain Shore’s militia.

Around four o’clock the next morning, we arrived at the copse of black oak trees for which the spring had been named. We were situated on a long slope a half-mile north of the Ruffian encampment and could see in the gray dawn haze their line of covered wagons below, with the tents pitched behind them and, on the wooded slope to the rear, their picketed horses and mules. As there were no fires and no other activity evident in the camp, we assumed they were still sleeping, so we dismounted and, leaving Fred in charge of the horses, made our way stealthily downhill through the brush, where we split into two groups, Father’s nine men and Captain Shore’s fifteen. At this point, about sixty rods from the wagons, we were discovered by a sentinel who had been posted up by the picketed animals, and he fired his musket and shouted the alarm: “We’re under attack!”

Like bees swarming from a hive, the half-dressed Ruffians ran from their tents and commenced firing on us. Instantly, Captain Shore and his men, who were in a somewhat more exposed position than we, laid down a barrage of return fire, while Father led us on the run off to the right a ways, ordering us as he ran not to fire yet. “Hold your fire, boys, and remember, when you do shoot, aim low!” That was always his advice: get to close quarters and aim low. And aim for the body, not the head. “Every one of us would be dead by now” he often said, “if our enemies had aimed low.”

After a few moments, we had made our way to a protected position in a ravine to the right of the wagons. From there, we could get clear, covered shots on the Ruffians, so we laid down our own barrage, which drove them to the backside of their camp into a further ravine, where they kept up a steady fusillade against both Captain Shore’s men in front of them and us on the flank.

As Captain Shore’s men had commenced firing earlier than we and more recklessly, they were soon out of ammunition and could no longer return fire, and because they were the more exposed, they started taking on injuries, and several of his men cried out, “I’m hit! I’m hit! Someone help me, I’m a dead man!” One fellow over there was sobbing like a sorrowful woman. I saw three of Shore’s men — one of them the preacher Moore — break and run back up the long slope towards the grove of black oaks. Then three more fled.

We were trapped, with no alternative to seeing it through to victory or death; and the men knew that now. Father prowled back and forth behind us, scolding us and bucking us up and pointing out targets as they appeared, making of himself a most obvious target in the process, but seeming not to care, as if daring the enemy to shoot him. Several times I shouted, “Father, stay down!” but he only scowled at me, as if I were being cowardly. There was shooting coming from all directions and from both sides: terrified men were firing their weapons randomly at targets made invisible and everywhere by simple human fear: our boys were firing as much at Shore’s men as at Pate’s, and both those bands were shooting in our direction also, and we all may even have fired sometimes at ourselves, so that when Henry Thompson took a bullet in the thigh and rolled away from me, slapping at his wound and hollering, “Damn! Damn! Damn!” as if he’d been stung by a red-hot coal, I didn’t know if he’d been hit by a Ruffian’s bullet or a Free-State militiaman’s. I couldn’t even be positive that I hadn’t accidentally shot him myself. Father rushed to Henry’s side and ripped a strip of cloth from his own shirttail, took out his dirk, and with it and the strip of cloth made a tourniquet for him.

Somewhere in here I remember Captain Shore appearing in our ravine with a small number of his men, those who had not cut and run: he was telling Father that they were out of ammunition and would have to retreat or else go for reinforcements. He had one man dead, five who were wounded, and six who had deserted. The Ruffians had dug in good, he said, and could wait us out, unless we got more men and ammunition quickly. He seemed much discouraged. Father was disgusted and told him to go on back for reinforcements, then, and take the dead man and the wounded with him, including Henry Thompson.

Then, when Shore and his men had left, Father told us to open fire on the Ruffians’ horses and mules, which were picketed in a rope corral a short ways uphill from the tents. “It’ll distract them so Captain Shore can get his men out, and maybe it’ll even draw a few of them out of their hole to where we can pick them off,” he said. He told us this time not to aim low but to shoot at the animals’ heads, because he wanted them to die, not to suffer, and they were easier to hit than men anyhow.

We obeyed and shot into the wild-eyed herd of animals. The horses and mules neighed and brayed loudly when they were hit, and they tripped and trampled upon one another in the dust, as first one poor beast went down and then a second and a third. It was an awful sight, and I had trouble going along with it, but I said nothing and fired away with the others. I shot horses and mules and men that day and had very few thoughts of what I was doing or why, but at one point, in the midst of this carnage, I suddenly saw us all, almost as if I were not a part of it: bands of terrified white American boys and men killing each other and screaming bloody murder into one another’s faces and shooting down poor, dumb animals, slaying one another and our livestock and terrorizing our mothers and wives and children and burning our houses and crops — all to settle the fate of Negro Americans living hundreds and even thousands of miles away from here, a people who were much unlike us and who were utterly unaware of what we were inflicting upon each other here on this hot June morning in amongst the black oak trees of Kansas. It was no longer clear to me: were we doing this for them, the Negroes; or were we simply using them as an excuse to commit vile crimes against one another? Was our true nature that of the man who sacrifices himself and others for his principles; or was it that of the criminal? You could not tell it from our acts.

Firing on the horses and mules evidently surprised and distracted the enemy sufficiently to cover Captain Shore’s retreat from the battle— field, but it drew none of the Ruffians from their cover, and as soon as all the animals were down, they started in again on us. From their ravine behind the tents, they kept us huddled under a blanket of rifle-fire, and as we could get no good angle on them, we were obliged to lie low and prepare for their final charge, which we figured was coming next. Father instructed us to have our broadswords and revolvers at the ready. “Wait till they close on us, boys, and pick your targets carefully. If their leaders go down at the start, the rest might flee, even though they hugely outnumber us.”

But then an astonishing thing happened. I was lying with my back to the ravine, facing uphill towards the grove by the spring, so I saw it all: Fred, alone on horseback, appeared at the edge of the trees and was surveying the scene below with mild surmise, when suddenly he raised his broadsword over his head and came galloping full speed down the long slope straight towards us and the enemy beyond, shouting loudly as he neared us, “We have them surrounded! We have them surrounded!” All firing ceased, as Fred rode across the cleared space that divided us from the Ruffians, still waving his cutlass and bellowing, “We have them surrounded!” Then he disappeared into the bushes off to our left, and we saw him no more.

We were silent for a moment and looked at one another in puzzlement.

“That was Fred,” Salmon said. “Why do you suppose he did that?” Father answered that he didn’t know, but look, and sure enough, there came Captain Pate and one of his lieutenants, walking towards us and waving a white flag. What followed is well known: Pate wished to obtain a truce, he said. He declared that he was a deputy United States marshal sent out by the government to capture “certain persons for whom writs of arrest have been issued—”

Father cut him off and in his coldest voice said, “I’ve been told that before, sir. I know who you are and why you are here. You will surrender unconditionally, Captain Pate, or we will leave every one of you lying dead with your animals over there.”

“Give me fifteen minutes—” Pate said, but Father again interrupted and drew his revolver on him and commanded him to have his men lay down their arms. We put our weapons out where they could be seen and aimed them straight at Pate and his lieutenant.

Father said, “You’re surrounded, you realize.”

“But we’re here under a white flag,” Pate said. “You can’t throw down on us with a white flag showing. That violates the articles of war.”

“Who drew up those articles?” Father asked. “Not I. Not thee, Captain Pate. No, you are my prisoner. And if you don’t tell your men to lay down their arms, I’ll shoot you dead.”

You could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes: Father was ready to kill the man and let himself be shot for it at once, as would surely happen, for he and Pate and Pate’s man stood alone up on the lip of the ravine, fully exposed to the guns of the enemy. Luckily, Pate was no fool: he could read Father’s intent and was himself not eager to die. He agreed to surrender and sent his lieutenant trotting back to his lines to instruct his men to lay down their arms and march out with their hands on their heads. Which, a few moments later, they did, surprising us, when they were all lined up before us, with their numbers, for there were twenty-six of them, uninjured and well-armed. Pate’s men were, of course, even more surprised when they saw how few we were, and they were angry at their captain, who lost much face by the surrender and later complained bitterly of what he called Father’s “deceptive, casual disregard for the rules of war.”

Thus ended the famous Battle of Black Jack, which Father, in a letter to the New York Tribune, rightly named “the first regular battle fought between Free-State and Pro-Slavery forces in Kansas.” We had killed four men and wounded nearly a dozen and captured more prisoners in one sweep than had so far been captured by all the Free — State forces in total. In the North and amongst the Free-Staters, John Brown came away with nearly heroic stature; to the Southerners, he was now the devil incarnate.

Had it not been for Fred’s miraculous intervention, however, his mad, delusional charge onto the battlefield, the Battle of Black Jack would have ended much differently. His son’s apparent madness was Father’s good fortune: for Fred did, in fact, believe that we had the Ruffians surrounded, and he insisted for days afterwards that he had seen Free-State men on all sides firing on the Ruffians from the bushes and slaughtering them without mercy. He had acted, he said, to end the terrible slaughter of the Missourians.

We knew, of course, that he had only seen the horses and mules going down, that it was the slaughter of the animals that had maddened him, and I said as much to Father.

“The boy was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision,” he answered. “That is all that matters.”

I see that, almost inadvertently, I have been writing you much that concerns my brother Fred, and perhaps I should complete his story here. Towards the end of August, I walked out one morning from camp alone very early to observe the sun rise, an event I had not seen in several weeks, for we had been night-raiding for a long while at a hectic pace over in Linn County and during the daylight hours had mostly hidden out in the marshes and deep gullies, sleeping whenever we could, and thus we had had little opportunity or time for admiring God’s orderly governance of the universe, as it were. Recently, however, we had succeeded in driving a herd of nearly one hundred fifty head of liberated Ruffian cattle into Osawatomie for distribution amongst the people there and, feeling protected by their gratitude, had encamped a few miles from town and, for the first night in a fortnight, been given a normal parcel of sleep. Thus we felt able to lighten our vigilance somewhat, causing Father to release me from my usual task of overseeing the watch, and I had been allowed to enjoy a full night wrapped in my blanket by the guttering fire.

When I first rolled out of my blanket that morning, Father was nowhere in sight — commiserating or consulting with his God in the bushes someplace nearby, I supposed. I was surprised, therefore, when, as I emerged from the tree cover and approached the grassy ridge above our campsite, I spotted him profiled against the sky there, gazing eastward towards the horizon, as if he, too, had come out to see the sun rise. It was a cool, dry morning, not quite dawn, with no breeze. The sky was enormous and loomed above us like a tautly drawn celestial tent, and the land swept darkly away beneath it like a vast, chilled desert. Back in camp in the gully, it was still dark as night, although up here the southeastern sky had faded to a soft, crumbly gray, making Father’s figure a sharp, paper-thin silhouette against it. I silently took my place beside him on the ridge, and together we stared out across the rolling prairie in the direction of the settlement of Osawatomie, some five miles distant, down along the Marais des Cygnes.

A moment or two passed, when, out on the horizon, there appeared parallel to it a long string of silver light. Soon it had thickened into a metallic strap and broadened, and after a few moments, the lower edge of the silver strap took on a golden hue, while above the strap the fleecy clouds began to go from gray to yellow to red, as if a fire were being lit below them. It was strikingly beautiful and strange in its clarity and exactness. I said to Father, “It looks like it’s a miniature scene and close to us. Like a painting, almost, instead of huge and far away and real.”

The Old Man merely nodded and said nothing. Perhaps he was used to such visions. I lapsed back into silence and continued watching the eastern horizon slowly shift color and shape. Soon, when I knew that the scarlet disk of the sun was about to break the horizon and shatter the scene with its rays, I saw an extraordinary thing. It’s something that occurs rarely, but nonetheless normally, at sea or on the desert, and also, on the rarest of occasions, happens out on the prairies of the West, where it appears in more nearly perfect detail and on a much grander scale. Commonly called a mirage, it’s disdained for that, despite its beauty and rarity, as if it were merely an illusion. But it is in no way an illusion. It is real and is taking place in present time. What one sees is not a hallucinated or imagined scene: when, as on this morning, the atmospheric and geographic conditions are perfectly aligned, objects and entire scenes and events located far beyond one’s normal range of vision are brought close and are made sharply, silently visible; or else the beholder himself is instantly transported from his former spot across the many miles of prairie, carried as if on a Mohammedan flying carpet and brought face-to-face with a scene that he could otherwise have only imagined or dreamed.

It is actually unclear which is moved, the scene in the distance or the observer here at hand. Perhaps it’s that the visible aspect of a thing, of any thing, is like its smell, and when atmospheric conditions are right, its visible aspect can be carried away separately, like a spoor, to an observer who is situated many miles distant and who then is enabled to see the thing up close, the way one can sometimes wake to the smell of coffee being brewed over a fire far down the valley from one’s bed and think it’s being made in the next room.

This is what Father and I saw: at first, there was a misty, grayish scrim that rose from the horizon and became a semi-opaque sheet. Then, evolving out of a series of dark, vertical threads and strings, solid objects began to appear against it, and in a few seconds, a familiar bit of scenery had taken shape — the road that led past Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin, on the near side of Osawatomie. There were the trees and the creek and the burnt-over stumps of his field and even the smoke curling from his chimney. In the further distance, I saw a man walking from the spring with a bucket in each hand.

The man was Fred! My brother Fred, barefoot and shirtless, was walking slowly towards the cabin, looking lost in thought or prayer. I was too astonished and pleased by the sight to speak of it. Three days before, Father had ordered him to Lawrence for supplies and mail from home and to ask for reinforcements for the defense of the town of Osawatomie, but Fred had felt indisposed from a recent onslaught of the ague and had begged to stay at Uncle’s for a while, until he recovered, and Father had relented. I had not expected to see him again for a week or more, and now here he was, soundless as death, but very much alive and before my eyes making his slow way along the roadway from the spring to the cabin, as if he were alone and invisible to all eyes but his own.

At that instant, there came three riders over the crest of the hill a ways behind Fred, men whom I recognized at once as Ruffians, men who had been riding with John Reid, the Mexican War veteran from Missouri who had given himself the rank of general and headed up one of those bands that had been in particular hot pursuit of us Browns since Pottawatomie and Black Jack months earlier. Reid had threatened noisily on many occasions to burn down the entire town of Osawatomie, but this was late August, and we had begun not to take these blowhard threats too seriously, for we had most of these men well on the run all across the territory by now, and despite their numbers, all they were capable of were random raids on isolated cabins and farms. It was from some of Reid’s people, in fact, that we had stolen the herd of cattle recently left off with the citizens of Osawatomie — stolen back, I should say — and the three I now saw riding up on Fred I had marked then as villains, and Father and I had even briefly spoken with them: coarse, brutal men whose main object was looting and pillaging the farms and lands of Free-State settlers.

“Fred!” I cried. “Look behind you!”

“He can’t hear you, Owen,” Father said in a low voice. “He may be done for.”

Helplessly, as if bound to a stake, we watched from our spot miles from the scene, while the three riders approached Fred from behind. They had come over the rise from the direction of town, sent out, as I quickly surmised, to reconnoiter for General Reid, in preparation for his oft-threatened raid on the settlement. Their presence probably meant that Reid and his hundred-man force of Ruffians were close by. But Fred did not seem to recognize the men at all or to regard them as enemies. He turned and stopped in the road, and as they neared, he stood and watched, apparently unafraid, as if the men were merely local Free-Staters not known to him.

Father and I were close enough to the scene to see over his shoulder, as it were, and we stared in silence as Fred nodded good morning and the others touched the brims of their hats and made to pass, when one of the men, the large-bellied fellow in the center, gave Fred a hard stare. I would later learn that this was the Reverend Martin White, a notorious and malignant pro-slaver from Arkansas who back in ’54 had come out to settle and preach to his fellow pro-slavers, one of those men who, after the Pottawatomie affair, had become fixated on avenging himself against us Browns.

Although I could not hear him, I saw him speak to Fred and found that I could read his lips somewhat: I know you! he seems to say. And Fred, who still has not recognized the danger, advances open-faced towards the men to greet them, his buckets still in his hands, his bare chest exposed to the riders, who draw out their revolvers and throw down on him. Fred stops in his tracks now and looks wonderingly, innocently, up at them, as once more the man in the middle, Reverend White, silently mouths some words: You’re one of John Browns boys!

By now, Fred’s face has gone all dark and serious, for he has finally seen the dangerous fix he is in, and he shakes his head no, he’s not one of John Brown’s boys.

I know you! White declares.

Fred again shakes his head no. He mouths the words I don’t know John Brown.

Where’s he hiding?

I don’t know him.

Yes, you are his son! says White, and he levels his revolver and fires straight into Fred’s pale, bare chest.

The bullet killed him at once, and he fell like a stone in the middle of the road. For a few seconds, the riders stared down at his crumpled, lifeless body and the spilled water buckets. Then they spurred their horses into a gallop and rode off, heading away from town in the direction they had come, no doubt to bring Reid’s force straight on.

Dark blood poured from the hole in Fred’s chest and puddled over and around his body. A light breeze lifted and flattened the leaves of the nearby cottonwood trees and sifted the tall grasses alongside the road. And now, slowly, the scene began to fade from view, gathering itself back into the dark threads and strings from which it had emerged, until once again Father and I were gazing across the featureless prairie towards the eastern horizon, staring at nothing, and the sun was risen, blasting back at us, radiant and bright yellow and orange, driving the fleecy, gold-tinged clouds from the skies and bathing our faces in its light.

“Murderers!” I cried. Enraged and horrified was I — but I spoke also as if to verify the actuality of what I had just seen, for I could scarcely believe that it had truly happened.

“He denied me,” Father said in a low voice.

“They shot him like a dog!”

“If he had not denied me, they wouldn’t have shot him. They would have taken him prisoner is all, as they did John and Jason. I’m sure of it.”

“No. Even if you’re right, it’s not true,” I declared. Fred was gone, and gone from us forever — my wholly innocent brother, my childhood companion, the boy and man I had loved and envied more than all the others, the one I would have been myself, if I had been strong enough, clear enough, humble enough, if I had been a Christian: my best brother was dead.

Father turned to me and said, “What do you mean, it’s not true?” “Fred has been killed! And that’s the simple fact of it! That’s the truth of the matter. Why he was killed, or how he might have avoided it — those aren’t important now, Father. He’s dead. He’s your son, my brother, and he’s dead!”

I looked into Father’s ice-gray eyes and saw a strange sort of puzzlement there, and for the first time realized that he could neither comprehend nor share my feelings at that moment, and thus he did not in the slightest understand me. He did not know who I was. Or who Fred had been. And consequently, in a crucial way, though he had seen it with his own eyes, he did not know what had just happened.

Suddenly, I felt pity for the Old Man. Despite his intelligence and his gifts of language and his mastery of stratagem, he possessed a rare and dangerous kind of stupidity — a stupidity of the heart. It was possibly the very thing that, combined with his intelligence, gifts, and mastery, had indeed made him into an irresistible leader of men, had made him a resourceful and courageous warrior and even a powerful, rigorous man of religion; but his stupid heart had also made him dangerous, fatally dangerous, to anyone who loved him and to anyone whom he loved back. More than the rest of us, Fred had loved the Old Man; and Father had loved him more than all his other children back. And now Fred was a dead man.

“He has made the blood remission. He is with the Lord,” Father said, and he turned to go. “Come on, we have to rouse the boys. Reid’s prepared to raid Osawatomie, and we have to warn the people and help defend them.” He paused for a second and said, “I believe that the Lord has given us this vision for their sake, not Fred’s.”

Then he left me. I lingered a moment longer, watching the sun blot out the eastern horizon with its light, and saw Fred’s open face float against the light, and his slow, thoughtful gestures and ways, and heard faintly in the breeze his gentle, abrupt voice — an illusion this time, no mirage, no vision given by the Lord, and it was already beginning to fade. Then slowly, reluctantly, so as to depart from it before it disappeared altogether, I turned away from this weak, diminishing apparition of my dead brother and followed Father’s cold, dark form down the ridge into the camp.

On that day, the day that his son was killed, Father fought the battle that made him known as Osawatomie Brown. Until his own death and for many years after, even to today, it was his public name. Perhaps — despite my account and because of yours — it will be his name forever. Other men, most of whom had never seen him in the flesh — the journalists and hagiographers of the North, mainly — gave it to him, but he quickly embraced it himself and took to signing, with a vain flourish, his letters and the autograph books of his admirers with it: Osawatomie Brown. Or sometimes, more formally, John Brown of Osawatomie. On the day that he sacrificed his best son upon the stone altar of his belief, Father within hours was transformed from a mortal man — an extraordinary and famous man, to be sure, but, still, only a man — into a hero bathed in swirls of light. It mattered not whether they liked his ways or admired his courage or believed his words; the American people from then on viewed him as more and other than a man.

