Cloudsplitter (88 page)
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.