Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Generally, then, until the autumn that Father and I returned from England, I had treated his plan for invading the South and liberating the slaves as another of his harmless diversions, an elaborate way for him to express the anger and frustration caused by his financial failures and by the pacifism and compromises of the other whites in the anti-slave movement and by the fearfulness and lack of unity among so many Negroes. It kept him from despair over his money-problems, and it stopped him from throwing up his hands in disgust and walking out on the abolitionists altogether. It was his fantasy, not mine.

  There was one early occasion, however, when I actually, whole-heartedly, shared his dream of a war of liberation and terror. It occurred when he first revealed his plan to Frederick Douglass. I watched this distinguished, intelligent, worldly gentleman, a Southerner and an escaped slave himself, a man who knew the risks and stakes personally, a true warrior in the war against slavery—I watched Mr. Douglass take Father’s military strategies seriously and felt ashamed of my skepticism and temporarily cast it off. Although it would be another two years before I rid myself of it for good, that night in ‘48 in Springfield, when Mr. Douglass first came to visit, was an important beginning of my life as a warrior, too.

  I remember hurrying home on a dark, wintry night from the Brown & Perkins warehouse to our crowded little house on Franklin Street, hoping to be there in time for supper with the others. Walking slam-bang through the door into the front parlor, I saw Father seated at the table with a tall, broad-shouldered, dark brown man with a forceful jaw and a great leonine mass of hair. I recognized Mr. Douglass instantly, of course, for although I had not seen him in the flesh before this, engravings of his handsome, impressive face had appeared in any number of issues of The Liberator and other abolitionist periodicals. He was younger than I had thought him to be, still in his early thirties then, but with beginning streaks of gray in his hair. He had a massive face and a broad, high forehead, a wonderfully patrician look, but in an African way, as if he were a direct descendant of a long line of Ethiopian kings. Seated side by side at the old pine table where we normally took our meals, both men were gazing intently at a large sheet of paper Father’s map of Virginia and points south, I saw at once. His Subterranean Passway.

  Back then, when we were newly located in Springfield and Brown & Perkins was briefly thought to be a thriving business, visitors to our home were often visibly surprised to see how modestly we lived. Mr. Douglass, in his fine woolen suit, sat stiffly at the table, his feet squarely under his chair, as if he were more accustomed to meeting white abolitionists in formal, velvet-covered parlors than in a workingman’s dwelling-place. We owned very little furniture then, a continuing effect of the Ohio bankruptcy, which was actually of a benefit to us in that narrow, wood-frame row house—the rooms were tiny, like hutches, and we were a family of nine people and needed the space for our very bodies. We utilized the six small chambers in an unorthodox way, determined more by need than by convention, making the kitchen serve as a combination cookroom, washroom, and workshop and the front parlor as an office and for taking our meals. Father and Mary slept in the dining room proper, and we children, seven of us, were distributed by sex and age in the three sleeping rooms upstairs. It was a spartan home in a laborers’ neighborhood but, withal, a cozy and cheerful place, where we had many guests and visitors, mostly unpretentious people, sheepmen from out west and Negroes connecting through Father to a line or way-station of the Underground Railroad, people who made themselves comfortable in such bare surroundings more easily, perhaps, than Mr. Douglass.

  Father introduced me to the man. “This is my third son, Owen. He’s been working late at the warehouse,”he said, to explain the tufts of wool clinging to my clothing and hair and the dirt on my face and hands.

  Mr. Douglass rose from his seat and extended his large hand and smiled gently. “A pleasure” he said, a simple statement made almost lordly by his powerful, deep voice and regal bearing. This was a man! I rubbed my hand on my coveralls and grasped his and shook it with enthusiasm, although I was too shy and awed by him to speak a single word.

  “Mister Douglass is on his way to Rochester, from a speaking engagement in Boston. He learned of us from the Reverends Garnet and Loguen,” Father said, obviously pleased by having been recommended by the two Negro radicals. “They said we were to be trusted. No small encomium for a white man, if I may say so, coming from those two,”he said to Mr. Douglass with evident pride.

  Mr. Douglass smiled generously at Father. “Yes, that’s true, I’m afraid.”

  “When you’ve washed and changed your shin, Owen, you may come and join us,” Father then said.

  I rushed through my ablutions back in the kitchen, where Mary and Ruth and the younger children were at work preparing supper. John was then still in Akron, finishing his business school studies, and Jason and Fred were situated in Hudson, minding Mr. Simon Perkins’s flocks. Although I was the eldest son then in residence, I was still young enough to be surprised and honored by Father’s invitation to join him and Mr. Douglass in the parlor.