This transformation, before anyone else even knew that it had occurred, Father already understood and had begun using for his own secret purposes. In the mind of the South, he would be Baal and Anathema. And in the imagination of the North, he would make him-self a Greek or Roman hero, Achilles in his tent or Horatio at the bridge, or one of the old, impetuous, dragon-slaying heroes of Arthurian romance, each of whom in the beginning surely had been, like him, a flesh-and-blood man who, one day, when a sufficient number of stories about him had accumulated in the public mind, stepped across an invisible line and, as if by magic, became other than human: the son lay murdered in the dusty Kansas track, and the father would ride down that track into legend. So that, in the North, Osawatomie Brown soon reached the point of fame where he could lose a battle, and it would nonetheless be regarded as a victory — a triumph, if not for him or for the anti-slavery forces, then for the human spirit. In the South, his victories signaled the coming millennium, the impending war between the races, and his losses entered the accounts as proof, not of his military feebleness or personal failure, but of his enemies’ courage and virtue in defense of slavery. All men now measured their stature and meaning against Osawatomie Brown’s.

In mundane reality, however, the Battle of Osawatomie was neither loss nor victory: I was there. It had no political or military stature and no philosophical or religious meaning. I broke and ran with the others, abandoning the town to the Ruffians’ scourging fire and pillage; I know what it was — merely a failed defense on our part, and a looting raid on theirs.

Neither Father nor I, without having agreed between ourselves, said anything to the others in our party of what we had witnessed from the ridge at dawn that morning, except that we had spotted General Reid’s scouts returning from Osawatomie, riding away from the settlement east to west, towards the Lawrence Road, where, according to rumor, Reid’s force had temporarily bivouacked. And when we rode down from our camp into town, passing Uncle’s cabin, where Fred’s body lay inside on a plank table, we did not stop to pray over it or to speak solemnly with its sad, frightened attendants of Fred’s brief life and useless death; we rode straight on to warn the settlers of the imminent raid from General Reid’s band of irregulars, which we knew numbered in the hundreds.

Reid had been moving across the countryside for weeks, gathering all the loose gangs of marauders into a cohesive force. Rumors, until then mostly discounted by us, had been flying from one Free-State redoubt to another: that he wished to make a final, defining attack on Lawrence and then on Topeka, the capitals of Kansas abolitionism-attacks that we knew would not be tolerated by the federal army, in spite of the unspoken, continued support of the pro-slavers’ interests by the President and his Secretary of War; not wishing to get caught between the Ruffians and the federal troops, we had left the defense of both cities to their own citizens. And until we saw Reid’s scouts returning that morning from Osawatomie, we had not thought that he would bother taking Osawatomie, in spite of its reputation as an abolitionist stronghold and, notwithstanding our long absence from the place, its reputation as the Kansas base of the Browns. By this time, Wealthy and little Tonny and Ellen had returned to Ohio; John and Jason were in Topeka; and our brother-in-law Henry, after suffering his leg wound at Black Jack, had gone home to sister Ruth and their little farm in North Elba. Most of the other inhabitants had fled the town by now as well, so that it was a cluster of barely twenty families — poor, stubborn folks who had refused to abandon their cabins and property to the pro-slave predators of the region but who, unlike the more organized and well-armed citizens of Lawrence and Topeka, posed no real threat to the Ruffians.

However, due to our having distributed amongst them the one hundred fifty head of cattle that we on nighttime raids had been liberating piecemeal from small bands of Ruffians over the previous weeks, we had unintentionally made the town an object of General Reid’s especial attention, and it now appeared that he had stopped on his march towards Lawrence and was coming in unexpectedly from the west, moving south of the Marais des Cygnes River and north of the Pottawatomie, a narrowing wedge of territory that pointed at the heart of the town where the two rivers met.

At the low log blockhouse — actually, more a storehouse than a fort — we combined with Captain Parson’s small homeguard of boys and old men and spread out amongst the trees at the edge of the settlement and dug in there to await the arrival of Reid’s men, with the river, at the one place where it broadened and went shallow and was thus fordable, at our backs. “Never defend an unfordable river,” went one of Father’s maxims, “or the Lord may have to part the waters for you.” At one point, before we had dispersed and taken our positions in the woods behind rocks and logs, Father and I had a moment alone. We were standing on a high, shrubby overlook, with the Marais des Cygnes passing below us. Father was seated on a stump, slowly sharpening his cutlass and every few seconds casting a wary eye up the trail, where we expected soon to see Reid and his men come riding in.

“Why not pack everyone up and safely abandon this place, Father?” I asked him. “Innocent lives will be lost defending it, and Reid’s going to take it anyway.”

“The apostle saith, ‘Rebuke with all long suffering,’“ he answered without looking up from his work. ‘“For the time will come when the people will not endure sound doctrine, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall all be turned into fables.’“

I sighed. “All right, fine. But tell me what you propose to accomplish here.”

“Apotheosis, son. Apotheosis.”

“You expect to die here?”

“Oh, no! Just the opposite. God does not want me to die yet. He has something further for me to do. Something much larger. I know this.”

“You know God’s mind?”

“Yes,” he said, calm as a counting house clerk.

“How do you come by this knowledge, Father?”

“The Lord speaks to me. He shows me things. You know this, Owen,” he added with some impatience.

A moment passed in silence, while I pondered his claim — for this was the first time that he had said it so bluntly — that not only did he see what the Lord wished him to see but he had God’s very words in his ear. Finally, I asked, “And what does the Lord say to you? What does He say of me, for instance?”

He turned his face up to me and gently smiled. “The Lord says that I shall never weep for thee, as King David wept for his beloved son, Absalom. And as I must weep for Frederick. And that I shall never wish to have died for thee, as King David wished to die for Absalom. Today, Owen, the Lord hath delivered up the men who hath raised their hand against me, and all who hath raised themselves up against me to do me hurt shall someday be as that young man is. Frederick. My son.” He paused for a few seconds, then went on. “I swear it, and the Lord hath promised it. For if I must, to smite these men I will carry this battle into Africa.”

“Africa,” I said.

“You kill a serpent by striking off its head.”

Africa? Was my father, indeed and at last, mad? I was long used to his reliance on elaborate, obscure figures and his habit of displacing the immediate present with the Biblical past, and while usually I could follow his circumlocutious path to his meaning without much difficulty and often found his meaning original, profound, and insightful, this time he had me. Africa! Had the shock of Fred’s murder begun to settle in and madden him? He had so far evidenced no grief or outrage over it, but deep feelings too much denied or suppressed can inexplicably erupt in fissures elsewhere.

“Look, they’re here!” he suddenly said, sounding almost relieved, and he stood and pointed towards the western track, where there came the first of Reid’s force over the horizon, and following close behind came a great troop of men on horseback, riding three abreast and at full gallop. Father slapped his sword into its scabbard and instantly began giving orders. “Hold your fire, men! Aim low, and wait till they’re upon us!” he shouted, as he ran from one man to another, his dozen fighters and Captain Parson’s twenty more, encouraging them and bucking up their courage in the face of this most formidable, terrifying force.

Straight on the riders came, as if expecting no one to oppose them, as if we had indeed done the rational, expected thing and abandoned the town to them. Soon they were only a quarter-mile off, well within range of our Sharps rifles, of which we had perhaps ten, and still Father said to hold fire, wait for his command, and then they were within range of our muskets, but he would not let us shoot yet, so we held back a few seconds longer, until they were fit targets even for our revolvers, when finally Father called, “Fire!” and thirty guns — thirty rifles, muskets, and revolvers — roared as one, and twenty or more of Reid’s men cried out and fell like clods of dirt. Those who were not hit in the fusillade wheeled away from the trail and, firing wildly from horseback, fled into the woods in several directions at once, while we reloaded and went on shooting at the riders and killing those on the ground who had gone down not dead but merely wounded in the first volley.

Reid’s force was like a huge wave rolling in upon a rock. And when the riders had fallen away before us and their ranks had broken on both our flanks, they at first swirled and scattered amongst the trees in confused eddies, then made their circuitous way to a height back up the road a ways, well beyond the range of our guns, where they re-gathered in military formation, as if preparing to roll in against the rock a second time. Meanwhile, Father strode back and forth among his hunkered men, making sure that no one had been shot and readying us for the renewed attack, assuring us that the Lord would protect us and walking about in full view of the enemy, as if he needed no such assurance himself.

I lay tucked in behind a low, brush-covered hummock, studying through the gaps in the brush the moves of the enemy on the distant rise, when I saw one of Reid’s men dismount and get down on one knee and carefully aim his long rifle in our direction. There was a puff of white smoke, then the sound of a single gunshot, and when I turned to see where the bullet might have hit, Father was standing next to me, still recklessly exposed to the enemy.

He stepped close, turned, showed me his back, and said, “Can you see anything torn or bloody, Owen?”

I replied that I could not.

“Well, I believe I just took a terrible rap on the back from that fellow’s long rifle.”

“What! Then stay down!”

He grinned and said, “Don’t fret yourself, son. The Lord doesn’t intend for me to be shot in the back. He just wants me to keep facing His enemy, that’s all. It’s a little reminder.”

I remember turning towards Reid’s men then and seeing for the first time their cannon. This was no guerilla skirmish; this was warfare. They had rolled the weapon out and were loading it with grapeshot. A moment later, they fired the thing, and it made a terrible roar, snapping off whole trees and tearing down branches overhead. They quickly reloaded and fired a second time, with the same, frightening effect. It made a deep bellow and then a shriek as the grape whistled over our heads and crashed against the trees and hummocks, splintering and smashing everything it hit. While the cannoneers with each new firing brought their weapon closer and closer into deadly range, the rest of Reid’s men, gathering courage from its destructive power, dismounted and formed large companies of shooters and commenced to advance on foot upon our position, stopping every ten or fifteen yards to aim and fire their muskets, driving us slowly back towards the river.

Father kept exhorting us to hold our ground and wait for close quarters and aim low and so on, but first Captain Parson’s men and then Father’s, too, even Salmon and Oliver, were now in full retreat, firing and running, ducking behind a tree or a rock and firing and running again. I stayed at the front beside Father and watched them fly past. Father and I looked at each other and said nothing. Here several of the men were shot and went down — older men: Mr. Partridge, as I recollect, and Mr. Holmes — and this terrified the rest even more and turned their more or less orderly retreat into a pandemonious rout, until finally even Father at this point gave up the fight and, showing the enemy his back, made for the river, with me close behind.

I remember stopping atop the bank, the last of the Osawatomie defenders to flee, and looking down at our men as they waded through the chest-high water, with Father coming after, as if he were not following them but was in hot pursuit — a revolver held high in each hand and his battered old palm-leaf hat set squarely on his head and the tails of his mustard-yellow linen duster floating out behind.

He cut a ludicrous figure. Except for those men — both ours and the enemy’s — who lay dead on the rough ground behind me, they all did. It made no sense to me, none of it. I no longer knew what I was doing here or why. For a second, I thought of turning away from Father and the others and walking straight towards Reid’s cannon and riflemen, offering myself up to them — as a prisoner, if they wanted, or as a sacrifice — just to end it, to finish this mad fight and give sense, if not to my life, then to my death. In a world where every man was trying for no apparent reason to kill the other, the only sensible man should have long since been slain. Like poor, murdered Fred.

Then I heard Father’s hard voice call up to me: “Owen! God sees it, Owen! God sees it!” And with that, down the embankment I scrambled and into the river and on to the further bank — saved once again from myself by my father’s call to come along, come and kill men another day.

We arrived late that evening, foot-sore, weary, and sullen, at Uncle’s cabin, which Reid’s marauders, having marked it already with Fred’s cold-blooded murder, had passed over and left intact. Earlier, as we re-gathered on the far bank of the river, we had stood awhile and watched the smoke rise over the village of Osawatomie, where the Ruffians were gaily pillaging and burning. Now and then, the silence was broken by the whoops of the victors and the random sounds of their guns being fired exuberantly into the air. That there was still in effect, despite contradicting claims on both sides, an unwritten law against violating or otherwise injuring women and children was cold comfort to us: houses and barns filled with the long, arduous summer’s harvest were going up in flames, and Free-State livestock was being herded together for travel east to feed hungry mouths in Missouri, and stores and the several public buildings were being looted and burned to the ground. All over the region, the grassy plains and pretty cottonwood dells were scarred by the blackened ruins of farmsteads and crossroads stores, and the trails and roads were increasingly haunted by the wagons of burned-out Free-Staters and pro-slavery families alike returning with their few remaining possessions and animals to their home states — ruined by this war, slump-shouldered, disillusioned, and broken.

Uncle was alone in his cabin when we arrived. Having determined to stay and minister to his tiny flock, he had long since sent his wife, Flora, Father’s half-sister, on back to Ohio for the duration of the hostilities. In spite of his connection to us Browns and of having briefly harbored John and Jason after the Pottawatomie massacre, he had managed, by virtue of his simple decency and even-handedness in all his dealings, to escape persecution by the roving bands of Ruffians. There are all sorts of Christians, and Uncle Sam Adair was, to my mind, a simple Christian, for, although he hated slavery, he regarded all human beings as equally fallen from grace and equally capable of salvation. He was thus essentially pacifistic, like Jason, and did not believe that it was necessary to kill people in order to free others. From the beginning, this had separated Uncle from Father, although Uncle was not severe about it — except, of course, for a spell following the Pottawatomie killings. So while he did not exactly welcome us into his home that night, he nonetheless permitted us to enter and view Fred’s body and make the necessary determinations for his burial.

The main room of the cabin was dimly lit by a single oil lantern and a low fire in the fireplace. We crowded in — Father, Salmon, Oliver, and I — and stood facing the long table where Uncle had laid out the body. He had put Fred’s boots back on him and his shirt, buttoned to the throat, and had washed and shaved his face, so that Fred seemed almost to be sleeping. Fred in repose and in that flickering light had an angelic face, soft and pink and round, more like our mother’s than Father’s. There was something, not female, but decidedly feminine in Fred; in this he was not much like his father or brothers, we who seemed so wholly masculine, unyielding, and crude. Even when a stoical, solitary shepherd in Ohio, where he had resembled no man so much as John the Baptist in the wilderness, Fred had had about him a delicacy and finesse, a physical sweetness, that had set him apart from other men in a way that, after his self-mutilation, became even more pronounced than before: somehow, that most violent and most masculine act of self-reproach, in Fred’s hand, had looked nearly gentle, and it had neither frightened nor embarrassed any of us. We had been saddened by it, of course, but not intimidated, as we would have been if one of our other brothers had done it.

I cannot say what Father thought or felt that night as he looked down on Fred’s body. He did not weep, nor for a long while did he say anything. Always, as regards his children, Father’s thoughts and feelings were strong, but they were also at times somewhat gnarled and stunted, as if our very existence were a chastizement to him. When a decent amount of time had passed in silence, Uncle cleared his throat and coughed nervously and said, “Would you like me to say the prayers for the lad, John?”

At first, Father did not respond; then he slowly shook his head no. I looked at his face and saw again that there was something newly broken in him: a piece of his mind that hitherto had been intact was now cast off from it, and he was no longer merely suppressing his emotions, his rage and grief, saving them for a later, more appropriate hour and place: his mind now was less a finely calibrated engine than a monument: it had become like chiseled stone, cut and carved in a permanent way, and I saw that what Father did not express he did not feel.

He stepped away from Fred’s body and, passing between us, went to the door and said for Uncle to bury Fred here on the property and to mark it properly with his name and dates. “And say upon it the words of the apostle, ‘For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.’” Then, abruptly, he asked Uncle how many horses he had.

“A pair,” Uncle told him. “And I still have a mule.”

“I will need them, along with your wagon. I’ll replace them in a few days. The boys and I have an appointment with some Ruffians, and I don’t want to disappoint them by arriving late.” It was his intention, he said, to nip awhile at the flanks and heels of Reid’s army, until we had ourselves fresh mounts and supplies, and then he would come back around, before heading into Africa.

Uncle looked at him with the same bewildered amazement as I had earlier. “Africa, John? What are you saying?”

“You will know it when I’ve done it;’ Father said. And at that I suddenly remembered his old plan, his Subterranean Passway into the South, and I finally understood his meaning and knew that for him, and lor us, this dismal, murderous war in Kansas was nearly finished.

“Come on, boys,” he said. “Your brother is with the Lord. You’ll see him again soon enough.” Then he stepped from the cabin into the night, and we trooped silently after.

Chapter 21

There commenced then a lengthy period which in hindsight could be called the calm before the storm, although we did not know then that the storm was truly coming, even though Father increasingly predicted it. He never said the name of the place, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the town down in the very heart of the Slavocracy where the federal government manufactured its famed Sharps rifles. He called it Africa. But we knew roughly the place he meant and that a new, more dangerous, and more consequential work on a different front was about to begin.

And having come to this point in my account, dear Miss Mayo, where begin the more publically known and recorded events in Father’s life, let me declare that I wish only to tell you here what you cannot more easily and reliably learn elsewhere from the now hundreds of published histories and memoirs of those days half a century gone. My memory for facts, dates, names, and so on is not sharp; it never was: you don’t need me for those anyhow. But my feelings and emotions, my whole sensibility, are today, as I scribble here in my cabin, the same as they were back then. I fear that is all I have now to offer you. It is as if I have throughout these intervening years been insensible to everything that has since then occurred or passed before me, and I am today in my brain and heart the very same man I was a half-century ago, a man suffering incoherently through each new day, whether in North Elba or Kansas or Virginia, with no sure knowledge of what the next day will bring. I am still a man stuck in that same, old killing game, a man who — having contrived to set his father in motion and having shaped matters in such a way as to set the Old Man onto a bloody track straight to perdition, or at least to purgatory — is condemned to follow him there and, if possible, with these words, with the truthfulness of this account, with this confession of my intentions, my desires, and my secret acts, finally to release him. I want Father’s soul to be free of me at last, and mine to be free of him, regardless of where from this purgatory we each afterwards must go.

I wonder sometimes if you can understand this. And if you can accept and make use of it. Oh, I know that there is a public reality and a private reality and that my best use — for you, for me, and for all those lingering ghosts as well — has been to keep to the private and ignore the rest. But even so, I do want my story, if possible, to impinge upon the public reality, on history, and I mean here and there to tell it accordingly. For instance, it has become almost a commonplace in recent years to say that Father, like many Christians of his generation, began as a principled, religious-minded young Northern man agitated by Negro slavery in the South and racialism everywhere, and that, like many such men, he understandably became in middle-age an actively engaged opponent of slavery and racialism, but that in his old age he changed, suddenly and inexplicably, into a free-booting guerilla, whence he moved swiftly on to become a terrorist and finally, astonishingly, a martyr. Thus, looking back through a glass colored by the Civil War, most Americans nowadays find his actions incomprehensible, and they call him mad, or wish to. So while I’m here to tell you certain things that you cannot otherwise know, I also wish to remind you that Father’s progression from activist to martyr, his slow march to willed disaster, can be viewed, not as a descent into madness, but as a reasonable progression — especially if one consider the political strength of those who in those days meant to keep chattel slavery the law of the land. Remember, all-out war between the North and the South was unthinkable to us: due to an ancient, deeply ingrained racialism, any war undertaken by the citizens of the North for the purpose of freeing an enslaved people whose skins were black seemed a pure impossibility. We believed instead that the Northerners — when it finally came clear to them what we already knew, that the South now wholly owned the government of the nation — would simply secede from the Union, leaving behind a nation in which a huge number of our fellow Americans and all their unborn progeny were chattel slaves: literal, unrepatriated prisoners-of-war. Before that could happen, we meant to liberate as many of them as possible. And failing that, failing to free our prisoners-of-war prior to the eventual and, as it seemed to us, inevitable cessation of hostilities between the Northern and Southern states, the one side cowardly and the other evil, we meant to slay every slaveholder we could lay our hands on. And those whose throats we could not reach directly or whose heads we could not find in the sights of our guns, we would terrorize from afar, hoping thereby to rouse them to bloody acts of reprisal, which might in turn straighten the spines of our Northern citizenry and bring a few of them over to our side.

We did not want the North to secede from the Union and make its own slave-free republic or join with Canada in some new, colonized relation to Olde England or even make with Canada an independent, slave-free nation of the north. And it never once occurred to us that the Southerners would leave the Union. They didn’t have to. They already owned the entire machinery of government in Washington and in those years, the late ’50s, were merely solidifying and making permanent their control of it by carrying slavery into the western territories. In our own way, with no knowledge of the coming Civil War, we were fighting to preserve the American Republic.

But I was speaking of my father’s gradual progression from antislavery agitator all the way to terrorist, guerilla captain, and martyr, how it seemed — not in hindsight, but at the time of its occurrence — a reasonable and moral response to the times and to the deep, continuous frustration they created. Father may have been the first to resort to pure terrorism for political and military purposes, but the wisdom and necessity of it were early on as plain to the other side as to us: they never needed our example to inspire them to butcher innocent civilians. And without Father, that’s what I would have been, merely an innocent civilian, wifeless, childless, and alone, a Northern bachelor tending his flock of merinos out on the rolling, grassy shoulder of the Marais des Cygnes a few miles from the abolitionist enclave of Osawatomie — easy pickings for one of the roving, drunken bands of Ruffians, who would have treated me as they treated so many other isolated Free-State farmers and herdsmen: they’d have shot me dead, burned my cabin, stolen off my sheep and horse, and ridden on to the next farmstead.

Sometimes I think it would have been better for me, for Father, for our entire family, for everyone, if it had happened that way. Better for everyone, perhaps, if, back in Springfield, when Father gave me leave to go my own way and not return to North Elba, I had gone. “Just go, Owen, follow your elder brothers to Ohio and beyond, if that’s what you prefer, or follow the elephant and go to Californ-i-ay in search of gold, if that interests you!” If I had taken him at his word and, with his permission, had forsaken what he called my duty, so many terrible things would never have happened: the death of Lyman Epps; Fred’s self-mutilation and migration with me to Kansas; and Father’s, and Salmon’s, Oliver’s, and Henry Thompson’s, migration there, too, for without me and Fred in tow, John and Jason and their families surely would have given up that first cruel winter and come home to Ohio; and then there would have been no Pottawatomie killings and possibly no war at all in the Kansas Territory, which in ’58 would have come into the Union as a slave state instead of a free, an event surely to be followed by the secession of most of the northern states and their probable, eventual union with Canada. There would have been no debacle at Harpers Ferry. No Civil War.

Think of it! Father would have ended his days peacefully in the manner he so often wished, as a farmer and preacher in North Elba, aiding and instructing his white and Negro neighbors, dying in old age in his bed, surrounded by his beloved family, and buried in the shade of his favorite mountain, Tahawus, the Cloudsplitter.

Is it ridiculous and grandiose to speculate this way? To think that so much depends upon so little? Miss Mayo, I think it’s no more ridiculous or grandiose than to believe that our trivial lives here on earth are watched over and fated by an all-seeing, all-knowing God. But cannot the law of cause-and-effect be rationally thought to operate from the ground up, as well as from the top down? And if there is an order to the universe, then all our affairs here on earth are, surely, inextricably linked one to the other. I believe that the universe is like a desert, and each of our lives is a grain of sand that touches three or four adjacent to it, and when one grain turns in the wind or is moved or adjusted even slightly, those next to it will move also, and they in turn will shift the others next to each of them, and so on, all across the vast, uncountable billions of grains in the desert, until over time a great storm arises and alters the face of the planet. So why should I forbid myself from believing that my single action, or even my inaction, one day in my youth in my father’s warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts, altered history? And that it was instrumental in shaping, not only my destiny, but Father’s, too, and my entire family’s, and even, if I may be forgiven this vision, the destiny of an entire people?

Which is why I did what I did — why I returned that fall from Springfield to the farm in North Elba, why I went there to do my duty. For even if we cannot know the ultimate consequences of our actions or inactions, we must nonetheless behave as if they do have ultimate consequences. No little thing in our lives is without meaning; never mind that we can never know it ourselves. I did what I did, my duty, in order to free the slaves. I did it to change history. It is finally that simple. My immediate motives, of course, at every step of the way were like everyone else’s, even Father’s — mixed, often confused and selfish, and frequently unknown even to me until many years later. But so long as I was doing my duty, so long as I was acting on the principles that I had learned when a child, then I was bending my life to free the slaves: I was shaping and curving it like a barrel stave that would someday fit with other lives similarly bent, so as to construct a vessel capable of measuring out and transporting into the future the history of our time and place. It would be a history capable of establishing forever the true nature and meaning of the nineteenth century in the United States of America, and thus would my tiny life raise a storm that would alter the face of the planet. Father’s God-fearing, typological vision of the events that surrounded us then was not so different from mine. My vision may have been secular and his Biblical, but neither was materialistic. They were both, perhaps, versions of Mr. Emerson’s grand, over-arching, transcendental vision, just not so clearly or poetically expressed. At least in my case. In Father’s, I’m not so sure, for the Bible is nothing if not clear and poetical.

In a sense, I suppose that what I am inscribing on these pages is the Secret History of John Brown. You may, of course, do with it what you wish, or do nothing with it, if it seems worthless to you and Professor Villard. As I have said, we each will have very different uses for it anyhow, uses shaped by those to whom we each imagine we are telling our respective tales. For you and the professor, it is told to present and future generations of students of the history of nineteenth-century America; for me, it is being told to the dead, the long dead and buried companions of my past. And told especially to my dead father.

Your history of John Brown, however, will be of no use to the dead. It is for the living and the unborn: you are in the business of creating received knowledge. I am in the business of coming along behind and correcting it. I remind you of this for several reasons, but mostly so that you will understand that what I leave out of my account is all that I see no reason to correct or to enlarge upon. Simply put, I accept the truth of whatever is absent from these pages.

And for that reason, you will not find here any further description of the war in Kansas, even though it continued to burn beyond the so-called Battle of Osawatomie for fully another year and a half, before finally flickering down to a charred pile of ash in the winter of ’58, with the Free-State forces arrived at last in exhausted ascendancy. By then, Father’s and my attentions were elsewhere. His attention was on the Eastern sources of funding for his African Campaign, as he had come to call it; mine was on the recruitment and training, in our secret encampment at Tabor, Iowa, of the young men who would follow Father into Africa, and the long, broody wait for him to signal that the moment to attack had at last arrived. Also not here: Father’s lengthy visits and planning sessions during the spring and summer of ’57 and all throughout ’58 with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, and Gerrit Smith in Peterboro; and, over in Massachusetts, his fiery speeches at Springfield, Worcester, Medford, Concord, and Boston; and his stay in Concord with the distinguished authors Messrs. Emerson, Thoreau, Higginson, and Sanborn, all of whom have since published what I assume to be truthful accounts of Father’s appearance, words, and deportment there. By then, his apotheosis was nearly completed anyhow, and he was to everyone he met a grand, Cromwellian figure transfigured in the glow of their lofty, optimistic thought. But I was not myself present at any of those meetings so cannot know how, in fact, he behaved.

I do not include here anything that I myself know nothing of or know only through hearsay. For instance, Father’s journey to Canada in April and May of ’58, where, at the famous Chatham Convention of Negro leaders, he first presented to the public, as it were, his plan for the Subterranean Passway and obtained from the most prominent Negroes, Frederick Douglass and the Reverends Loguen and Garnet and Harriet Tubman and others of that radical ilk, the same sort of trust and financial support that he had earlier secured in private from the radical whites in New York and New England. It was at Chatham that he recruited into our little army its first Negro member, Osborn Anderson. Later, of course, as you may know by now, there were four other Negroes who went the full route with us, courageous, doomed men — the mulatto Lewis Leary and his nephew John Copeland, who had been a student at Oberlin College in Ohio; and the splendid Dangerfield Newby; and Frederick Douglass’s friend and valet, Shields Green, of whom, despite his willingness to abandon Mr. Douglass and follow Father, I had no particularly high opinion, and of that I may later write. I have at this moment no desire to puncture Shields’s somewhat inflated reputation, for he was young and ignorant and surely did not realize what he had let himself in for, when he left his protector and went down with Father into “the steel trap!’ as Mr. Douglass called it. He died horribly. One must, as long as one remains alive, forgive the dead everything.

There is, of course, the well-known story of Father’s seeking out and recruiting in New York City Mr. Hugh Forbes, the conceited British journalist who had accompanied us on shipboard from Boston to Liverpool and by carriage to London during our ill-fated voyage abroad. That sordid story has been told often elsewhere, told more by Father’s enemies than by his friends, probably because of its tendency to portray Father as a deluded old man or, at best, as disastrously naive. I’m reluctant to enter it here, however, because Forbes, too, like Shields Green, may be dead by now, and I had few dealings with him myself and from the start viewed him as a callow, cynical, pompous man and a dissembler. But then, I was never so innocent as Father, especially when it came to a certain type of man, of which Forbes was a prime example — the carefully reticent, smooth-talking fellow with a casual claim to experiences and knowledge that, to Father, were cosmopolitan, which is to say, European. And because he did not boast in the usual loud American way of having fought alongside Mazzini and Garibaldi in Italy and of composing a military handbook for the Austrian army and reporting on the cataclysmic events in Europe in ’48 for the New York Herald and his own periodical, The European, but instead implied and insinuated them into conversation in the educated British way, the Old Man, the rough-cut Yankee auto-didact, believed him and hired him on as our only salaried recruit. He even commissioned the velvety fellow with the rank of colonel and sent him west to Tabor to drill and train his troop of young, ragtag volunteers, all of whom by then were hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign and needed, not drilling exercises, but weaponry, supplies, and more fighting men. We certainly did not need a man like Forbes, Colonel Forbes, telling us what to do.

Little matter, for he did not turn up in Iowa for months anyhow, and when he finally arrived, he was mainly taken up with the composition of his military handbook for the coming American anti-slavery revolution, which, thanks to Father, he was convinced was imminent, a volume that, as soon as it was properly published, he expected to see purchased and eagerly read by all Americans, north and south, and by Europeans, too. He expected this book to make his personal fortune.

Though Forbes was the first, he was the most transparent of the many men who tried to exploit Father for personal, financial gain. There was also the growing number of journalists who wrote for the Eastern newspapers and periodicals and now followed Father every-where and sent back to their editors lavishly embellished accounts of the Old Man’s adventures in Kansas and his public appearances in New York and New England. Father had taken to traveling under the name of Shubel Morgan again, ostensibly to conceal his identity from federal officers still seeking to arrest him for his actions in Kansas, and wore the long white beard with which after his death he was so famously portrayed; but under any name and in whatever disguise, the comings and goings of Osawatomie Brown were by now well-known to the press, for he had become a colorful character, one whom all Americans enjoyed reading about, regardless of their views on slavery. With these journalists I have little quarrel, however, for quite as effectively as they exploited him, Father exploited them back by using their vivid, exaggerated stories of his military exploits and his spiritual and moral clarity to advertise and confirm his own accounts of his bravery, personal sacrifice, and character.

Most of the other profiteers — at least until later, after Harpers Ferry, when the sale of Father’s personal letters and effects and the odd, cast-off article of clothing or weapon became as lucrative as the sale of portions of the True Cross — were small fellows, merchants, mainly, and tradesmen out to extract from Father’s purse as much as the market would bear for guns and bullets, sabers and saddles and other war supplies. Exploiting a market inflated by the Old Man’s needs for secrecy and speed of delivery, they picked Father’s pocket, which had been filled and re-filled again and again by his now-loyal cadre of Eastern gentlemen of means, men who had finally decided that Father was right, that the war against slavery would have to be carried into Africa, and Osawatomie Brown was the only man to do it. They were Mr. Gerrit Smith, as always, and Dr. Howe and Messrs. Lawrence, Stearns, Sanborn, and Higginson. Good men, all, if not personally courageous. And I do not fault them for denying Father in the weeks and months immediately following the uproar at Harpers Ferry, any more than one can fault Peter for denying Christ. Later, in the aftermath of the Civil War, they did return to his side and glorified his memory with more than appropriate praise.

Forbes, though, was a cat with a different coat. And I’m reminded by that figure that he wore a green velvet jacket and fringed doeskin boots and affected a cane with a silver knob. He even sported an ostrich feather in his hatband. All of which made him look ridiculous out there in Iowa, especially when he pulled a face and moaned about the fate of his poor wife and babes, who were supposedly living in abject poverty back in Paris, France. He claimed that their sacrifice was made so that he could continue with his noble mission of assisting and guiding Osawatomie Brown in the great attempt to liberate the American slaves. He declared that he was personally re-writing American history.

He actually said this to me himself. It was out in Tabor, in April of ’59, when we were holed up at the farm of a Quaker supporter of Father’s, a man originally from Indiana who believed that we were preparing, not for war, but for a massive flight of Negro refugees out of the South — which was essentially true, although our intended means to foment that flight were unlikely to have met with any Quaker’s approval. Perhaps, like so many self-proclaimed pacifists gone bone-weary of battling the pro-slavers’ endless stratagems and violence, he had intuited our true plans and welcomed them, but did not wish to be told of them in any detail. Regardless, all that winter and into the spring, he had allowed our shabby troop of sometimes twenty, sometimes fewer than ten, to ensconce itself secretly in his barn by night and train in his fields by day. There Forbes had us marching up and down like toy soldiers, mainly it seemed for the pleasure he got from hearing his own British gentleman’s voice bark orders at American country-boys.

I remember the April afternoon when, all sweaty and covered with dirt and seeds and thistles from the fields and gullies that we had spent the day conquering for our colonel, I left the other men and, approaching Forbes, asked if I could speak with him privately. He was seated in the shade of a cottonwood tree on a stool he had borrowed from the Quaker’s kitchen and, without looking up from the papers on his lap, said to me, “It’s appropriate, Lieutenant, when requesting permission to speak, to salute your superior officer and address him by rank.”

He had been with us only a week by then, but already I was sick of him, and the other men downright despised him and were starting to blame Father for his presence among us. John Kagi had declared the night before that he was ready to shoot the fellow dead, and only my loyalty to Father had kept me from running him straight off the place myself. That and my fear that, if he were overtly resisted by us, he would at once turn on us and reveal Father’s plans to the federal authorities — which, as is now well-known, he eventually did. It is true: months before it took place, Forbes came close to ending the raid on Harpers Ferry. Luckily — or, as it turned out, perhaps unluckily — no one in the government or the press believed then that any man, not even the notorious terrorist Osawatomie Brown, would contemplate mounting a privately financed armed raid on a federal weapons manufactory and depot in the fortified heart of the South. Thus, after Forbes turned on us and until the raid itself finally occurred, his words bore no credence with anyone on either side, which is what saved us for another day. By then, of course, he was seen as a fellow conspirator himself and was pursued by the government and fled into England, where he may indeed be living today, an old dandy in doeskin boots, dining out on stories of his early involvement with the famous American anti-slavery guerilla leader and martyr, Osawatomie Brown. I suppose it’s on that possibility that I criticize him now.

Out there in Iowa, despite his constant admonitions, I neither saluted Forbes nor addressed him by rank. I said straight out that the men and I were faithful to Father and to our common cause, but I could no longer assure him that one or more of the men would not shoot him. I emphasized, so as to make my own position clear, that his murder would be a betrayal of Father’s wishes and detrimental to our common cause. His murder by one of us could undo us altogether. I wanted him to know who and what were keeping him alive.

“You’re quite serious, Brown.”

“Quite, Forbes.”

He still had not looked up at me. “You know what I’m writing here, Brown?”

I knew very well: he had held forth on the virtues of his tract numerous times. “A military manual,” I said.

“Yes. But more than that, Brown. It’s a manual, all right, but one composed specifically for the use of men fighting to end slavery in America. And like all such manuals, it’s a history of the time and place of its own composition. D’ you understand that, Brown?”

“You mean it’s about us. And about you.”

“Precisely. And the chapter I’m presently engaged in writing is called ‘The American Garibaldi,’ which is concerned with nothing less than the necessity and means of transforming ordinary citizens into soldiers. Of transforming peasants — ignorant farmers, laborers, woodcutters, and the like — into disciplined soldiers. Now, what do you suppose General Garibaldi would have done if one of his Italian lieutenants had come up and spoken to him as you have just spoken to me?”

“Well, Forbes, I don’t rightly know.”

“No. No, you don’t. That’s the point. Y’see, I know things that you don’t. Which is precisely why your father hired me on and commissioned me with the rank of colonel.” Here he digressed awhile to complain of Father’s not having paid him as he had promised, along with some sorrowful reminders of poor Mrs. Forbes and his hungry babes in Paris, France, until at last he returned to the subject at hand — mutiny. “General Garibaldi,” he said, “would have instructed his Lieutenant, as I am you, that it was the lieutenant’s responsibility, not the general’s, to put down any potential mutiny. And if the lieutenant could not do it, then the lieutenant himself would be regarded as mutinous and would be peremptorily shot by firing squad.”

I looked back at the boys lounging in the field behind me and could scarcely keep a straight lace at the thought of Forbes ordering them to stand in formation for my execution. “Hed have said that, eh? The general.”

‘Yes, Brown. And then, just as I myself am about to do, he would have stood and left his lieutenant to ponder that statement, and he would have brooked no further discussion on the subject of mutiny.” Forbes closed his writing book and, as predicted by himself, stood and walked off towards the barn, leaving me, like General Garibaldi’s lieutenant, to ponder his statement.

Forbes surprised me, though, for that was the last I ever saw of him. I said nothing to the men of my strange conversation with our colonel, and after a while we all wandered back to the barn and washed and, as usual, prepared our frugal evening meal of hoecakes and stew, until finally someone noticed that Forbes was nowhere about. His horse was gone, and all his gear. “Good riddance,” Kagi muttered, and all concurred. Without meaning to, I had scared the fellow off. He took himself so seriously that I had taken him a bit seriously myself, or perhaps I might have humored and endured him longer and spared us much risk afterwards.

Later, I learned where he had gone — east to New York City, thence to Washington, where he had commenced his vain campaign to betray Father to our enemies. In time, Father learned of Forbes’s failed attempts to convince the Secretary of War and the various newspapers of our plan — thanks to a flurry of frightened letters from friendly abolitionists in the War Department and the journalist Mr. Redpath, who at once told Messrs. Smith and Higginson and Dr. Howe. Typically, they panicked, but to the Old Man, Forbes’s attempted betrayal was a positive development, as it had created amongst our supporters a greater urgency for the battle to begin at once. And, further, the peculiarly deaf ears of the War Secretary and the others to whom Forbes had spoken only confirmed in Father’s mind that God was still his protector, and by winnowing Forbes out, the Lord had merely been correcting Father’s error in having judged the man useful years earlier when they first met.

In his letter to me, summoning me and the rest of the troop to disperse to our respective homes and await his marching orders, he told me all this. He ended his long letter by writing, I believe that the Lord was merely testing my acumen, as well as my faith, back then, as He always does. And in the unpleasant matter of Mr. Forbes, the Lord hath found me sadly wanting. But now, thanks to the steady increase in my faith and trust in Him, the Almighty hath again protected me from my own folly. Now, come directly home to North Elba, son, he wrote. The Lord is making it so that we must act quickly’.

And so, once again, this time for the last time, I came through the Cascade Notch from the wilderness village of Keene into North Elba and, out there on the freshly greening Plains of Abraham, set up on the rise just beyond the bulky shadow of Father’s beloved Mount Tahawus, sighted our family farm. So sweetly self-contained and four-square it seemed in the pale June light that I dared not recall to my mind my gloomy reasons for having returned here — for it was merely to say goodbye, perhaps forever, to my beloved brothers, those who would not accompany Father and me south, and to my dear sisters and stepmother, who had already endured so much for us and would soon endure unimaginably more, and to the place itself, where, to all intents and purposes, I had grown in my cumbersome way into manhood.

I think back to those olden days now as I thought back to them then and approach the doorway of the house as I approached it then, with fear and literal trembling, for so much has changed in the intervening years, the years since the death of Lyman Epps and my flight into the West and my return today, so much has changed in the world at large, and yet I myself have not been altered — I am still that same, half-cracked man, Owen Brown, lurching forward into history on the heels of his father, resolving all his private, warring emotions and conflicted passions in the larger, public war against slavery, making the miserable, inescapable violence of his temperament appear useful and principled by aiming it, not at himself, where perhaps it properly belonged, but at his father’s demonized opponents. For otherwise, how would I have turned out but as a suicide?

And having admitted that, I suddenly understand what must follow upon the completion of my confession! For then I will, at last, have no longer a reason to live. I will be ready to become a ghost myself, so as to replace in purgatory the long-suffering ghosts this confession has been designed expressly to release.

Dear Miss Mayo, since I wrote the lines above, I have been briefly away from my table, searching through the rubble of my cabin for my old revolver, my sidearm in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry and the long, furtive years of flight afterwards. I located it at last in a cache of Father’s letters from ’55 and ’56 (which I had previously overlooked and promise now to send to you when I finally gather and send on all the scattered pages of this sorry, disheveled account), and when I came upon it there in a corner beneath my cot — along with some two dozen rounds of ammunition — I confess that I felt a strange, new kind of glee. I know not what else to call it than glee: it is a peculiar, altogether unfamiliar emotion to me.

I have placed the revolver, my old Colt.45, now cleaned and loaded, upon the writing table, and every time I come to the end of a sentence, I look up from the page and see the weapon there, waiting patiently as an old friend set to take me on a journey, and I feel again that exotic, anticipatory glee.

It is late summer — here and everywhere that my mind goes — and the mowing has evidently been interrupted by this morning’s rain, and the deserted fields glisten silvery in the sun as I pass along between them, on horseback then, in my mind and memory now, making my slow way through the notch and over the Plains towards the farm. The storm clouds have broken and blown away to the east, leaving great, spreading shreds and swaths of deep blue sky. Off to my left and behind me looms the craggy granite peak whose very name I cannot let enter my mind without Father’s dark face also entering there, for I have come over the years so to associate the two, as if each, mountain and man, were a portrait of the other and the two, reduced to their simplest outlines, were a single, runic inscription which I must, before I die, decipher, or I will not know the meaning of my own existence or its worth.