  When I arrived back at the table and took my seat next to Father, I saw that he was showing Mr. Douglass his sketches of the log blockhouses that he intended to build at strategic points along the Passway, forts to serve both as supply depots for his army and as way-stations for passing the liberated slaves north—those who chose not to stay in the South and fight alongside him and his main force. Father had long ago designed these simple structures: easily defended, windowless cubes made of thick logs with firing slots and secret basements and long escape tunnels, they were to be tucked away in the narrow defiles and gorges of the Appalachians. He believed, against all conventional thinking on the matter, that a military force could better defend a low place than a high. In Deuteronomy, the Lord had warned the Israelites against settling in high places—and for good reason, according to Father. “First, because in a low place you’ll have a well, and your water won’t run out. And second, because if the defile is sufficiently narrow, you can’t be surrounded. In order to lay a siege against you, the enemy will be obliged to divide his force and climb to the heights. At which point, you proceed at once to charge against the weakened force left below, and then you quickly surround the climbers on high, who will now be under siege by you, trapped without water and with no way down except by your leave.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Douglass. “And you propose to man each of these blockhouses with a small force of... what? Twenty-five men at the most?”

  “At most,” Father said.

  “Whilst your main army conducts forays into the flatlands below.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fine, but how shall they be supplied? Your main forces can’t do it. They’ll be too busy eluding capture and hanging by the slaveowners.”

  “They’ll be supplied from the North,” Father explained. He would establish agents in Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose responsibility would be to gather and store supplies and arms purchased for them by radical abolitionist supporters and to ship them south along the Passway, even as freshly liberated slaves came north along the same route. No wagon would come south empty, just as no wagon would return empty, either: the Underground Railroad was to run two ways now, instead of one. Father’s main army, he went on, would simply take its supplies, its food, fresh horses, and so forth, from the raided plantations. They would also have whatever food and supplies they were given by sympathetic Southern whites. For there would be some supporters among the whites, Father was sure, small farmers and the like, who, not owning any slaves, were bound to be profoundly disgusted by the ways that the system oppressed them, too, people who would therefore welcome the opportunity to aid and abet men come south to wage war against slavery.

  Here Mr. Douglass shook his great head. “I think, Mister Brown, that you don’t know those folks like I do. You’re a white man and perhaps understand whites, but you’re not a Southern white man. Go on, though. There’s much to admire here a
nyhow,” he said gently.

  A sustained, guerilla war would swiftly drive the price of a slave worth one thousand dollars today to ten thousand dollars or even more, Father explained. The cotton could not be grown, harvested, ginned, shipped, and sold without a huge labor force, and there were not enough whites in the South to accomplish that great and economically necessary task alone. Father was convinced that if the fight lasted long enough and caused a sufficient number of slaves to escape, the costs of holding on to their slaves would so greatly outweigh the benefits that the Slavocracy would move to strike a deal that would free all slaves in exchange for their return home as paid workers. “Slaves run north for freedom” Father noted, “not work.” If they had freedom, they would stay, and many of those now living in the North would likely return also. “I do not intend to conquer the South,” Father declared. “I merely mean to make slavery prohibitively expensive. If a people cannot be made to do the right thing, Mister Douglass, then we must make them do the thing that is in their interest.”

  For this reason, he was convinced that his war of liberation must be undertaken now or very soon, before slavery was extended into the western territories. If we did not strike now, he said, when the Southern states, because of their dependence on cotton, were economically vulnerable and more or less evenly matched in Congress by the North, then we would be faced later with only two alternatives—division of the Union or a bloody civil war. Or perhaps both. The longer we delayed, the more successful the South would be in extending slavery into Texas and the other territories, and even into Cuba and Mexico. Expansion out of the South into the west and the Caribbean isles would diversify the slaveholding economy from cotton and soon make it powerful beyond belief, and as those territories became states, they would come to dominate the North in Congress. With a slaveowning Democrat President, Senate, and House of Representatives, the North would have no choice but to secede from the Union or, to avoid total absorption by the Slavocracy, go to war. There were already calls for secession-or-war from both sides.

  “Yes, but let me be sure, Mister Brown, that you’re not resurrecting that old idea of a black republic. Your plan could produce that. I would vehemently oppose that. A little land-locked Haiti, separate from and surrounded by a white United States;’ Mr. Douglass said. “I would not wish for that.”

  “No, no, no! Not at all. Well, temporarily, perhaps. But only as a way of keeping the venture from being mistakenly construed as a policy of the Northern states,” Father insisted. He wished to do it more or less the same as the Texans had done against Mexico. He planned to publish assurances that as soon as slavery was abolished in every state and territory, his temporary Negro republic would be dissolved, at which time all conquered regions would be returned to the control of their original state governments.

  Mr. Douglass sighed heavily, a melancholy exhalation, and peered down at the map before him. “The federal army will come after you, sir. It doesn’t matter, North or South—they won’t permit it.”

  It would take them too long to act, Father explained, and when they did, he would have moved his forces to another front. From the mountains of Virginia, we would slip down to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee and on into the hills of Georgia. We would be divided into small, highly mobile units, little more than bands, striking where least expected and then retreating to our mountain hideouts, disappearing into the upland forests like the Seminole Indians into the swamps of Florida. Also, as he pointed out, our campaign would have hundreds of thousands of civilian supporters, millions, North and South, which would weaken to a crucial degree any federal army commissioned to stop us. “A federal army would have to cut down every tree from Alabama to Ohio to defeat us!” Father said, wagging a finger.