There is no one in the fields and no other person on the narrow dirt track coming my way towards the farm or from it towards me, and no cattle or kine or horses grazing in the pastures and pens. No dogs and none of the fine, blooded, merino sheep whose dams and sires Father brought up from Springfield in the spring of ’50, when we first settled here. No smoke rises from the chimneys of the house or from the tanning shed or from Lyman’s old forge, and except for the thin rattle of the frigid waters of the Au Sable over rock in the wooded valley below and the shudder of the breeze amongst the topmost branches of the ancient pines towering on the slopes above me, there is no sound — no one is cutting wood or hammering nails anywhere in earshot, no one digs a well or a pit or ditch, no one opens or closes a door or a window. Even the birds — silent as ghosts!

Father wrote that he would meet me at the farm, that we would all meet in North Elba — we in the family who will go down into Africa together: my brother Watson, only twenty-four years old, who returned here to the farm after his turn in Kansas and Iowa ahead of me and who will die miserably in Father’s arms of gunshot wounds in less than four months’ time; and our youngest brother, Oliver, a boy of twenty-one and already battle-hardened from the Kansas campaign, but bookish withal and about to marry a daughter of the Brewster family nearby, a girl who will be a widow before turning twenty; and two of my brothers-in-law from the Thompson clan, William and Dauphin, whose elder brother Henry sacrificed all he dared in Kansas and returned to North Elba over a year ago to recover from his wound at Black Jack and live again as a farmer and husband to our sister Ruth and thus will not die in Virginia with his brothers. The others, sixteen of them — although Father thought there would be thirty or forty or even more — will join us when we ride south, or they have already been sent there by the Old Man to reconnoiter and await our arrival: John Kagi, who even now is in Virginia, ascertaining the number and quality of the forces that will oppose us; and John Cook, disguised as an itinerant schoolteacher, obtaining and fitting out for our rendez-vous the soon-to-be-famous Kennedy farmhouse on the heights north of Harpers Ferry, the place where we will make our headquarters during the weeks leading up to our assault on the armory and town below. Brothers John and Jason, with their families in Ohio, will not join us in battle, Jason on principle and John, against his principles, out of fear. Brother Salmon, at Father’s orders and despite his loud protestations, has been stationed here at the farm to care for Mary and our sisters and to manage the affairs of the family, which the Old Man knows will become exceedingly complex after the raid, regardless of its outcome.

But on the day of my arrival at the farm, no one is there to greet me; no one reaches out to embrace me and welcome me home. Shadows flash across the ground at my feet, as the broken, silver-edged clouds pass over the house and break and merge and break again — the earth keeps spinning on its spine and rolling around the sun, whilst here on the ground all is still, fixed in time and place like a lacquered insect impaled upon a pin: the lane off the roadway; the barn and outbuildings; the house itself. And there, yonder in the center of the yard, is Father’s rock, head-high and the size of a room. The chunk of dark gray granite sits settled upon the ground as if placed there for no other purpose than to mark the eventual gravesite of Father himself and of my brothers Watson and Oliver, of the Thompson boys, William and Dauphin; and to memorialize the impetuous John Kagi, the noble Aaron Stevens, who will take four shots in the body before he falls, and John Cook, who will be captured in the Pennsylvania woods a few miles north of Harpers Ferry and dragged back to Virginia to be hung alongside Father and the rest; of the quick-tempered boy from Maine Charlie Tidd, and Jeremiah Anderson, avenging himself upon his grandfather, a Virginia slaveholder, and Albert Hazlett, who followed the Old Man to victory in Kansas and will follow him to the scaffold in Virginia; and of the stoical Edwin Coppoc of Ohio and his younger brother, Barclay, and the free Negro John Copeland, as intelligent and articulate as a Brown; and of the Canadian spiritualist Stewart Taylor, and Will Leeman, the youngest of the raiders in our band, a Maine boy who went to work at fourteen in a shoe factory and at seventeen came out to Kansas for no other reason than to fight alongside the great Osawatomie Brown; and of Osborn Anderson, the Negro printer who joined Father in Canada, and Frank Meriam of Massachusetts, and Lewis Leary, the mulatto man who said he was descended from the Lost Colonists of Roanoke Isle, and the tall, handsome Dangerfield Newby, an escaped slave whose abiding hope for the raid was to free his wife and children, but who will die of a six-inch spike shot into his throat by a pro-slaver’s musket; and of Frederick Douglass’s man Shields Green, whom we called Emperor, a man born a slave, who freed his body and gave it over to the cause, but never quite freed his mind. . There sits the huge, rough Adirondack boulder, a chunk of the mountain Tahawus, ready to memorialize the short lives and violent deaths of the men whom I will ride into battle with and then betray. It will be their ghostly watchtower, the place where they will gather together afterwards and wait in silence through the long years, as winter snows blow down from Canada and sweep across the Plains of Abraham and as spring rains wash and thaw the land and soften it for the grasses and flowers of summer and as the autumn leaves catch and collect in low, moldering piles. Great-Grandfather John Brown’s Yankee slate marker leans against the rock, brought north from Connecticut, as Father long intended, to remind all men and women of the unmarked graves of the old Revolutionary War hero and of brother Fred, whose dates have been freshly cut into it and whose body lies beneath Kansas soil, forever lost to us: both those accusatory souls will linger with the others here as well, for it matters not where lie today the bits of bone and the shreds of cloth they once wore: their spirits have all returned to this one spot, this cold, gray altar, here to be stared and wondered at by casual passers-by, to be prayed over by those who would come out and pay homage to John Brown and his brave men, and to haunt and chastize me for all the remaining years of my life, even to today, this long, ongoing day of my inevitable return. It is here, before this stone altar, that I must make my final confession and my sacrifice.

Cold stove, aprons drooped across chair-backs, muddy boots stacked in the rack by the back entry: I stand in the dead center of the room and cock my head like a hunted animal listening for the hunter; no, more like the hunter poised for the sound of his prey. But I hear nothing, not even a mouse in the wall or a squirrel skittering across the cedar-shake roof. No brother or sister turns in sleep in a narrow cot in the loft overhead; no one sighs and peers from the small, square window up there. There is not a breath, human or otherwise, to ripple the still, funereal air of this house.

Perhaps I have unknowingly arrived home on the Sabbath, the Lord’s one day of rest, when, after six days of tending to our puny needs, He commands us to tend His. Perhaps everyone has departed for the small white church in the settlement below, there to pray for strength now and divine grace at the moment of death and salvation and eternal life thereafter.

Everlasting life—what a horrid thought! Although sometimes I have believed that it would not be a terrible thing to be killed eternally. To be slain again and again, until I no longer feared death. Then life would be the illusion, and dying and being born again to die again the only reality: the world, which has no experience anyhow at being me, would simply go on being itself. I might become good, finally: a perfect man, like a Hindoo saint, with no stern, bearded God lording it over me, enticing me with guilt and shame and principles and duty, and making goodness an irresistible obligation, impossible to meet, and not simply man’s natural condition.

Ah, but I was born and raised a Christian, not a Hindoo! I can only glimpse these things but now and then and cannot sustain such a perverse, foreign view of life and death for longer than it takes to write it down here. Worse, I am a Christian without a God, a fallen man without a Saviour. I am a believer without belief.

I’m unable to say how long I have stood here in the house thinking these strange thoughts, but the shadows have grown long, and the room has nearly fallen into darkness, when finally, for the first time since my arrival home, I hear the sound of another living creature: the slow hoofbeats of a horse, then of several horses approaching the farm at a walk, and the sharp bark of a dog — from the high, thin sound of it, a collie dog — and the laughter and easy talk of human beings! From the window I see, coming through the dusk, my family: there at the front is Father, white-bearded and looking ancient in the face, though still as straight-gaited as ever; and my stepmother, Mary, and my sisters seated up in the wagon; and my younger brothers and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and with them, afoot and on horseback and riding in a trap, half a dozen more, white people and Negroes both, our longtime northcountry neighbors and friends coming gaily along the lane from the settlement as if from a holiday outing.

Suddenly, the empty vessel has been filled, and out of invisibility and silence, I have been made visible to myself, and audible! I call out to them, joyous and grateful for the simple fact of their existence elsewhere than in my mind and memory, and rush pell-mell from the house to the yard and greet them there. These beautiful, utterly familiar faces and bodies are real, are tangible! And here, at last, clasped to the bosom of family and friends, I am one with others again! As when I was a child and my mother had not died yet. As when Father had not begun to block out the sun and replace it with his own cold disk, as when he had not cast me in his permanent shadow. They all touch me, and they even embrace me, and they say how glad they are to have me with them again. Though nothing is forgotten, all is forgiven! Even Susan Epps is here amongst them, and she has beside her, holding tightly to her skirt, a small boy — her son, Lyman’s son, emblem of her love for him and his forgiveness of me, for that is how she presents the little boy to me, saying simply, proudly, “I have a son to make your acquaintance, Owen Brown,” and that is how I receive him, and he me.

Sister Ruth declares that she, too, will soon have a child to make my acquaintance, a nephew or niece, and there will be others coming along before long, for here are Oliver and his pretty young bride, Miss Martha Brewster, who have this very afternoon become husband and wife! A wedding, one I could have attended myself, Ruth tells me, had I arrived in time or had they known of the imminence of my return so as to have held off the wedding for a few hours. But no one knew when Owen would appear, except Father, she says, and nods approvingly at the Old Man, who kept insisting that Owen would get home in time for Oliver’s and Lizzies wedding, and as usual Father was not altogether wrong, she adds, and not altogether right, and everyone laughs at that, for we are delighted when Ruth teases the Old Man, the only one of us who can do it and make him blush with pleasure from it and not scowl.

Mary, my dear stepmother, I first hold close to my face and then at arms’ length, so that I can peer into her large brown eyes and see my own face reflected back and know that, even though I can never love her as she wishes and Father asks, she nonetheless loves me as powerfully as any mother can love her natural son and feels no loss for herself or imbalance in the exchange, only sorrow for me. My brothers and brothers-in-law and my old friends from Timbuctoo and the village of North Elba, all in the shy way of northcountry farmers, shake my hand and clap me on the shoulder and ask me to say by what route, by what roads and ferries and canals, came I home all the way from I-o-way; and how were the other boys, asks Salmon, when I passed through Ohio; and their families, asks Watson, and our uncles and aunts and cousins in Ohio; and did I visit and pray over Grandfather Brown’s grave in Akron, asks sister Annie, the sweetest and most pious of Father’s daughters and of Grandfather Brown’s granddaughters. And to all I say yes and yes and yes: I have done everything that you would have me do, been everywhere you wanted me to go, said what you wished to have said yourselves, and now here I am standing amongst you, your beloved son, brother, uncle, dear friend, and I want nothing of life now but never again to leave this place and these people. I see the newly married and the recently familied and the several generations rising and all this beautiful, high meadowland and forest that surrounds us, and I permit myself the glimmering thought that someday soon I will ask to marry Susan Epps and raise her son and make for us a farm here on the Plains of Abraham. I will make of this joyful moment a starting point for a long, happy, and fruitful life, instead of making it the mocking, ironic end of a life that was short and bitter and barren.

Would that not be a wonderful way to end this story? With one wedding just finished and another soon to come — the third son of John Brown to marry the Negro widow of his dearest friend, to raise together his friend’s, her late husband’s, namesake into manhood here in the Adirondack wilderness, the three of them, one small family free of all the cruel symbolism of race and the ancient curse of slavery, a white man and a Negro woman and child held dear by a family and community that see them and deal with them solely as family and friends and fellow citizens?

Fantasy, delusion, dream! A guilty white man’s chimera, that’s all. It lasts but a second. It lasts until Father comes forward now and places his heavy hands onto my shoulders, and I am suddenly ashamed of my hope and can no longer look at Susan or her son or at anyone else. Only at Father: at his cold eyes, gray as granite. I feel him press his hands down with great force, as if he has settled a yoke upon my shoulders and wishes me to kneel under its weight. And so I do, I bend and kneel, and in Jesus’ name he prays over me, thanking the Almighty for bringing me safely home, so that I can keep and fulfill my covenant with the Lord and can now go out from this blessed place and commence the great and terrible work that He hath ordained for us.

Amen, he says; and Amen says everyone else; and Amen say I, too.

2 2

We wake in darkness and long for light, and when the light comes, we wait for darkness to return, so that we can descend the rickety ladder from our crowded, windowless attic and warm our hands at the kitchen fire and walk about the yard awhile. We go out of the house either in pairs or alone, so as not to draw the attention of some errant nighttime traveler unexpectedly making his late way past the old Kennedy farm, someone who from the road would surely note, even in darkness, the presence of a crowd often or more men milling about the stone-and-white-clapboard house and wonder why they were there. The house is surrounded by woods, however, and is fairly remote, with the public road in front leading only and indirectly to the country village of Boonesborough, so that a pair of men or a man alone, if he remain silent, can walk back and forth before the house unseen for a spell, can stretch his cramped limbs and breathe the cool, fresh air of outdoors for the first time in twenty-four hours, and from the road no one not warned of a stranger’s presence would see him. Even if by accident the traveler did catch a glimpse of a stranger or two standing in the yard, he would think nothing amiss, for Dr. Kennedy’s family, now removed to Baltimore, has often rented its old, abandoned family farm to landless seasonal farmers, which was how John Kagi, when he contracted to rent the place for us, represented Father and his several sons — a Mr. Isaac Smith and his boys, from up near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, looking for good Virginia farmland to buy and perhaps at the same time to graze and fatten a few head of livestock to butcher and sell in the fall to the citizens and armory workers of Harpers Ferry. Kagi, who seems almost to believe his lies himself, has a gift for storytelling.

The town of Harpers Ferry and the rifle and musket manufactories and the federal arsenal are situated in a deep, narrow gorge three miles south of here, on a spit of terraced, flat-rock land, where the Shenandoah cuts between two high, wooded ridges and empties into the Potomac. At first sight, it seems an unlikely place to make and store an army’s weapons, vulnerable to attack and siege from the high bluffs on both sides of both rivers. But Father has explained that none of our nation’s enemies could attack the town, so far from sea, without first having captured Washington, fifty miles downriver, or Richmond and Baltimore. The last place from which the federal government would expect Harpers Ferry to be attacked is by land, he says, smiling, and only our fellow Americans could manage that. Which is, of course, precisely where and who we are: ensconced northwest of the town up here in the Kennedy farmhouse, fellow Americans coming in under cover of darkness one by one from all over the continent — well-armed young men with anti-slavery principles in their minds and bloody murder in their hearts.

We have said our somber final goodbyes to our families and homes in the North and have joined the Old Man here — fifteen white men and five Negro, when we have all assembled — to wait out the days and weeks and, if necessary, months until he tells us finally that the moment we have been waiting for, some of us for a lifetime, has come. The plan, his meticulously detailed schedule and breakdown of operations, he has rehearsed for us over and over again, night after night, in the chilled, candlelit room above the one big room of the house, our prison, as we have come jokingly to call it. On the basement level, there is a kitchen, where sister Annie and Oliver’s new wife, Martha, have settled in to cook and launder for us — they arrived back in mid-July, after Father, having determined that our disguise as land speculators and provenders of meat required the presence of womenfolk, summoned them down from North Elba. A short ways from the house is a locked shed, where we have stored our weapons, which we periodically clean and maintain to break the monotony of our confinement-some two hundred Sharps rifles and that many more pistols and a thousand sharpened steel-tipped pikes, all paid for by Father’s secret supporters and shipped to Isaac Smith & Sons piecemeal over the summer months from Ohio and Hartford by way of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in wooden cases marked “Hardware and Castings.” John Kagi, who once taught school in the area and knows it well, has functioned as our main advance agent here and has facilitated these delicate operations. Also, John Cook has been here for nearly a year already, sent down from Iowa by Father as a spy, because of his intelligence and Yale education and his much-admired social skills, and he has managed without arousing suspicion to gain employment as a canal-lock tender and last spring even married a local girl, whom he had got with child, which naturally did not particularly please Father, but it helped Cook settle into the daily life of the town, and that has proved useful.

We ourselves have arrived in a trickle, a few at a time. First, on July 3, Father and I and our old Kansas cohort Jeremiah Anderson came in by wagon from North Elba, and then soon after came Oliver and Watson and the Thompson boys, William, who earlier wished to be in Kansas with us and his brother Henry but never made it off the Thompson farm, and his younger brother Dauphin, only twenty years old, by nature a sweet and gentle boy, but who over the years has come practically to worship Father. From Maine comes Charlie Tidd and with him Aaron Stevens, both hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign, and shortly after them, Albert Hazlett rides a wagon in, followed by the Canadian Stewart Taylor, the spiritualist, who is convinced that he alone will die at Harpers Ferry and seems almost to welcome it, as if his death is a small price to pay for the survival of the rest of us. A week later, the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barclay, will arrive at the farmhouse, lapsed Quakers who trained with us in Iowa. Then, late in the summer, Willie Leeman will walk all the way in from Maine, and shortly after him come the first of the Negroes, Osborn Anderson and Dangerfield Newby, which pleases Father immensely, for he has begun to grow fearful that his army will be made up only of white men. In the end, there will be four more men to join us at the Kennedy farm: the Bostonian Francis Meriam, unstable and inspired to join us by his recent visit with the journalist Redpath to the black republic of Haiti; and John Copeland, Lewis Leary, and Shields Green, the last three of them Ohio Negroes, which, not counting our commander-in-chief, rounds out our number at twenty.

But do not fear, this number will be sufficient unto our present needs, Father has declared. We have pared away from our side all those men who would defeat us through their cowardice and faithlessness. We now have only the enemy to fight. July has turned into August and is moving rapidly towards autumn, and as each new recruit joins us, Father begins his narrative anew, an old jeremiad against slavery that lapses into fresh prophecy of its demise, as weekly he adjusts his plan for the taking of Harpers Ferry, so that it reflects the skills and personalities of the new arrivals, his increased belief in his recruits’ commitment to the raid, and his growing awareness that in the end there will be far fewer of us than he anticipated. The arrival of Mr. Douglass will, of course, alter things considerably, even if he comes alone, but it’s mainly afterwards that his presence will revise our circumstances and operations, Father points out, after we have seized the town and the cry has gone out across the Virginia countryside that Osawatomie Brown and Frederick Douglass have begun their long-awaited war to liberate the slaves. That’s when our sharpened pikes, with their six-foot ash handles and eight-inch knife blades bolted to the top, will go into action. Father believes that most of the slaves who join up with us will not be much experienced in the use of firearms, but until they can be trained and properly armed, these weapons will do them fine. Besides, the very sight of razor-sharp spears in the hands of vengeful liberated Negroes will help terrorize the slaveholders. Terror is one of our weapons, he says. Perhaps our strongest weapon. Until then, however, and for now, this is the plan.

From our blanket rolls scattered over the rough plank floor, we prop our heads in our hands and listen to our commander-in-chief, and each of us sees himself playing his role flawlessly, not missing a cue or a line, as if he were an actor in a perfectly executed play. Father sits on a stool in the center of the attic, and as usual, he first hectors and inspires us with his rhetoric and then runs through his plan yet again. He is the author of the play and its stage-manager and master of costumes and scenery and all our properties, and he is the lead actor as well — along with Mr. Douglass, of course, we mustn’t forget him, for without Frederick Douglass, no matter how successful the first act is played, the second and third will surely fail. There may not even be a second or third. Everyone knows that. Father will reveal more about those acts later, he says, but for now we need be mindful only that it is overall a work, a performance, whose second and continuing acts will require not one hero but two.

The rest of us are important players, too, we know, but compared to the Old Man and Mr. Douglass, minor. Father insists that no, each one of us is as crucial to the success of this operation as every other: from top to bottom, we are a chain, and if one link breaks, the entire chain comes undone. But still, we know better. And so does he. Each of us twenty is replaceable, and until Mr. Douglass arrives, this will be the Old Man’s show, and then it will belong to the two of them. It will never belong to us. Meanwhile, however, we listen to the Old Man’s directions and memorize our lines and positions, so that when at last Osawatomie Brown steps onto the stage and begins the action, we will be able to follow his lead and efficiently prepare the way for the entry of the famous Frederick Douglass and his thousands of Negro actors, all of whom are as yet unrehearsed and have been cast as players only in our imaginations.

Even so, the time to act is fast approaching, Father tells us. Already there have appeared numerous signs from the Lord — such as the sudden recent arrival of the pikes from Chambersburg, where they had been oddly delayed for weeks, despite Kagi’s best attempts to get them released and sent on to us. And soon from the Lord there will come additional signs, emblems and omens dressed as incidental events and information, to encourage us and make us the more eager to risk our lives in battle rather than continue with this suffocating waiting game at the farm on the Maryland Heights. For instance, Father will dispatch Cook down along the Charles Town Turnpike to determine the numbers and disposition of the slaves there, his only attempt to reconnoiter the region beyond the town of Harpers Ferry itself, and Cook will return aflame with news that the moon is right for insurrection, for it is nearly a dog-tooth moon, the type that makes Africans particularly discontented, he has learned. This, too, is a sign from the Lord, Father tells us. Cook has also been told of a young male slave at a farm nearby who just yesterday hung himself because his owner sold the man’s wife down South. A shipment of spears suddenly released, a dog-tooth moon, and a hanging man: on the strength of these and other similarly propitious portents, Father has sent sister Annie and Martha back home to North Elba. We are now awaiting only the arrival of Mr. Douglass, who we hope will bring with him a phalanx of well-armed Negro fighters from the North, although Father warns us that lately letters from his black cohorts back there are suggesting otherwise.

Finally, one night Father climbs up to our attic with his lamp in one hand and a fat packet of papers and maps in the other, and taking his customary seat at the center of the group, he spreads the contents of his packet at his feet. As he begins to speak, he raises one of the maps from the pile — we see at once that it is the now-familiar drawing of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry, made by Cook — and, as usual, he shows it to us and allows it to be passed amongst us, so that, while Father sets out the plan, each man can better visualize what he is to do and where he shall stand when he does it. This time, however, when he has gone through, once again, step by step, the taking of Harpers Ferry, he retrieves and sets aside Cook’s map and is silent and looks somberly at his clasped hands, as if in prayer. After a long moment, without looking up, he abruptly declares that tonight he has decided to reveal to us that we will not be conducting the sort of raid that most of us still believe we have come here for. This is not to be merely a larger, more dangerous and dramatic, slave-running expedition than any of us has ever undertaken before. There is instead a much larger task before us, a greater thing than we have yet dared imagine.

Kagi has long known of this grand, about-to-be-revealed scheme, as have I, of course, and a few of the others, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and we have argued privately amongst ourselves as to its feasibility and have agreed, after much disputation, that it can be done and must be attempted; but my brothers Watson and Oliver have not heard it before, nor my brothers-in-law Will and Dauphin Thompson, nor has Father until now trusted any of the recent arrivals with this vision, for it is truly a vision and not so much a plan, and to see it as he does, we must first for a long time not have seen or heard much else. Our long confinement together and our isolation from the world outside have finally made us all visionaries, capable at last of seeing what Father sees and of believing his words as if they were true prophecy.

Here, men, I want you to examine these maps, he says, and he picks up and flaps at us a set of cambric-cloth squares onto which he has pasted the states of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas — eight squares, and one state to a square. In the margin of each map, he has written numerals: 491,000, for the number of slaves in Virginia, he explains, 87,000 in Maryland, and so on, which comes to a total of 1,996,366 slaves, he pronounces, looking up at us. But he does not see us, his twenty followers, unshaven, unwashed, gaunt, and sober-faced, all of us young men and a few of us mere boys: instead, his gray eyes gleam with excitement at the sight of a spreading black wave of mutinous slaves, nearly two million strong, as all across the South they flee their cabins and shops and barns and rise from the cotton and tobacco and sugarcane fields and take up pitchforks, axes, machetes, and the thousands of Sharps rifles that will come flowing down the Alleghenies from the North; he sees them, first hundreds, then thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, flowing down the country roads and highways, meeting in town squares and on city streets and merging into the largest army ever seen in this land, an army with but one purpose, and that is to take back from the slaveholders what for a quarter of a millennium has been stolen from them — their freedom, their American birthrights, their very lives. This raid will establish no Underground Railroad operation, he tells us, for regardless of scale, it is no mere slave raid. This will be an act of an entirely different order. Yes, after we have taken Harpers Ferry, we will make our appointed rendezvous with Mr. Douglass in the Allegheny foothills west of here, as planned, but then we will not, as some of us believed, hole up in small forts and siphon escaped slaves into the North. Instead, we shall divide our forces into two portions, the Defenders, under Mr. Douglass’s command, and the Liberators, under Father’s, and whilst the Defenders protect and hurry into the North those women, children, elderly, and infirm slaves who wish to resettle there, the Liberators will commence to march rapidly southward along the densely wooded north-south mountain passes, making lightning-like strikes against the plantations on the plains lower down, seizing armories and arsenals and supplies as they go, building a cavalry, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, and even seizing artillery, like the Maroons of Jamaica, destroying railroads and fortifications. When the Shenandoah Valley goes, the plantations along the James River will quickly fall, and then the Tidewater tobacco farms, and when Virginia goes, the rest of the Southern states will nearly conquer themselves, there being down there, as in Haiti and Jamaica, such a disproportionate number of Negroes to whites. And there will be thousands of non-slaveholding whites, too, God-fearing, decent Southerners, who will come running to our side, once they understand that our true intentions are not to slay white men and women in their beds or to overthrow their state or federal government or to dissolve the Union, but merely to end American slavery. To end it now, here, in these years. Look, look! he says, excitedly showing us the map of Alabama, where with X’she has marked, county by county, the heaviest concentrations of slaves. When we emerge from the Tennessee hills here in Augusta County, the slaves will rise up spontaneously in adjacent Montgomery County, and in a week or perhaps two, when the news has arrived there, the same will occur in Macon and Russell Counties, and the flames of rebellion will leap like a wildfire from one district to the next, straight across into Georgia, whence the fire will roar all the way east to the Sea Isles, causing it to curl back north into the Carolinas, until we have ignited a great, encircling conflagration, which cannot be extinguished until it has burnt the ancient sin and scourge of slavery entirely away, from one end of the South to the other, from Maryland to Louisiana, until at last nothing remains of the Slavocracy but a smoldering pile of char!

The Old Man’s peroration ends and is met with soft silence. At first, Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson look slowly around the dim, shadowy room, as if searching the faces of the others for a sign that their collective silence indicates collective skepticism, which was Kagi’s early reaction to Father’s vision, or dismay, Cook’s and Stevens’s first response, or simple awe, Anderson’s. I myself look to my brothers’ eyes, Watson and Oliver, seeking there a clarifying version of my own thoughts and feelings, for in my earlier disputations with Kagi, Cook, and Stevens, I defended the logic of Father’s grand plan with no other desire than to defeat their objections to it, my old role, and in winning them over have not made my own private position strong to myself or even clear. But it is too late. Watson and Oliver and the Thompsons, my brothers and brothers-in-law, all of the men, wear on their faces a single expression, the expression worn also by Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and no doubt by me, too: it is the hungry look of a follower, of a true believer. There is no Thomas the Doubter in this room, no sober skeptic, no ironist, no dark materialist. We have all been confined here in this isolated place for too many weeks and months to have any mentality left that is not a piece of a single mind, and that mind is shaped and filled by Father alone.

But, yes, much of what you have expected will be met, he continues, calmer now, comforted by our silence. He again holds out Cook’s large, detailed map of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry and says that we shall indeed, as we have intended all along, soon attack and seize the town. That has not changed. It will be our first formally declared act of war against the slaveholders, the first act of our mighty drama. And when we have seized the town, we shall, as planned, take control of the arms stored in three buildings there — the government armory, where the muskets are made, the Hall rifle works, and the arsenal. As we all know, there are no federal troops presently posted in the town and only a few private guards protecting these stores of weapons and munitions, so we will not be much opposed, and if we strike quickly and under cover of night, it will be done before we are even noticed by the townspeople. We shall nevertheless take hostages and hold them, probably in the armory yard, to protect us against the local militias, should they be roused, whilst we await the first reinforcing arrival of mutinous slaves from the surrounding countryside, and then, in a matter of hours, we shall have flown back up into the mountain fastness south and west of the town, whence shall come our Republic’s salvation.

Shortly after nightfall on a Sabbath, it will begin with a fervent prayer offered up to God, that we may be assisted by Him in the total, final liberation of all the slaves on this continent. We shall not ask the Lord to spare or even to protect our own lives in this venture: our lives have been pledged strictly to our duty; that is all. We must not ask the Lord to release us of our duty. Then, with everyone gathered in the room below, so that we may be mentally clear as to our legal rights and obligations and our principles, Aaron Stevens, who has the most impressive voice of us all, will read aloud Father’s Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States, which so nobly begins: Whereas slavery is a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence: therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances. He will read all forty-five articles, ending thusly, with the carefully worded reassurance that The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any State government, or of the general government of the United States, and look to no dissolution of the

Union, but simply to amendment and repeal. And our flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution.

Following this somber recitation, our commander-in-chief will administer anew to us as a group the same oath of secrecy that, individually, upon our first arrival at the farm, each of us has already been sworn to. Father then will say simply, “Men, get on your arms. We now proceed to the Ferry.”

I am to stay behind with Francis Meriam and Barclay Coppoc, the two men Father and I have come to view as the weakest links in our chain, the one because of his physical frailty and tendency to hysteria, the other because of his youth and his residual Quaker timidity. I would prefer to be at the front with Father and the others, but I know better than to object to this assignment, for no one else in the group can be trusted with it, he says, and besides, it places me in a position of authority as second-in-command and at Father’s flank, so that if something goes dreadfully wrong, my duty will be to rescue them. My immediate charge, however, is to transfer all the arms from the house and storage shed, except for those taken by the advance party, to a small, unused schoolhouse situated in the woods overlooking the Potomac and directly across the river from Harpers Ferry, there to await the first arrival of liberated slaves, to arm them and lead them into the mountains, where a few days later we will rendez-vous with Father and the others. On his map of Virginia, Father shows us our Allegheny meeting place in Frederick County, which he himself scouted years ago, while on a surveying expedition of lands owned by Oberlin College. Mr. Douglass should have joined us by then, Father assures us, and will take overall command of my unit. I am to remain as captain of the new recruits, however, and as executive officer of the operation, until Father himself has joined us. After that, I am to ride at Father’s side with the Liberators. I have also been charged with the obligation to remove or destroy any incriminating evidence that we might have left here at the farmhouse, such as letters, maps, journals, and other personal effects.

We have in our possession two wagons, one for my use and the other for Father’s advance party. It must be on a night with no moon shining, no stars, a night overcast and drear, and when Father’s men have loaded their wagon with the half a hundred pikes and twenty rifles they require for the taking of Harpers Ferry, immediately and without ceremony, at a simple command from Father, they will set off down the public road, Father perched on the wagon seat with his head uncharacteristically bent forward, stooped as if in deep thought or prayer, and our old North Elba farmhorse, the bay Morgan mare, between the shafts, and the sixteen men marching silently in the cold drizzle alongside the wagon and behind. I will stand by the door of the house with Meriam and young Barclay Coppoc and watch them disappear into the darkness as if being swallowed by it. I do not know yet what I will feel when that moment comes, but it will not be fear or dread. It is too late for that.

After a few moments, when we can no longer hear the tramp of their boots on the wet ground or the creak and chop of their wagon and horse, my two men and I will turn quickly to our tasks — Meriam and Coppoc to load our wagon with the remaining weapons from the shed, whilst I gather all our scattered papers from the house. By candlelight, I will prowl carefully through the entire house, from basement kitchen to our attic hideout, collecting every shred of paper I can find and stuffing all of it loosely into a cloth valise. To my slight surprise, I will be obliged to fill the bag several times over, emptying it each time in the basement next to the woodstove on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. Soon I will have made a large, disordered pile, at first glance much of it rubbish, which I plan to separate from the rest and burn. But when I commence to sort the papers, I will discover with a little shock that most of the remaining papers, a whole heap of them, are Father’s, and amongst them are dozens of letters, many from family members in North Elba and Ohio, and numerous others, only slightly coded, written by his secret Northern supporters, Dr. Howe, Gerrit Smith, Franklin Sanborn, and so on, and even several letters from Frederick Douglass, and receipts for Father’s purchases of arms back in Iowa and Ohio and for the pikes in Hartford, Connecticut, and here are all of Father’s maps, the very maps with which he showed us his grand plan, and Cook’s drawing of Harpers Ferry, and Father’s pocket notebooks, where he has listed, county by county, as on his maps, slave population figures taken from the 1850 national census, and the names of many towns and cities of the South and their marching distance from one another, such as Montgomery to Memphis, 3 da., and Charleston to Savannah, 2 1/2 da. I have known this would happen, for I have seen most of these papers, maps, and notebooks lying carelessly about for weeks, as if, having shown them to us, Father no longer wished to order or hide them, and I have felt a twinge of fear that, in the rush of last-minute preparations, he would neglect to take them up. But I would not reflect upon it until later, until after Father and I had ridden up for our final, secret meeting with Mr. Douglass in Chambersburg.

While I clear the house and my men stack the arms into our wagon, Father and his men will be nearing the covered bridge that crosses the Potomac from Maryland into the state of Virginia and the town of Harpers Ferry. This is how it will go. Around nine o’clock, the drizzle shifts over to a straight rain. At ten-thirty, they reach the Maryland Heights, a steep, wooded thousand-foot-high cliff above the cut of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge. Although from up here it is too dark to make out the shapes of the brick-front buildings and cobbled streets below, the men can see through the rain a few dim, last lights from the slumbering town. Passing by the abandoned log schoolhouse, where I am to store our weapons and later arm the escaping slaves, Father and his men descend on the narrow, winding lane to the grassy riverbank and march for a while alongside the wide, swift-flowing, steel-colored river to the covered bridge, which crosses to Harpers Ferry a short ways upstream from the place where the east-running Potomac River is joined from the south by the Shendandoah. Well in sight of the bridge now, its wide, black entrance beckoning like the mouth of a gigantic serpent, they leave the road and cross the C & O Canal at lock 23 and make their way in the cold rain along the tow path to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks running in from the east. Here the tracks turn, cross the canal, and pass through the covered bridge alongside the narrow roadway, passing over the wide, gray river in pitch darkness to the station and loading platforms in the town center, where they turn again and lead out of town on the further side of the Potomac into western Virginia and on to Ohio.

Father and his men are well down in the gorge now, as if they have entered the den of the monstrous snake. Behind them and before them on their left, like thick, black curtains hanging from the blacker sky, loom high walls, where clusters of scrub oak and thickets of thorn bushes cling to wet, rocky escarpments all the way to the tops, and tall, windblown chestnut and walnut trees rise from the bluffs above. There can be no return now: Father and his men have reached the bridge over the Potomac and must enter it and go on, straight into the town at the further end. Father halts the wagon at the entrance for a moment and stations Watson and Stewart Taylor as a rear guard on the Maryland side. Then, at the Old Man’s command, Kagi and Stevens march straight into the mouth of the bridge. Fifty yards back, Father follows in the rumbling wagon, and the rest of the men, rifles at the ready and cartridge boxes clipped to the outside of their clothing for quick access, march wordlessly along behind, walking stiffly on the loose planks, as if on ice, and taking shallow, tight breaths, as if afraid to fill their chests with the blackness that surrounds them.

A few moments later, Kagi and Stevens emerge from the long throat of the bridge. They are the first of the raiders to enter the town, and as soon as they have set their boots onto the rain-slicked cobbles of Potomac Street, a watchman hears their step and calls, Who goes there! Kagi answers, Hallo, Billy Williams! It’s a friend! The watchman draws close to the two and lifts his lantern and says, Oh, it’s Mister Kagi who’s out so late, and they instantly throw down on him and take him prisoner and douse his lamp.

The raid has begun. Osawatomie Brown and his men are inside Harpers Ferry and have taken their first hostage. The raiders are able to breathe and walk normally now, and they move rapidly and efficiently from one place and situation to the next, exactly as planned and rehearsed. Turning right on Potomac Street at the B & O train depot, they pass the deserted porch and darkened windows of the Wager Hotel, where the last guests have finally gone upstairs to their rooms, and head straight towards the armory, a long double row of brick buildings situated between the railroad siding and the canal. On the left, adjacent to the gate of the armory grounds, there is a square brick building, a single-storey, two-room structure that serves as a fire-engine house for the town and a guardhouse for the armory. When Father has drawn the wagon close to the iron gate, the armory watchman, whose name is Daniel Whelan, cracks open the timbered door of the firehouse, pauses, squints into the darkness, and then reluctantly steps outside into the rain. In a sleepy voice, he says, That you, Williams?

Open the gate, Mister Whelan, Father says.

You’re not Williams, says the watchman, more confused than frightened. At once, Oliver and Newby step forward with their rifles leveled and take him prisoner. Aaron Stevens grabs the crowbar from the wagon bed and twists it into the chain holding the gate. When the lock snaps, he and Kagi swing open the gate, and Father drives the wagon straight into the yard. The other men, including the two captured watchmen, follow at gunpoint, and Kagi swings the gate closed again.

Now Father climbs down from the wagon and, turning to his dumbfounded prisoners, declares that he has come here from Kansas, for this is a slave state, and he has come to free all its Negro slaves.

Williams and Whelan look wide-eyed in disbelief at the old man. The rain drips from the tattered brim of his hat and from his white beard. Barely hearing his words, they stare at him, this bony, sharp-eyed old fellow in the frock coat, who, except for his rifle and the two pistols at his waist, resembles more a poor, hardscrabble farmer from the hills than a Yankee liberator of slaves, and they look around at the small, shabbily dressed, heavily armed group of white and Negro young men who stand near him, and finally at each other, and say nothing. What is happening here? For Williams and Whelan, this is a strange, waking dream, a shared hallucination.

I have taken possession of the United States armory, the old man calmly continues. And if the citizens of the town interfere with me and my men, we must burn the town and have blood.

Father now proceeds to dispatch his men so as to take control of the remaining arms supplies and defenses of the town. Under guard by Dauphin Thompson and Lewis Leary, the two hostages are shut into the firehouse, while Oliver and Will Thompson are sent three blocks south on Shenandoah Street to take command of the bridge that crosses the Shenandoah River into town. The tollbooth proves to be empty and the bridge unguarded. Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc take over the arsenal, also unguarded, just off the main square and in sight of the hotel, where they will wait for further orders and a wagon to empty it. Stevens, Kagi, and Copeland are ordered to the rifle factory, which is located a short ways further down Shenandoah Street at Lower Hall’s Island, a long, narrow rise of land in the Shendandoah River that is separated from the shore by a canal. Once more, a single watchman is surprised by the raiders and, when captured, is marched by Stevens back to the firehouse, leaving Kagi and Copeland behind to hold the rifle works. On his return to the firehouse, Stevens comes upon three half-drunk, unarmed young men, carousers straggling home late from the Wager Hotel, and he swiftly puts them under his gun and brings them in with the watchman.

It is not yet midnight, and both bridges into town, the armory, the arsenal, and the rifle factory have been brought under the control of the raiders. Six men have been taken hostage and locked into the firehouse. Unknown to the rest of its citizens, unknown to the world, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, belongs to Osawatomie Brown. Around this time, the rain lets up, and the clouds slowly pull away and open the starry sky to view. Soon the dog-tooth moon breaks the dark horizon above the Maryland Heights north of town, where, just before one A.M., as Father expected, a fourth watchman, Patrick Higgins, comes down the moonlit footpath from his home in Sandy Hook to relieve Williams at the Maryland side of the Potomac bridge. As he enters the covered bridge, Watson and Stewart Taylor, Father’s rear guard, step from the shadows and capture the man. In silence, dutifully following the plan, they direct their prisoner to the bridge and commence marching him over to the firehouse, when suddenly Higgins turns and swats Watson on the forehead and races ahead of them into the darkness. Before Watson can stay his hand, Taylor raises his rifle and fires, his bullet slightly grazing the forehead of the escaping man, who is able nonetheless to get safely to the end of the bridge and into the Wager Hotel, where he is the first to raise the alarm, although he cannot say who has shot at him or why.

This is an eventuality that Father has anticipated, a part of his overall plan, and so long as it happens after the bridges and the arms stores have been captured and hostages have been taken, it does not much concern him that sometime in the night a shot or two will be fired, alerting the citizens that a violent action is under way. By daylight, they will know of it, anyhow, and will be told by him then of its purpose, and soon the whole country will begin to apprehend its scale. After all, this raid is meant to be a public act, not a private one, he has reminded us, and if our aims are to be met, we must actually invite a certain hue-and-cry and, so long as we are in control of events and not they us, welcome it. Still, the echoing sound of the first shot shocks the men, and Watson’s and Taylor’s breathless report that their prisoner has escaped into the hotel frightens them. Father, however, is calm as ice.

At this moment, he is mainly concerned with Aaron Stevens’s mission into the countryside. He has sent Stevens with Tidd and Cook and three of the Negro men, Anderson, Leary, and Green, five miles west of Harpers Ferry to Halltown, where resides the wealthy planter Colonel Lewis Washington, a man who is a direct descendant of General George Washington and, for that, something of a local celebrity and politician, an aide to Virginia’s Governor Wise. Further, he is known to have inherited from his incomparable ancestor an elaborately engraved pistol presented to the General after the Revolution by the Marquis de Lafayette and a ceremonial sword given him by King Frederick the Great of Prussia. The Old Man wants Colonel Lewis Washington as a hostage, and he wants to free the Colonel’s half-dozen slaves, but most of all, to help place his own acts into their proper context, he wants General George Washington’s pistol and his sword.