  “They well might. Perhaps—” Mr. Douglass began.

  Father interrupted him. “Also, I believe that our job could be completed in a single year, too soon for them to muster the requisite force. On the first day, right off, we’d issue a statement of our intentions and show our willingness to negotiate a peace strictly in terms of the ending of slavery. We’d be absolutely clear that we have no other intention but to end slavery. A war conducted without a precise goal can never be won! Remember that, Mister Douglass. I learned it in Europe. By the same token, the more precise the goal, the fewer soldiers needed to win it. Learned that there, too. You must state your objective clearly and then show that you’re willing to die for it, and if you can demonstrate that it’s in your enemy’s own interest to have you gain your objective, as we’ll do by making the market price of every slave in America insupportably high, victory will fall into your lap like an overripe fruit!”

  While the two went back and forth, Father explaining and defending his ideas and Mr. Douglass questioning them, gently objecting here and there, but gradually, as it seemed to me, going along, I looked freshly at Father’s map of his wonderful Subterranean Passway. It was the central nervous system for his whole operation, a spinal cord that ran from Timbuctoo south all the way to Alabama, with a thousand nerve-like branches east and west along the way. I remembered, years before, first tying into it from a western branch, riding down from Ohio with Father and my brothers into the hills of Kentucky, where we met slaves who had escaped from plantations far to the south in Georgia and South Carolina, exhausted men, women, and children who had been passed along for weeks, emerging blinking into the light of freedom as if they had come up from a network of tunnels hundreds of miles long. And I knew that Timbuctoo, where we would soon be living, tapped into the Passway at its head in the Adirondacks, and lately we had come at it from the east here in Springfield, Massachusetts, where I had seen the great Harriet Tubman, she whom Father called The General, “a woman who is most of a man,”he said, and heard her testify as to its existence. It was real, this Subterranean Passway. Father had not dreamed it up. The slaveholders had not been able to sever it or to block it permanently anywhere along its length. If they attacked it in one place, it appeared the next night in another. Father’s plan for a guerilla war against the Slavocracy was, in fact, a logical extension of the ongoing work of the Underground Railroad, and he had focused his thinking on the one aspect of the Railroad that no other abolitionist had so far grasped—that its continued existence had slowly raised the dollar value of slaves. He was proposing simply to accelerate that process.

  Mr. Douglass said to Father, “Well, I do admire your plan, Mister Brown. Or, rather, I should say that I admire portions of your plan. Naturally, you aren’t the first man, white or Negro, to propose leading an armed rebellion among the slaves. It’s a common enough dream. But, unlike most others, you’ve anticipated many of the difficulties. And you have the large picture in mind as well. One thing, however. A question. I have many questions, sir, but this one first. I assume that you yourself plan to be the general for this army. And also the president of this ‘temporary’ Negro republic in the mountains. Does this mean that you, sir, would be our Moses?” Mr. Douglass smiled, but his words belied the smile.

  Father looked at him straight. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the reason I’ve revealed all this to you tonight, Mister Douglass. I would have you be the Moses of your people, sir. Not me, and not any other white man. No, Mister Douglass, I would be Aaron unto thee, anointed and consecrated by thee, and then I would go forth and make the blood sacrifice for both our peoples. The crime against one is the sin of the other, and to avenge the crime is to expunge the sin.”

  There was a long silence as the two looked directly into one another’s eyes—dark, melancholy eyes and flashing gray eyes. On the Negro man’s face was imprinted a great question, and on the white maris face a great statement, and the two, wordlessly, were struggling to make them match. I don’t think that Mr. Douglass had ever heard a white man speak like this before, at least a white man whom he did not think crazy. And I don’t believe that Father had ever spoken quite like this before.

  In a low voice, Father said, “I have four gr
own sons who will follow me into the South.”

  Who was the fourth? I thought, and then remembered our poor Fred. But, yes, why not Fred, too? In this matter, what was true of John, Jason, and me was true of him also. Yes, we will follow you, all four of us.

  Father then said, “I have raised every member of my family to take this war straight to the slavemasters. They and I are prepared to die for it.”

  Mr. Douglass slowly turned his great head to me. He looked me up and down and said, “Well, is this true, young man? That you’re prepared to die in battle? To die for the benefit of Negro slaves? Are you ready to give up your young life so that another young man, whose skin is black, can live as a free man?”

  I glanced again at Father’s map of the Passway and saw that it was a good plan; it would work; he was right—victory would fall into our lap like overripe fruit. And I remember thinking then that I would not die; I could not: I was strong and intelligent, I could run very fast, I was a fine shot and a first-rate horseman and could live in the forest like an Indian: and so I said to Mr. Douglass, “Yes, sir, I’m prepared for that. Father has prepared me pretty well. He has anointed and consecrated me and prepared me for the blood sacrifice, like Moses did for Aaron.”

  I saw Father suppress a look of simple pride and perhaps surprise at the boldness of my speech. He said, “So you see, Mister Douglass. I may well be Moses, but only here, in my own house.”