With a rail pulled from the fence by the meadow in front of the house, Stevens and his men batter down the Colonel’s door and roust him and his terrified family from their beds. When the Colonel has dressed and has delivered over to the raiders his ancestor’s famous weapons, Stevens formally places him under arrest and, leaving the man’s wife and young children behind, seats him next to Tidd in a two-horse carriage appropriated from the barn. Behind them, Anderson, Leary, and Green have hitched the Colonel’s four remaining horses to a farm wagon and have placed into it three liberated slaves, two men and a young woman — all they could find in the house and barn, or maybe they’re the only Negroes on the place not too frightened to show themselves, Anderson explains to Stevens, for these poor people can’t know for sure yet that we are who we say we are. Stevens agrees, and they start back along the Charles Town Turnpike towards Harpers Ferry.

A mile west of Bolivar Heights, still following Father’s orders, they draw the wagons up before a large farm owned by John Allstadt, after Colonel Washington the wealthiest planter in the region and, like him, a slaveholder — the owner, in fact, of the young woman who was sold off into the Deep South and her young husband who a week ago hung himself because of it. A second time, Stevens and his men break down a front door and enter a stranger’s home unopposed. They quickly make hostages of the man of the house, Mr. Allstadt, and his eighteen-year-old son, and unceremoniously liberate Allstadt’s four remaining slaves, who are added to the group in the farm wagon. As instructed, Stevens and the other raiders are scrupulously polite to their prisoners and to the women and children, just as they were at Colonel Washington’s, and they try not to frighten them overmuch and take pains to cause no unnecessary damage to the house or personal property, other than that of converting the slaves into free men and women. They state clearly to the whites their sole reason for breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and making prisoners of the husbands and sons — which is strictly to end slavery. If we are not opposed, Stevens says, no blood will be spilt. The husbands and sons, like the wagons and horses, will eventually be returned to them, but their slaves are no longer owned by them, he says. The slaves of Virginia are owned henceforth by themselves and cannot be returned to any man.

In the meantime, back at Harpers Ferry, at 1:25 A.M., precisely as scheduled, the Baltimore-bound B & O passenger train rolls in, and when it has hissed to a noisy stop at the station, the night clerk from the hotel next door skitters low from the door of the railroad station, and before the conductor can step down from the train to the platform, the man has leapt aboard, bearing the startling news that gunmen are out on the Potomac bridge and have shot a watchman, who lies bleeding inside the hotel! Worse, the other three town watchmen are nowhere about and may even have been murdered! And here’s something else: when the clerk slipped unseen into the station by a rear window adjacent to the hotel, he tried to telegraph the stationmaster in Charles Town and discovered that the wires had been cut. There is something very strange, something dangerous, happening, and until now, with no idea of how many gunmen might be out there or where they may be hiding, no one but the night clerk has dared to leave the hotel or been able to raise a general alarm.

The conductor, A. J. Phelps, takes immediate charge and directs the engineer and the baggagemaster, who carries a pistol, to step from the train and investigate the bridge, for it may have been sabotaged. Who knows but what these gunmen are train robbers and have blocked the bridge somehow? If the tracks appear clear, he says, they straightway will pass across the river and, at the station in Monococy in Maryland, will telegraph the news of these startling events over to Charles Town, the county seat, where there is a federal marshal’s office and a regiment of town militia available for help.

Sleepy passengers peer out their windows, wondering why the delay, as the engineer and the baggagemaster, his pistol at the ready, walk slowly along the station platform, step down to the railbed, and crunch over the cinders and gravel towards the dark mouth of the covered bridge. When the pair are about fifteen feet from the entrance, Watson speaks to them from the darkness ahead. Drop your pistol, sir, and both of you walk slowly towards us. Keep your hands in full view. You’re under a hundred guns, gentlemen, and are now our prisoners. You won’t be harmed, if you do as we say.

The baggagemaster lets his pistol fall to the railbed, and the two men, as instructed, extend their hands as if ready to be manacled and walk forward. Meanwhile, behind them, up on the platform, a Negro man named Hayward Shepherd, a freedman employed at the station as the night baggageman, has stepped from the office to the platform to see what is going on, and Phelps, the conductor — too far from the bridge for him or the clerk or anyone on the train to see in the darkness that the engineer and the baggagemaster have been all but taken prisoner — orders him to go and assist them in their investigation. Shepherd jumps to the ground and hurries to join the two, who have disappeared inside the bridge. When he, too, has neared the entrance and is now beyond earshot of the men on the platform, he hears a calm, low voice from the darkness, Watson Brown’s, ordering him to stop and listen. Shepherd, a middle-aged bachelor affectionately called “Uncle Hay” by the white citizens of the town, stops and listens. In a conversational tone, Watson tells him what Father has instructed all of us to say to the Virginia freedmen. We have come from Kansas to free the slaves. You may join us in this enterprise or not. But if you refuse to join us, we will treat with you as with any white man who refuses to join us. We will be forced to consider you our enemy.

For a second, Shepherd hesitates, as if not quite getting Watson’s meaning, and then abruptly he turns and runs. Watson — or perhaps it is Stewart Taylor, or maybe some other raider, standing in the shadows of the storefronts nearby; any one of us could have done it — fires his rifle, and Shepherd falls, mortally wounded by a single bullet in the spine, running through to the chest. With everyone watching him and no one daring to move to help — not Watson or Stewart inside the covered bridge, not their two prisoners, not the several raiders hiding in the shadows along the street or Father standing unseen at the gate of the armory, not the men up on the platform by the station or the passengers staring in horror from the windows of the train: no one who sees it can make himself come forward to help the fallen man — as Shepherd lifts his bloody chest from the cinders and with his arms slowly drags his numbed, dying body away from the bridge towards the station. After what seems like a long while, he succeeds in getting to a protected place below the platform that is close enough for Phelps and the hotel clerk safely to reach down and draw him up to it, where they quickly pull his body inside the station as if he were already a dead man.

Prepare yourselves for sad ironies, Father forewarned us, often enough for us to have expected it. But it has come nonetheless as a dismaying shock. Men, the cruel perversity of slavery will snap back betimes and will try to bite us in our face, he told us. We have to be hard, hard. This surely is what he meant: that in the liberation of the slaves, the first to die may well be neither a white man nor a slave, but a free Negro.

This sad event has the immediate good effect, however, of closing down the train and trapping its passengers inside it, with Conductor Phelps and the hotel clerk retreating to the station, and the guests, those few wakened by this, the second gunshot of the night, holing up inside the hotel. For the time being, the town is still ours. A little after four A.M., Aaron Stevens’s party comes clattering down Potomac Street, the trap driven by Tidd, with Colonel Washington and Mr. Allstadt and his son in it, and the farm wagon driven by Cook, with the seven liberated slaves huddled in back. Stevens, who carries General Washington’s pistol and sword wrapped in a blanket, and the other raiders, Anderson, Leary, and Green, are on horseback, their mounts taken from Allstadt’s farm.

As soon as they have arrived at the armory yard, Father tells the newly freed slaves who he is, Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, which, as he expected, evokes in them a certain fearfulness, until he reveals that his principal ally is the famous Negro Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave himself, and this seems to impress and calm them somewhat, for these are Virginia ex-slaves and rebellious types, surely, or they would not have come in with Stevens and his men, and being from a border town, they no doubt have had secret access to abolitionist information and literature. He places pikes into their hands and stations them inside the firehouse to guard the growing number of hostages. For now, these white men are your prisoners, he says. Treat them honestly, for they are hostages, whom we will deploy if we need to bargain for our continued safety, and as we will be freeing them later, we want them to tell other white people the truth about us, that we want not revenge but liberty.

The seven Negroes, a woman and six men, several of them barefoot in the cold night, take up their pikes and hesitantly, as if they have no choice in the matter, follow their former masters into the firehouse, while Father straps on George Washington’s scabbard and sword and adds to his pair of old service revolvers the General’s engraved pistol and tooled leather holster. In all his armament, he is a formidable sight, a warrior chieftain, and with his Old Testament beard and fierce gray eyes and his battered straw hat and Yankee farmer’s woolen frock coat and his — to the Negroes, to all people, in fact — peculiar way of speaking, he is a paradoxical one as well: a man out of time, without a shred of vanity or the slightest regard for convention, and though an old man, he is as overflowing as a boy with single-minded purpose and high principles, armed and clothed for no other task in life than this night’s bloody work. The rest of the men, if they put their rifles down, and the ex-slaves, if they put away their pikes, could easily fold back into the general populace and disappear from sight, here or anywhere in America; but not Father: he is Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, and no American, white or black, Northern or Southern, would mistake him for anybody else.

Although they are far fewer than he expected by now and seem somewhat confused and fearful, the arrival of these, the first of the freed slaves, has excited Father, and he orders Cook to drive one of the wagons over to the Maryland side, to the schoolhouse where I and my two men, Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam, will have cached the remainder of our arms, one hundred fifty rifles and another hundred pistols and most of the thousand sharpened pikes. Cook is to bring one-third of the pikes back into town, for, surely, by morning there will be mutinous slaves thronging to the armory yard. The remainder of the weapons are for me and my men to distribute first amongst the insurrectionary slaves who come in from Maryland, and then we are to carry the remainder up into the mountains for eventual dispersal there. By daylight, on both sides of the river, we will have hundreds of escaped slaves to arm, Father says, and must be ready for them in both places, or they will not believe that we are serious.

For now, until further orders, the raiders who are inside the town are merely to hold their positions — Kagi and his men, Copeland and now Leary, over at the rifle factory on Hall’s Island, Oliver and Will Thompson posted at the Shenandoah bridge, Watson and Taylor still holding the bridge across the Potomac, and Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc guarding the arsenal; the rest of the men stand at the ready here at the center of town, in and around the armory grounds and the firehouse.

It is close to six A.M. The rain has ceased, and the heavy storm clouds have moved off, and as dawn approaches, the sky turns slowly to a fluttery, gray, silken sheet, with the high, wooded ridges in the east and north silhouetted against it. The brick storefronts and houses and offices of the town and the narrow, cobbled streets glisten wetly from the night’s rain, and when the first light of the rising sun spreads across the eastern horizon, the faces of the buildings here below turn pink and seem almost to bloom, as if in the darkness of the night they existed only in a nascent form, not quite real.

Before long, the first of the armory workers, all unsuspecting, come drifting into the center of town in twos and threes from their small wood-frame houses above the cliffs on Clay Street, and as they walk through the iron gate into the yard, Father and the others grab them and make them hostages in the firehouse, until he has close to forty men crowded into the two large rooms and has to station several of his raiders inside with the freed slaves to help guard them. Then, by daylight, just as Father said it would, word of the raid gets out. Dr. John Starry, a local physician, is the first to raise the alarm. Summoned to the hotel hours earlier to care for the wounded watchman and the dying Hayward Shepherd by a courageous Negro barman who, at risk of his life, slipped out a side door of the hotel and down dark alleyways to the physician’s house, Dr. Starry bandages the watchman’s forehead and is at Shepherd’s side when the poor man dies, after which, accompanied by the barman who brought him there, he succeeds in returning to his home undetected, where at once he rouses his family and neighbors. Then he rides to the home of the Superintendent of the Armory, A. M. Kitzmiller, bringing the scarcely-to-be-believed news. The armory, arsenal, and rifle works and a large group of hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, are all in the hands of an army of abolitionist murderers that is led by none other than Osawatomie Brown and aided by a wild gang of escaped, spear-carrying slaves! There is a full-scale insurrection under way! Brown has trained cannon on the square, the doctor reports, and is moving all the arms from the town into the interior!

Soon the bell of the Lutheran church atop the hill starts to clang, summoning the citizens to an emergency meeting, and a rider has been sent to Shepherdstown to call out the local militia, and a second has been dispatched to Charles Town for the Jefferson Guards, formed for the express purpose of meeting precisely this circumstance after the Turner rebellion back in ‘31.

Father and his men, when they hear the church bell ringing on and on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, know what is happening. Don’t be frightened, boys, don’t panic. There’s still plenty of time, he assures the men. The hostages and practically every rifle in the town are in our hands. And the Lord is watching over us. We won’t go down, boys, but if the Lord requires it of us, then it will be as Samson went. These people know that, and they don’t want it, so we’re still safe enough here.

It is full daylight, around seven A.M., when Father strides through the gate of the armory yard and approaches the railroad station and calls out for Mr. Phelps, the conductor. Come here, sir! I wish to parley with you! Phelps pokes his head out the door but refuses to come forward. I have decided to let you move the train on to Baltimore, Father declares. But tell your employer, and tell all the civil and military authorities, that this is the last train I will permit in or out of Harpers Ferry, at the extreme peril of those men we have taken prisoner, until we have finished with our business here.

Phelps nods, and he and the engineer and the baggagemaster return to the train, fire it up, and take it slowly towards the covered bridge and across the Potomac into Maryland. From the schoolhouse on the heights opposite, I watch the train far below snake its way out of the bridge and wind along the north bank of the river towards Baltimore and Washington beyond, and I know that within minutes, as soon as the train has reached the station at Monocacy, news of the raid will reach the main offices of the B & O. An hour later, in Richmond, an aide to Governor Henry Wise will disturb the Governor’s breakfast with astonishing news, and shortly afterwards, in Washington, D.C., an adjutant general will burst into the office of the Secretary of War, who will read the wire from Governor Wise requesting federal troops and will at once ask for an emergency meeting with President Buchanan. More in line with Father’s purposes — and I know this, too — by evening, every newspaper in the land will be shouting the news of our raid:

FEARFUL AND EXCITING INTELLIGENCE! NEGRO INSURRECTION

IN HARPERS FERRY, VIRGINIA, LED BY JOHN BROWN OF KANSAS!!

MANY SLAIN, HUNDREDS TAKEN HOSTAGE, FEDERAL ARMS SEIZED!!!

In morning light, a few personal weapons, mostly antiquated muskets and squirrel guns, have been located by the townspeople, and five or six of the more adventurous men among them have taken up firing positions on the hillside above the armory yard. It is not long, however, before they are spotted by the raiders, most of them Kansas veterans and much more experienced than the locals at this sort of action and possessing weapons of surpassing accuracy, so that the townsmen are barely able to open fire, when one of them, a grocer named Boerly, is shot dead by a bullet from a raider rifle, which causes a quick retreat amongst the others. It is mid-morning. The militias from Shepherdstown and Charles Town have not yet arrived, and in Washington, fifty miles to the east, federal troops are only now being mustered for railroad transport to Harpers Ferry. Here in town, their feeble efforts at defense effectively curtailed by the raiders’ deadly accurate Sharps rifles, by their fear of endangering the hostages, and by their growing certainty that there are many more than Father’s seventeen raiders occupying the town and hundreds more escaped slaves than seven, the citizens are limited to taking occasional, erratic potshots in the general direction of the armory, causing more danger and havoc to themselves than to the raiders.

Even so, over at the rifle works on Hall’s Island, Kagi has grown increasingly anxious about the passage of so much time, for he and his two men, Copeland and Leary, though they have so far held the factory uncontested, are situated far from the hostages in the firehouse, and thus, of Father’s force, they are the most vulnerable to attack from the townsmen. Kagi dispatches Leary to town on foot to request Father to send back a wagon and additional men, so that they can quickly load the seized weapons from the factory and begin their escape into the mountains. It is time. None of the raiders has been killed or even wounded. According to the plan, they should all be departing from Harpers Ferry by now.

And I, up on the Maryland Heights, should also have left by now. That is the plan, Father’s plan, his vision of how it would go at Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17, and everything up to now has gone accordingly. Except for the one thing: that the hundreds of escaping slaves whom we expected to come rushing to our side have not yet appeared, and the few who have are turning fearful and hesitant and may themselves have to be put under guard and made into hostages.

But that does not matter, I decide, as I watch from my perch above the town. Father’s plan can accommodate that, too. We have seized at least three wagonloads of weapons, we have terrorized the entire South into believing that an insurrection has begun, and in the North we have raised fresh huzzahs and enthusiastic promises of material support and a coming flood of volunteer fighters — we have, indeed, begun an insurrection, which surely, thanks to the presence of Frederick Douglass, will catch and burst into flame in a matter of mere days, and if Father leads his men out of Harpers Ferry now and makes his appointed rendez-vous in the Alleghenies with Mr. Douglass, we will still be able to feed those flames and follow them into the deeper South, just as Father wished. It is not too late.

The slaves will come in, Father insists. They will soon start to arrive. We must give them every moment up to the last possible moment to learn of our raid and our intentions and to overcome their natural fears and flee their masters’ farms and plantations for the town, which is still under our control. The second we abandon the town, the escaping slaves will have no place to go where they are not in terrible danger. For their sake, we shall continue to hold the town, he declares. Even as the Jefferson Guards ride in on the Charles Town Pike from the west and the Shepherdstown militia comes in along the Potomac road from the north and the troop train from Washington slowly approaches from the east.

Chapter 22

We wake in darkness and long for light, and when the light comes, we wait for darkness to return, so that we can descend the rickety ladder from our crowded, windowless attic and warm our hands at the kitchen fire and walk about the yard awhile. We go out of the house either in pairs or alone, so as not to draw the attention of some errant nighttime traveler unexpectedly making his late way past the old Kennedy farm, someone who from the road would surely note, even in darkness, the presence of a crowd often or more men milling about the stone-and-white-clapboard house and wonder why they were there. The house is surrounded by woods, however, and is fairly remote, with the public road in front leading only and indirectly to the country village of Boonesborough, so that a pair of men or a man alone, if he remain silent, can walk back and forth before the house unseen for a spell, can stretch his cramped limbs and breathe the cool, fresh air of outdoors for the first time in twenty-four hours, and from the road no one not warned of a stranger’s presence would see him. Even if by accident the traveler did catch a glimpse of a stranger or two standing in the yard, he would think nothing amiss, for Dr. Kennedy’s family, now removed to Baltimore, has often rented its old, abandoned family farm to landless seasonal farmers, which was how John Kagi, when he contracted to rent the place for us, represented Father and his several sons — a Mr. Isaac Smith and his boys, from up near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, looking for good Virginia farmland to buy and perhaps at the same time to graze and fatten a few head of livestock to butcher and sell in the fall to the citizens and armory workers of Harpers Ferry. Kagi, who seems almost to believe his lies himself, has a gift for storytelling.

The town of Harpers Ferry and the rifle and musket manufactories and the federal arsenal are situated in a deep, narrow gorge three miles south of here, on a spit of terraced, flat-rock land, where the Shenandoah cuts between two high, wooded ridges and empties into the Potomac. At first sight, it seems an unlikely place to make and store an army’s weapons, vulnerable to attack and siege from the high bluffs on both sides of both rivers. But Father has explained that none of our nation’s enemies could attack the town, so far from sea, without first having captured Washington, fifty miles downriver, or Richmond and Baltimore. The last place from which the federal government would expect Harpers Ferry to be attacked is by land, he says, smiling, and only our fellow Americans could manage that. Which is, of course, precisely where and who we are: ensconced northwest of the town up here in the Kennedy farmhouse, fellow Americans coming in under cover of darkness one by one from all over the continent — well-armed young men with anti-slavery principles in their minds and bloody murder in their hearts.

We have said our somber final goodbyes to our families and homes in the North and have joined the Old Man here — fifteen white men and five Negro, when we have all assembled — to wait out the days and weeks and, if necessary, months until he tells us finally that the moment we have been waiting for, some of us for a lifetime, has come. The plan, his meticulously detailed schedule and breakdown of operations, he has rehearsed for us over and over again, night after night, in the chilled, candlelit room above the one big room of the house, our prison, as we have come jokingly to call it. On the basement level, there is a kitchen, where sister Annie and Oliver’s new wife, Martha, have settled in to cook and launder for us — they arrived back in mid-July, after Father, having determined that our disguise as land speculators and provenders of meat required the presence of womenfolk, summoned them down from North Elba. A short ways from the house is a locked shed, where we have stored our weapons, which we periodically clean and maintain to break the monotony of our confinement-some two hundred Sharps rifles and that many more pistols and a thousand sharpened steel-tipped pikes, all paid for by Father’s secret supporters and shipped to Isaac Smith & Sons piecemeal over the summer months from Ohio and Hartford by way of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in wooden cases marked “Hardware and Castings.” John Kagi, who once taught school in the area and knows it well, has functioned as our main advance agent here and has facilitated these delicate operations. Also, John Cook has been here for nearly a year already, sent down from Iowa by Father as a spy, because of his intelligence and Yale education and his much-admired social skills, and he has managed without arousing suspicion to gain employment as a canal-lock tender and last spring even married a local girl, whom he had got with child, which naturally did not particularly please Father, but it helped Cook settle into the daily life of the town, and that has proved useful.

We ourselves have arrived in a trickle, a few at a time. First, on July 3, Father and I and our old Kansas cohort Jeremiah Anderson came in by wagon from North Elba, and then soon after came Oliver and Watson and the Thompson boys, William, who earlier wished to be in Kansas with us and his brother Henry but never made it off the Thompson farm, and his younger brother Dauphin, only twenty years old, by nature a sweet and gentle boy, but who over the years has come practically to worship Father. From Maine comes Charlie Tidd and with him Aaron Stevens, both hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign, and shortly after them, Albert Hazlett rides a wagon in, followed by the Canadian Stewart Taylor, the spiritualist, who is convinced that he alone will die at Harpers Ferry and seems almost to welcome it, as if his death is a small price to pay for the survival of the rest of us. A week later, the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barclay, will arrive at the farmhouse, lapsed Quakers who trained with us in Iowa. Then, late in the summer, Willie Leeman will walk all the way in from Maine, and shortly after him come the first of the Negroes, Osborn Anderson and Dangerfield Newby, which pleases Father immensely, for he has begun to grow fearful that his army will be made up only of white men. In the end, there will be four more men to join us at the Kennedy farm: the Bostonian Francis Meriam, unstable and inspired to join us by his recent visit with the journalist Redpath to the black republic of Haiti; and John Copeland, Lewis Leary, and Shields Green, the last three of them Ohio Negroes, which, not counting our commander-in-chief, rounds out our number at twenty.

But do not fear, this number will be sufficient unto our present needs, Father has declared. We have pared away from our side all those men who would defeat us through their cowardice and faithlessness. We now have only the enemy to fight. July has turned into August and is moving rapidly towards autumn, and as each new recruit joins us, Father begins his narrative anew, an old jeremiad against slavery that lapses into fresh prophecy of its demise, as weekly he adjusts his plan for the taking of Harpers Ferry, so that it reflects the skills and personalities of the new arrivals, his increased belief in his recruits’ commitment to the raid, and his growing awareness that in the end there will be far fewer of us than he anticipated. The arrival of Mr. Douglass will, of course, alter things considerably, even if he comes alone, but it’s mainly afterwards that his presence will revise our circumstances and operations, Father points out, after we have seized the town and the cry has gone out across the Virginia countryside that Osawatomie Brown and Frederick Douglass have begun their long-awaited war to liberate the slaves. That’s when our sharpened pikes, with their six-foot ash handles and eight-inch knife blades bolted to the top, will go into action. Father believes that most of the slaves who join up with us will not be much experienced in the use of firearms, but until they can be trained and properly armed, these weapons will do them fine. Besides, the very sight of razor-sharp spears in the hands of vengeful liberated Negroes will help terrorize the slaveholders. Terror is one of our weapons, he says. Perhaps our strongest weapon. Until then, however, and for now, this is the plan.

From our blanket rolls scattered over the rough plank floor, we prop our heads in our hands and listen to our commander-in-chief, and each of us sees himself playing his role flawlessly, not missing a cue or a line, as if he were an actor in a perfectly executed play. Father sits on a stool in the center of the attic, and as usual, he first hectors and inspires us with his rhetoric and then runs through his plan yet again. He is the author of the play and its stage-manager and master of costumes and scenery and all our properties, and he is the lead actor as well — along with Mr. Douglass, of course, we mustn’t forget him, for without Frederick Douglass, no matter how successful the first act is played, the second and third will surely fail. There may not even be a second or third. Everyone knows that. Father will reveal more about those acts later, he says, but for now we need be mindful only that it is overall a work, a performance, whose second and continuing acts will require not one hero but two.

The rest of us are important players, too, we know, but compared to the Old Man and Mr. Douglass, minor. Father insists that no, each one of us is as crucial to the success of this operation as every other: from top to bottom, we are a chain, and if one link breaks, the entire chain comes undone. But still, we know better. And so does he. Each of us twenty is replaceable, and until Mr. Douglass arrives, this will be the Old Man’s show, and then it will belong to the two of them. It will never belong to us. Meanwhile, however, we listen to the Old Man’s directions and memorize our lines and positions, so that when at last Osawatomie Brown steps onto the stage and begins the action, we will be able to follow his lead and efficiently prepare the way for the entry of the famous Frederick Douglass and his thousands of Negro actors, all of whom are as yet unrehearsed and have been cast as players only in our imaginations.

Even so, the time to act is fast approaching, Father tells us. Already there have appeared numerous signs from the Lord — such as the sudden recent arrival of the pikes from Chambersburg, where they had been oddly delayed for weeks, despite Kagi’s best attempts to get them released and sent on to us. And soon from the Lord there will come additional signs, emblems and omens dressed as incidental events and information, to encourage us and make us the more eager to risk our lives in battle rather than continue with this suffocating waiting game at the farm on the Maryland Heights. For instance, Father will dispatch Cook down along the Charles Town Turnpike to determine the numbers and disposition of the slaves there, his only attempt to reconnoiter the region beyond the town of Harpers Ferry itself, and Cook will return aflame with news that the moon is right for insurrection, for it is nearly a dog-tooth moon, the type that makes Africans particularly discontented, he has learned. This, too, is a sign from the Lord, Father tells us. Cook has also been told of a young male slave at a farm nearby who just yesterday hung himself because his owner sold the man’s wife down South. A shipment of spears suddenly released, a dog-tooth moon, and a hanging man: on the strength of these and other similarly propitious portents, Father has sent sister Annie and Martha back home to North Elba. We are now awaiting only the arrival of Mr. Douglass, who we hope will bring with him a phalanx of well-armed Negro fighters from the North, although Father warns us that lately letters from his black cohorts back there are suggesting otherwise.

Finally, one night Father climbs up to our attic with his lamp in one hand and a fat packet of papers and maps in the other, and taking his customary seat at the center of the group, he spreads the contents of his packet at his feet. As he begins to speak, he raises one of the maps from the pile — we see at once that it is the now-familiar drawing of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry, made by Cook — and, as usual, he shows it to us and allows it to be passed amongst us, so that, while Father sets out the plan, each man can better visualize what he is to do and where he shall stand when he does it. This time, however, when he has gone through, once again, step by step, the taking of Harpers Ferry, he retrieves and sets aside Cook’s map and is silent and looks somberly at his clasped hands, as if in prayer. After a long moment, without looking up, he abruptly declares that tonight he has decided to reveal to us that we will not be conducting the sort of raid that most of us still believe we have come here for. This is not to be merely a larger, more dangerous and dramatic, slave-running expedition than any of us has ever undertaken before. There is instead a much larger task before us, a greater thing than we have yet dared imagine.

Kagi has long known of this grand, about-to-be-revealed scheme, as have I, of course, and a few of the others, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and we have argued privately amongst ourselves as to its feasibility and have agreed, after much disputation, that it can be done and must be attempted; but my brothers Watson and Oliver have not heard it before, nor my brothers-in-law Will and Dauphin Thompson, nor has Father until now trusted any of the recent arrivals with this vision, for it is truly a vision and not so much a plan, and to see it as he does, we must first for a long time not have seen or heard much else. Our long confinement together and our isolation from the world outside have finally made us all visionaries, capable at last of seeing what Father sees and of believing his words as if they were true prophecy.

Here, men, I want you to examine these maps, he says, and he picks up and flaps at us a set of cambric-cloth squares onto which he has pasted the states of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas — eight squares, and one state to a square. In the margin of each map, he has written numerals: 491,000, for the number of slaves in Virginia, he explains, 87,000 in Maryland, and so on, which comes to a total of 1,996,366 slaves, he pronounces, looking up at us. But he does not see us, his twenty followers, unshaven, unwashed, gaunt, and sober-faced, all of us young men and a few of us mere boys: instead, his gray eyes gleam with excitement at the sight of a spreading black wave of mutinous slaves, nearly two million strong, as all across the South they flee their cabins and shops and barns and rise from the cotton and tobacco and sugarcane fields and take up pitchforks, axes, machetes, and the thousands of Sharps rifles that will come flowing down the Alleghenies from the North; he sees them, first hundreds, then thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, flowing down the country roads and highways, meeting in town squares and on city streets and merging into the largest army ever seen in this land, an army with but one purpose, and that is to take back from the slaveholders what for a quarter of a millennium has been stolen from them — their freedom, their American birthrights, their very lives. This raid will establish no Underground Railroad operation, he tells us, for regardless of scale, it is no mere slave raid. This will be an act of an entirely different order. Yes, after we have taken Harpers Ferry, we will make our appointed rendezvous with Mr. Douglass in the Allegheny foothills west of here, as planned, but then we will not, as some of us believed, hole up in small forts and siphon escaped slaves into the North. Instead, we shall divide our forces into two portions, the Defenders, under Mr. Douglass’s command, and the Liberators, under Father’s, and whilst the Defenders protect and hurry into the North those women, children, elderly, and infirm slaves who wish to resettle there, the Liberators will commence to march rapidly southward along the densely wooded north-south mountain passes, making lightning-like strikes against the plantations on the plains lower down, seizing armories and arsenals and supplies as they go, building a cavalry, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, and even seizing artillery, like the Maroons of Jamaica, destroying railroads and fortifications. When the Shenandoah Valley goes, the plantations along the James River will quickly fall, and then the Tidewater tobacco farms, and when Virginia goes, the rest of the Southern states will nearly conquer themselves, there being down there, as in Haiti and Jamaica, such a disproportionate number of Negroes to whites. And there will be thousands of non-slaveholding whites, too, God-fearing, decent Southerners, who will come running to our side, once they understand that our true intentions are not to slay white men and women in their beds or to overthrow their state or federal government or to dissolve the Union, but merely to end American slavery. To end it now, here, in these years. Look, look! he says, excitedly showing us the map of Alabama, where with X’she has marked, county by county, the heaviest concentrations of slaves. When we emerge from the Tennessee hills here in Augusta County, the slaves will rise up spontaneously in adjacent Montgomery County, and in a week or perhaps two, when the news has arrived there, the same will occur in Macon and Russell Counties, and the flames of rebellion will leap like a wildfire from one district to the next, straight across into Georgia, whence the fire will roar all the way east to the Sea Isles, causing it to curl back north into the Carolinas, until we have ignited a great, encircling conflagration, which cannot be extinguished until it has burnt the ancient sin and scourge of slavery entirely away, from one end of the South to the other, from Maryland to Louisiana, until at last nothing remains of the Slavocracy but a smoldering pile of char!

The Old Man’s peroration ends and is met with soft silence. At first, Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson look slowly around the dim, shadowy room, as if searching the faces of the others for a sign that their collective silence indicates collective skepticism, which was Kagi’s early reaction to Father’s vision, or dismay, Cook’s and Stevens’s first response, or simple awe, Anderson’s. I myself look to my brothers’ eyes, Watson and Oliver, seeking there a clarifying version of my own thoughts and feelings, for in my earlier disputations with Kagi, Cook, and Stevens, I defended the logic of Father’s grand plan with no other desire than to defeat their objections to it, my old role, and in winning them over have not made my own private position strong to myself or even clear. But it is too late. Watson and Oliver and the Thompsons, my brothers and brothers-in-law, all of the men, wear on their faces a single expression, the expression worn also by Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and no doubt by me, too: it is the hungry look of a follower, of a true believer. There is no Thomas the Doubter in this room, no sober skeptic, no ironist, no dark materialist. We have all been confined here in this isolated place for too many weeks and months to have any mentality left that is not a piece of a single mind, and that mind is shaped and filled by Father alone.

But, yes, much of what you have expected will be met, he continues, calmer now, comforted by our silence. He again holds out Cook’s large, detailed map of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry and says that we shall indeed, as we have intended all along, soon attack and seize the town. That has not changed. It will be our first formally declared act of war against the slaveholders, the first act of our mighty drama. And when we have seized the town, we shall, as planned, take control of the arms stored in three buildings there — the government armory, where the muskets are made, the Hall rifle works, and the arsenal. As we all know, there are no federal troops presently posted in the town and only a few private guards protecting these stores of weapons and munitions, so we will not be much opposed, and if we strike quickly and under cover of night, it will be done before we are even noticed by the townspeople. We shall nevertheless take hostages and hold them, probably in the armory yard, to protect us against the local militias, should they be roused, whilst we await the first reinforcing arrival of mutinous slaves from the surrounding countryside, and then, in a matter of hours, we shall have flown back up into the mountain fastness south and west of the town, whence shall come our Republic’s salvation.

Shortly after nightfall on a Sabbath, it will begin with a fervent prayer offered up to God, that we may be assisted by Him in the total, final liberation of all the slaves on this continent. We shall not ask the Lord to spare or even to protect our own lives in this venture: our lives have been pledged strictly to our duty; that is all. We must not ask the Lord to release us of our duty. Then, with everyone gathered in the room below, so that we may be mentally clear as to our legal rights and obligations and our principles, Aaron Stevens, who has the most impressive voice of us all, will read aloud Father’s Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States, which so nobly begins: Whereas slavery is a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence: therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances. He will read all forty-five articles, ending thusly, with the carefully worded reassurance that The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any State government, or of the general government of the United States, and look to no dissolution of the

Union, but simply to amendment and repeal. And our flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution.

Following this somber recitation, our commander-in-chief will administer anew to us as a group the same oath of secrecy that, individually, upon our first arrival at the farm, each of us has already been sworn to. Father then will say simply, “Men, get on your arms. We now proceed to the Ferry.”

I am to stay behind with Francis Meriam and Barclay Coppoc, the two men Father and I have come to view as the weakest links in our chain, the one because of his physical frailty and tendency to hysteria, the other because of his youth and his residual Quaker timidity. I would prefer to be at the front with Father and the others, but I know better than to object to this assignment, for no one else in the group can be trusted with it, he says, and besides, it places me in a position of authority as second-in-command and at Father’s flank, so that if something goes dreadfully wrong, my duty will be to rescue them. My immediate charge, however, is to transfer all the arms from the house and storage shed, except for those taken by the advance party, to a small, unused schoolhouse situated in the woods overlooking the Potomac and directly across the river from Harpers Ferry, there to await the first arrival of liberated slaves, to arm them and lead them into the mountains, where a few days later we will rendez-vous with Father and the others. On his map of Virginia, Father shows us our Allegheny meeting place in Frederick County, which he himself scouted years ago, while on a surveying expedition of lands owned by Oberlin College. Mr. Douglass should have joined us by then, Father assures us, and will take overall command of my unit. I am to remain as captain of the new recruits, however, and as executive officer of the operation, until Father himself has joined us. After that, I am to ride at Father’s side with the Liberators. I have also been charged with the obligation to remove or destroy any incriminating evidence that we might have left here at the farmhouse, such as letters, maps, journals, and other personal effects.

We have in our possession two wagons, one for my use and the other for Father’s advance party. It must be on a night with no moon shining, no stars, a night overcast and drear, and when Father’s men have loaded their wagon with the half a hundred pikes and twenty rifles they require for the taking of Harpers Ferry, immediately and without ceremony, at a simple command from Father, they will set off down the public road, Father perched on the wagon seat with his head uncharacteristically bent forward, stooped as if in deep thought or prayer, and our old North Elba farmhorse, the bay Morgan mare, between the shafts, and the sixteen men marching silently in the cold drizzle alongside the wagon and behind. I will stand by the door of the house with Meriam and young Barclay Coppoc and watch them disappear into the darkness as if being swallowed by it. I do not know yet what I will feel when that moment comes, but it will not be fear or dread. It is too late for that.

After a few moments, when we can no longer hear the tramp of their boots on the wet ground or the creak and chop of their wagon and horse, my two men and I will turn quickly to our tasks — Meriam and Coppoc to load our wagon with the remaining weapons from the shed, whilst I gather all our scattered papers from the house. By candlelight, I will prowl carefully through the entire house, from basement kitchen to our attic hideout, collecting every shred of paper I can find and stuffing all of it loosely into a cloth valise. To my slight surprise, I will be obliged to fill the bag several times over, emptying it each time in the basement next to the woodstove on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. Soon I will have made a large, disordered pile, at first glance much of it rubbish, which I plan to separate from the rest and burn. But when I commence to sort the papers, I will discover with a little shock that most of the remaining papers, a whole heap of them, are Father’s, and amongst them are dozens of letters, many from family members in North Elba and Ohio, and numerous others, only slightly coded, written by his secret Northern supporters, Dr. Howe, Gerrit Smith, Franklin Sanborn, and so on, and even several letters from Frederick Douglass, and receipts for Father’s purchases of arms back in Iowa and Ohio and for the pikes in Hartford, Connecticut, and here are all of Father’s maps, the very maps with which he showed us his grand plan, and Cook’s drawing of Harpers Ferry, and Father’s pocket notebooks, where he has listed, county by county, as on his maps, slave population figures taken from the 1850 national census, and the names of many towns and cities of the South and their marching distance from one another, such as Montgomery to Memphis, 3 da., and Charleston to Savannah, 2 1/2 da. I have known this would happen, for I have seen most of these papers, maps, and notebooks lying carelessly about for weeks, as if, having shown them to us, Father no longer wished to order or hide them, and I have felt a twinge of fear that, in the rush of last-minute preparations, he would neglect to take them up. But I would not reflect upon it until later, until after Father and I had ridden up for our final, secret meeting with Mr. Douglass in Chambersburg.

While I clear the house and my men stack the arms into our wagon, Father and his men will be nearing the covered bridge that crosses the Potomac from Maryland into the state of Virginia and the town of Harpers Ferry. This is how it will go. Around nine o’clock, the drizzle shifts over to a straight rain. At ten-thirty, they reach the Maryland Heights, a steep, wooded thousand-foot-high cliff above the cut of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge. Although from up here it is too dark to make out the shapes of the brick-front buildings and cobbled streets below, the men can see through the rain a few dim, last lights from the slumbering town. Passing by the abandoned log schoolhouse, where I am to store our weapons and later arm the escaping slaves, Father and his men descend on the narrow, winding lane to the grassy riverbank and march for a while alongside the wide, swift-flowing, steel-colored river to the covered bridge, which crosses to Harpers Ferry a short ways upstream from the place where the east-running Potomac River is joined from the south by the Shendandoah. Well in sight of the bridge now, its wide, black entrance beckoning like the mouth of a gigantic serpent, they leave the road and cross the C & O Canal at lock 23 and make their way in the cold rain along the tow path to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks running in from the east. Here the tracks turn, cross the canal, and pass through the covered bridge alongside the narrow roadway, passing over the wide, gray river in pitch darkness to the station and loading platforms in the town center, where they turn again and lead out of town on the further side of the Potomac into western Virginia and on to Ohio.

Father and his men are well down in the gorge now, as if they have entered the den of the monstrous snake. Behind them and before them on their left, like thick, black curtains hanging from the blacker sky, loom high walls, where clusters of scrub oak and thickets of thorn bushes cling to wet, rocky escarpments all the way to the tops, and tall, windblown chestnut and walnut trees rise from the bluffs above. There can be no return now: Father and his men have reached the bridge over the Potomac and must enter it and go on, straight into the town at the further end. Father halts the wagon at the entrance for a moment and stations Watson and Stewart Taylor as a rear guard on the Maryland side. Then, at the Old Man’s command, Kagi and Stevens march straight into the mouth of the bridge. Fifty yards back, Father follows in the rumbling wagon, and the rest of the men, rifles at the ready and cartridge boxes clipped to the outside of their clothing for quick access, march wordlessly along behind, walking stiffly on the loose planks, as if on ice, and taking shallow, tight breaths, as if afraid to fill their chests with the blackness that surrounds them.

A few moments later, Kagi and Stevens emerge from the long throat of the bridge. They are the first of the raiders to enter the town, and as soon as they have set their boots onto the rain-slicked cobbles of Potomac Street, a watchman hears their step and calls, Who goes there! Kagi answers, Hallo, Billy Williams! It’s a friend! The watchman draws close to the two and lifts his lantern and says, Oh, it’s Mister Kagi who’s out so late, and they instantly throw down on him and take him prisoner and douse his lamp.

The raid has begun. Osawatomie Brown and his men are inside Harpers Ferry and have taken their first hostage. The raiders are able to breathe and walk normally now, and they move rapidly and efficiently from one place and situation to the next, exactly as planned and rehearsed. Turning right on Potomac Street at the B & O train depot, they pass the deserted porch and darkened windows of the Wager Hotel, where the last guests have finally gone upstairs to their rooms, and head straight towards the armory, a long double row of brick buildings situated between the railroad siding and the canal. On the left, adjacent to the gate of the armory grounds, there is a square brick building, a single-storey, two-room structure that serves as a fire-engine house for the town and a guardhouse for the armory. When Father has drawn the wagon close to the iron gate, the armory watchman, whose name is Daniel Whelan, cracks open the timbered door of the firehouse, pauses, squints into the darkness, and then reluctantly steps outside into the rain. In a sleepy voice, he says, That you, Williams?

Open the gate, Mister Whelan, Father says.

You’re not Williams, says the watchman, more confused than frightened. At once, Oliver and Newby step forward with their rifles leveled and take him prisoner. Aaron Stevens grabs the crowbar from the wagon bed and twists it into the chain holding the gate. When the lock snaps, he and Kagi swing open the gate, and Father drives the wagon straight into the yard. The other men, including the two captured watchmen, follow at gunpoint, and Kagi swings the gate closed again.

Now Father climbs down from the wagon and, turning to his dumbfounded prisoners, declares that he has come here from Kansas, for this is a slave state, and he has come to free all its Negro slaves.

Williams and Whelan look wide-eyed in disbelief at the old man. The rain drips from the tattered brim of his hat and from his white beard. Barely hearing his words, they stare at him, this bony, sharp-eyed old fellow in the frock coat, who, except for his rifle and the two pistols at his waist, resembles more a poor, hardscrabble farmer from the hills than a Yankee liberator of slaves, and they look around at the small, shabbily dressed, heavily armed group of white and Negro young men who stand near him, and finally at each other, and say nothing. What is happening here? For Williams and Whelan, this is a strange, waking dream, a shared hallucination.

I have taken possession of the United States armory, the old man calmly continues. And if the citizens of the town interfere with me and my men, we must burn the town and have blood.

Father now proceeds to dispatch his men so as to take control of the remaining arms supplies and defenses of the town. Under guard by Dauphin Thompson and Lewis Leary, the two hostages are shut into the firehouse, while Oliver and Will Thompson are sent three blocks south on Shenandoah Street to take command of the bridge that crosses the Shenandoah River into town. The tollbooth proves to be empty and the bridge unguarded. Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc take over the arsenal, also unguarded, just off the main square and in sight of the hotel, where they will wait for further orders and a wagon to empty it. Stevens, Kagi, and Copeland are ordered to the rifle factory, which is located a short ways further down Shenandoah Street at Lower Hall’s Island, a long, narrow rise of land in the Shendandoah River that is separated from the shore by a canal. Once more, a single watchman is surprised by the raiders and, when captured, is marched by Stevens back to the firehouse, leaving Kagi and Copeland behind to hold the rifle works. On his return to the firehouse, Stevens comes upon three half-drunk, unarmed young men, carousers straggling home late from the Wager Hotel, and he swiftly puts them under his gun and brings them in with the watchman.

It is not yet midnight, and both bridges into town, the armory, the arsenal, and the rifle factory have been brought under the control of the raiders. Six men have been taken hostage and locked into the firehouse. Unknown to the rest of its citizens, unknown to the world, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, belongs to Osawatomie Brown. Around this time, the rain lets up, and the clouds slowly pull away and open the starry sky to view. Soon the dog-tooth moon breaks the dark horizon above the Maryland Heights north of town, where, just before one A.M., as Father expected, a fourth watchman, Patrick Higgins, comes down the moonlit footpath from his home in Sandy Hook to relieve Williams at the Maryland side of the Potomac bridge. As he enters the covered bridge, Watson and Stewart Taylor, Father’s rear guard, step from the shadows and capture the man. In silence, dutifully following the plan, they direct their prisoner to the bridge and commence marching him over to the firehouse, when suddenly Higgins turns and swats Watson on the forehead and races ahead of them into the darkness. Before Watson can stay his hand, Taylor raises his rifle and fires, his bullet slightly grazing the forehead of the escaping man, who is able nonetheless to get safely to the end of the bridge and into the Wager Hotel, where he is the first to raise the alarm, although he cannot say who has shot at him or why.

This is an eventuality that Father has anticipated, a part of his overall plan, and so long as it happens after the bridges and the arms stores have been captured and hostages have been taken, it does not much concern him that sometime in the night a shot or two will be fired, alerting the citizens that a violent action is under way. By daylight, they will know of it, anyhow, and will be told by him then of its purpose, and soon the whole country will begin to apprehend its scale. After all, this raid is meant to be a public act, not a private one, he has reminded us, and if our aims are to be met, we must actually invite a certain hue-and-cry and, so long as we are in control of events and not they us, welcome it. Still, the echoing sound of the first shot shocks the men, and Watson’s and Taylor’s breathless report that their prisoner has escaped into the hotel frightens them. Father, however, is calm as ice.

At this moment, he is mainly concerned with Aaron Stevens’s mission into the countryside. He has sent Stevens with Tidd and Cook and three of the Negro men, Anderson, Leary, and Green, five miles west of Harpers Ferry to Halltown, where resides the wealthy planter Colonel Lewis Washington, a man who is a direct descendant of General George Washington and, for that, something of a local celebrity and politician, an aide to Virginia’s Governor Wise. Further, he is known to have inherited from his incomparable ancestor an elaborately engraved pistol presented to the General after the Revolution by the Marquis de Lafayette and a ceremonial sword given him by King Frederick the Great of Prussia. The Old Man wants Colonel Lewis Washington as a hostage, and he wants to free the Colonel’s half-dozen slaves, but most of all, to help place his own acts into their proper context, he wants General George Washington’s pistol and his sword.

With a rail pulled from the fence by the meadow in front of the house, Stevens and his men batter down the Colonel’s door and roust him and his terrified family from their beds. When the Colonel has dressed and has delivered over to the raiders his ancestor’s famous weapons, Stevens formally places him under arrest and, leaving the man’s wife and young children behind, seats him next to Tidd in a two-horse carriage appropriated from the barn. Behind them, Anderson, Leary, and Green have hitched the Colonel’s four remaining horses to a farm wagon and have placed into it three liberated slaves, two men and a young woman — all they could find in the house and barn, or maybe they’re the only Negroes on the place not too frightened to show themselves, Anderson explains to Stevens, for these poor people can’t know for sure yet that we are who we say we are. Stevens agrees, and they start back along the Charles Town Turnpike towards Harpers Ferry.

A mile west of Bolivar Heights, still following Father’s orders, they draw the wagons up before a large farm owned by John Allstadt, after Colonel Washington the wealthiest planter in the region and, like him, a slaveholder — the owner, in fact, of the young woman who was sold off into the Deep South and her young husband who a week ago hung himself because of it. A second time, Stevens and his men break down a front door and enter a stranger’s home unopposed. They quickly make hostages of the man of the house, Mr. Allstadt, and his eighteen-year-old son, and unceremoniously liberate Allstadt’s four remaining slaves, who are added to the group in the farm wagon. As instructed, Stevens and the other raiders are scrupulously polite to their prisoners and to the women and children, just as they were at Colonel Washington’s, and they try not to frighten them overmuch and take pains to cause no unnecessary damage to the house or personal property, other than that of converting the slaves into free men and women. They state clearly to the whites their sole reason for breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and making prisoners of the husbands and sons — which is strictly to end slavery. If we are not opposed, Stevens says, no blood will be spilt. The husbands and sons, like the wagons and horses, will eventually be returned to them, but their slaves are no longer owned by them, he says. The slaves of Virginia are owned henceforth by themselves and cannot be returned to any man.

In the meantime, back at Harpers Ferry, at 1:25 A.M., precisely as scheduled, the Baltimore-bound B & O passenger train rolls in, and when it has hissed to a noisy stop at the station, the night clerk from the hotel next door skitters low from the door of the railroad station, and before the conductor can step down from the train to the platform, the man has leapt aboard, bearing the startling news that gunmen are out on the Potomac bridge and have shot a watchman, who lies bleeding inside the hotel! Worse, the other three town watchmen are nowhere about and may even have been murdered! And here’s something else: when the clerk slipped unseen into the station by a rear window adjacent to the hotel, he tried to telegraph the stationmaster in Charles Town and discovered that the wires had been cut. There is something very strange, something dangerous, happening, and until now, with no idea of how many gunmen might be out there or where they may be hiding, no one but the night clerk has dared to leave the hotel or been able to raise a general alarm.

The conductor, A. J. Phelps, takes immediate charge and directs the engineer and the baggagemaster, who carries a pistol, to step from the train and investigate the bridge, for it may have been sabotaged. Who knows but what these gunmen are train robbers and have blocked the bridge somehow? If the tracks appear clear, he says, they straightway will pass across the river and, at the station in Monococy in Maryland, will telegraph the news of these startling events over to Charles Town, the county seat, where there is a federal marshal’s office and a regiment of town militia available for help.

Sleepy passengers peer out their windows, wondering why the delay, as the engineer and the baggagemaster, his pistol at the ready, walk slowly along the station platform, step down to the railbed, and crunch over the cinders and gravel towards the dark mouth of the covered bridge. When the pair are about fifteen feet from the entrance, Watson speaks to them from the darkness ahead. Drop your pistol, sir, and both of you walk slowly towards us. Keep your hands in full view. You’re under a hundred guns, gentlemen, and are now our prisoners. You won’t be harmed, if you do as we say.

The baggagemaster lets his pistol fall to the railbed, and the two men, as instructed, extend their hands as if ready to be manacled and walk forward. Meanwhile, behind them, up on the platform, a Negro man named Hayward Shepherd, a freedman employed at the station as the night baggageman, has stepped from the office to the platform to see what is going on, and Phelps, the conductor — too far from the bridge for him or the clerk or anyone on the train to see in the darkness that the engineer and the baggagemaster have been all but taken prisoner — orders him to go and assist them in their investigation. Shepherd jumps to the ground and hurries to join the two, who have disappeared inside the bridge. When he, too, has neared the entrance and is now beyond earshot of the men on the platform, he hears a calm, low voice from the darkness, Watson Brown’s, ordering him to stop and listen. Shepherd, a middle-aged bachelor affectionately called “Uncle Hay” by the white citizens of the town, stops and listens. In a conversational tone, Watson tells him what Father has instructed all of us to say to the Virginia freedmen. We have come from Kansas to free the slaves. You may join us in this enterprise or not. But if you refuse to join us, we will treat with you as with any white man who refuses to join us. We will be forced to consider you our enemy.

For a second, Shepherd hesitates, as if not quite getting Watson’s meaning, and then abruptly he turns and runs. Watson — or perhaps it is Stewart Taylor, or maybe some other raider, standing in the shadows of the storefronts nearby; any one of us could have done it — fires his rifle, and Shepherd falls, mortally wounded by a single bullet in the spine, running through to the chest. With everyone watching him and no one daring to move to help — not Watson or Stewart inside the covered bridge, not their two prisoners, not the several raiders hiding in the shadows along the street or Father standing unseen at the gate of the armory, not the men up on the platform by the station or the passengers staring in horror from the windows of the train: no one who sees it can make himself come forward to help the fallen man — as Shepherd lifts his bloody chest from the cinders and with his arms slowly drags his numbed, dying body away from the bridge towards the station. After what seems like a long while, he succeeds in getting to a protected place below the platform that is close enough for Phelps and the hotel clerk safely to reach down and draw him up to it, where they quickly pull his body inside the station as if he were already a dead man.

Prepare yourselves for sad ironies, Father forewarned us, often enough for us to have expected it. But it has come nonetheless as a dismaying shock. Men, the cruel perversity of slavery will snap back betimes and will try to bite us in our face, he told us. We have to be hard, hard. This surely is what he meant: that in the liberation of the slaves, the first to die may well be neither a white man nor a slave, but a free Negro.

This sad event has the immediate good effect, however, of closing down the train and trapping its passengers inside it, with Conductor Phelps and the hotel clerk retreating to the station, and the guests, those few wakened by this, the second gunshot of the night, holing up inside the hotel. For the time being, the town is still ours. A little after four A.M., Aaron Stevens’s party comes clattering down Potomac Street, the trap driven by Tidd, with Colonel Washington and Mr. Allstadt and his son in it, and the farm wagon driven by Cook, with the seven liberated slaves huddled in back. Stevens, who carries General Washington’s pistol and sword wrapped in a blanket, and the other raiders, Anderson, Leary, and Green, are on horseback, their mounts taken from Allstadt’s farm.

As soon as they have arrived at the armory yard, Father tells the newly freed slaves who he is, Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, which, as he expected, evokes in them a certain fearfulness, until he reveals that his principal ally is the famous Negro Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave himself, and this seems to impress and calm them somewhat, for these are Virginia ex-slaves and rebellious types, surely, or they would not have come in with Stevens and his men, and being from a border town, they no doubt have had secret access to abolitionist information and literature. He places pikes into their hands and stations them inside the firehouse to guard the growing number of hostages. For now, these white men are your prisoners, he says. Treat them honestly, for they are hostages, whom we will deploy if we need to bargain for our continued safety, and as we will be freeing them later, we want them to tell other white people the truth about us, that we want not revenge but liberty.

The seven Negroes, a woman and six men, several of them barefoot in the cold night, take up their pikes and hesitantly, as if they have no choice in the matter, follow their former masters into the firehouse, while Father straps on George Washington’s scabbard and sword and adds to his pair of old service revolvers the General’s engraved pistol and tooled leather holster. In all his armament, he is a formidable sight, a warrior chieftain, and with his Old Testament beard and fierce gray eyes and his battered straw hat and Yankee farmer’s woolen frock coat and his — to the Negroes, to all people, in fact — peculiar way of speaking, he is a paradoxical one as well: a man out of time, without a shred of vanity or the slightest regard for convention, and though an old man, he is as overflowing as a boy with single-minded purpose and high principles, armed and clothed for no other task in life than this night’s bloody work. The rest of the men, if they put their rifles down, and the ex-slaves, if they put away their pikes, could easily fold back into the general populace and disappear from sight, here or anywhere in America; but not Father: he is Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, and no American, white or black, Northern or Southern, would mistake him for anybody else.

Although they are far fewer than he expected by now and seem somewhat confused and fearful, the arrival of these, the first of the freed slaves, has excited Father, and he orders Cook to drive one of the wagons over to the Maryland side, to the schoolhouse where I and my two men, Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam, will have cached the remainder of our arms, one hundred fifty rifles and another hundred pistols and most of the thousand sharpened pikes. Cook is to bring one-third of the pikes back into town, for, surely, by morning there will be mutinous slaves thronging to the armory yard. The remainder of the weapons are for me and my men to distribute first amongst the insurrectionary slaves who come in from Maryland, and then we are to carry the remainder up into the mountains for eventual dispersal there. By daylight, on both sides of the river, we will have hundreds of escaped slaves to arm, Father says, and must be ready for them in both places, or they will not believe that we are serious.

For now, until further orders, the raiders who are inside the town are merely to hold their positions — Kagi and his men, Copeland and now Leary, over at the rifle factory on Hall’s Island, Oliver and Will Thompson posted at the Shenandoah bridge, Watson and Taylor still holding the bridge across the Potomac, and Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc guarding the arsenal; the rest of the men stand at the ready here at the center of town, in and around the armory grounds and the firehouse.

It is close to six A.M. The rain has ceased, and the heavy storm clouds have moved off, and as dawn approaches, the sky turns slowly to a fluttery, gray, silken sheet, with the high, wooded ridges in the east and north silhouetted against it. The brick storefronts and houses and offices of the town and the narrow, cobbled streets glisten wetly from the night’s rain, and when the first light of the rising sun spreads across the eastern horizon, the faces of the buildings here below turn pink and seem almost to bloom, as if in the darkness of the night they existed only in a nascent form, not quite real.

Before long, the first of the armory workers, all unsuspecting, come drifting into the center of town in twos and threes from their small wood-frame houses above the cliffs on Clay Street, and as they walk through the iron gate into the yard, Father and the others grab them and make them hostages in the firehouse, until he has close to forty men crowded into the two large rooms and has to station several of his raiders inside with the freed slaves to help guard them. Then, by daylight, just as Father said it would, word of the raid gets out. Dr. John Starry, a local physician, is the first to raise the alarm. Summoned to the hotel hours earlier to care for the wounded watchman and the dying Hayward Shepherd by a courageous Negro barman who, at risk of his life, slipped out a side door of the hotel and down dark alleyways to the physician’s house, Dr. Starry bandages the watchman’s forehead and is at Shepherd’s side when the poor man dies, after which, accompanied by the barman who brought him there, he succeeds in returning to his home undetected, where at once he rouses his family and neighbors. Then he rides to the home of the Superintendent of the Armory, A. M. Kitzmiller, bringing the scarcely-to-be-believed news. The armory, arsenal, and rifle works and a large group of hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, are all in the hands of an army of abolitionist murderers that is led by none other than Osawatomie Brown and aided by a wild gang of escaped, spear-carrying slaves! There is a full-scale insurrection under way! Brown has trained cannon on the square, the doctor reports, and is moving all the arms from the town into the interior!

Soon the bell of the Lutheran church atop the hill starts to clang, summoning the citizens to an emergency meeting, and a rider has been sent to Shepherdstown to call out the local militia, and a second has been dispatched to Charles Town for the Jefferson Guards, formed for the express purpose of meeting precisely this circumstance after the Turner rebellion back in ’31.

Father and his men, when they hear the church bell ringing on and on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, know what is happening. Don’t be frightened, boys, don’t panic. There’s still plenty of time, he assures the men. The hostages and practically every rifle in the town are in our hands. And the Lord is watching over us. We won’t go down, boys, but if the Lord requires it of us, then it will be as Samson went. These people know that, and they don’t want it, so we’re still safe enough here.

It is full daylight, around seven A.M., when Father strides through the gate of the armory yard and approaches the railroad station and calls out for Mr. Phelps, the conductor. Come here, sir! I wish to parley with you! Phelps pokes his head out the door but refuses to come forward. I have decided to let you move the train on to Baltimore, Father declares. But tell your employer, and tell all the civil and military authorities, that this is the last train I will permit in or out of Harpers Ferry, at the extreme peril of those men we have taken prisoner, until we have finished with our business here.

Phelps nods, and he and the engineer and the baggagemaster return to the train, fire it up, and take it slowly towards the covered bridge and across the Potomac into Maryland. From the schoolhouse on the heights opposite, I watch the train far below snake its way out of the bridge and wind along the north bank of the river towards Baltimore and Washington beyond, and I know that within minutes, as soon as the train has reached the station at Monocacy, news of the raid will reach the main offices of the B & O. An hour later, in Richmond, an aide to Governor Henry Wise will disturb the Governor’s breakfast with astonishing news, and shortly afterwards, in Washington, D.C., an adjutant general will burst into the office of the Secretary of War, who will read the wire from Governor Wise requesting federal troops and will at once ask for an emergency meeting with President Buchanan. More in line with Father’s purposes — and I know this, too — by evening, every newspaper in the land will be shouting the news of our raid:

FEARFUL AND EXCITING INTELLIGENCE! NEGRO INSURRECTION

IN HARPERS FERRY, VIRGINIA, LED BY JOHN BROWN OF KANSAS!!

MANY SLAIN, HUNDREDS TAKEN HOSTAGE, FEDERAL ARMS SEIZED!!!

In morning light, a few personal weapons, mostly antiquated muskets and squirrel guns, have been located by the townspeople, and five or six of the more adventurous men among them have taken up firing positions on the hillside above the armory yard. It is not long, however, before they are spotted by the raiders, most of them Kansas veterans and much more experienced than the locals at this sort of action and possessing weapons of surpassing accuracy, so that the townsmen are barely able to open fire, when one of them, a grocer named Boerly, is shot dead by a bullet from a raider rifle, which causes a quick retreat amongst the others. It is mid-morning. The militias from Shepherdstown and Charles Town have not yet arrived, and in Washington, fifty miles to the east, federal troops are only now being mustered for railroad transport to Harpers Ferry. Here in town, their feeble efforts at defense effectively curtailed by the raiders’ deadly accurate Sharps rifles, by their fear of endangering the hostages, and by their growing certainty that there are many more than Father’s seventeen raiders occupying the town and hundreds more escaped slaves than seven, the citizens are limited to taking occasional, erratic potshots in the general direction of the armory, causing more danger and havoc to themselves than to the raiders.

Even so, over at the rifle works on Hall’s Island, Kagi has grown increasingly anxious about the passage of so much time, for he and his two men, Copeland and Leary, though they have so far held the factory uncontested, are situated far from the hostages in the firehouse, and thus, of Father’s force, they are the most vulnerable to attack from the townsmen. Kagi dispatches Leary to town on foot to request Father to send back a wagon and additional men, so that they can quickly load the seized weapons from the factory and begin their escape into the mountains. It is time. None of the raiders has been killed or even wounded. According to the plan, they should all be departing from Harpers Ferry by now.

And I, up on the Maryland Heights, should also have left by now. That is the plan, Father’s plan, his vision of how it would go at Harpers Ferry on the night of October 16 and the morning of October 17, and everything up to now has gone accordingly. Except for the one thing: that the hundreds of escaping slaves whom we expected to come rushing to our side have not yet appeared, and the few who have are turning fearful and hesitant and may themselves have to be put under guard and made into hostages.

But that does not matter, I decide, as I watch from my perch above the town. Father’s plan can accommodate that, too. We have seized at least three wagonloads of weapons, we have terrorized the entire South into believing that an insurrection has begun, and in the North we have raised fresh huzzahs and enthusiastic promises of material support and a coming flood of volunteer fighters — we have, indeed, begun an insurrection, which surely, thanks to the presence of Frederick Douglass, will catch and burst into flame in a matter of mere days, and if Father leads his men out of Harpers Ferry now and makes his appointed rendez-vous in the Alleghenies with Mr. Douglass, we will still be able to feed those flames and follow them into the deeper South, just as Father wished. It is not too late.

The slaves will come in, Father insists. They will soon start to arrive. We must give them every moment up to the last possible moment to learn of our raid and our intentions and to overcome their natural fears and flee their masters’ farms and plantations for the town, which is still under our control. The second we abandon the town, the escaping slaves will have no place to go where they are not in terrible danger. For their sake, we shall continue to hold the town, he declares. Even as the Jefferson Guards ride in on the Charles Town Pike from the west and the Shepherdstown militia comes in along the Potomac road from the north and the troop train from Washington slowly approaches from the east.