The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  I have to say that this was a question I had never before been asked. I didn’t know quite how to reply.

  "I regard my corset as a saddle." She went on, "We’ve all heard of slave gangs where they bridle the troublesome slaves so as to both assert and proclaim control. Well, we women are similarly tacked up, though with corsets rather than bridles. They stifle our breath and cut us in two and shape us to the liking of our masters."

  I would have to say that Thomas did not care for Louisa. He was careful to inform me that while he didn’t object to her sentiments, he could not quite like her manner, but I found it arrestingly daring and nothing if not genuine. Charles was hog happy, as Roland Brereton would say. He was fed, warmed, loved, and told what to do, and his sentiments about every matter quickly came to mirror his wife’s. K.T., he said, was the making of him, and it was true that in after years he prospered as well as any of our friends, died the father of eight and the grandfather of thirty-six, and spent sixteen years in the Kansas state legislature. And General Lane (later Senator Lane) always claimed that he admired Louisa Bisket and was admired by her in return, which was, of course, a recommendation to some and not to others.

  We spent our holidays cozily enough, and in the new year, Lawrence looked about as up-and-coming as a frozen town could look. There were sleighs and drags everywhere in the streets, and building continued in spite of the weather and the sickness. Not long after New Year’s Day, regular mail was established between Leavenworth and Lawrence, and there were plenty of goods everywhere, not only food. As Mrs. Bush would say, "Some days the Ruffians want to shoot us, and some days they don’t, but they never stop wanting our money."

  Charles was one of the carriers for mail and goods from Leavenworth, and in typical K.T. fashion, a few days after the route was established, he and Thomas made up their minds to combine a little trade with a little politics.

  The situation was this: Our Topeka convention, which we Free Staters had held in October, called for elections to state offices on January 15 (they’d been imagining a different January 15 than the one we got—a mild, sunny day and not a bitter, blustery one). The men of Lawrence voted properly, on the fifteenth, but the next day everyone heard that as a result of the fracas in Leavenworth the month before, the Free Staters there had been afraid to vote. The result was that they planned to gather at a certain farmhouse in a village eight miles from town on the next day, the seventeenth, and cast their ballots. Some men from Lawrence, including the mail carrier, Charles, and his assistant, Thomas, wished to be present and well armed, just to insure that the voting was carried out in good order.

  The men got up long before dawn and headed for Leavenworth, with Charles’s hot little gelding and Jeremiah in the traces. We resolved the question of Frank’s going along by the men’s sneaking out without him, which obliged him to sulk about the wheelwright’s shop all day. But for all Frank’s enthusiasm for the excitements of our life, on the one hand, and Thomas’s growing belief that events in Kansas must be brought to a climax in order for the slavery issue to be resolved once and for all, on the other, I often feared what Frank had gotten into with us, and I caught myself wondering how I would phrase the news of some disaster in a letter to my sister. Not all disasters, it now appeared, might come through the general bearing of arms by parties who hated one another; these days I also wondered how I might tell her that her boy had frozen to death.

  Louisa and I were anxious throughout that day and into the next. We stayed up all night and kept sending Frank out into the street, as if there might be something to hear all the way from Leavenworth. As it turned out, we were worried with good reason, for the Missourians had indeed discovered the voting. The night before, they had attacked the farm where it was to take place, and in the morning, before our husbands got there, they’d attacked a party of voters heading out to the farm. There were so many Missourians that the Free Staters ran off for fear of their lives and never got to vote at all. Shortly after Thomas and Charles got to the farm, the Missourians came around for the second time that day and shot off their guns into the air and vowed to break up the ballot boxes "and a lot of heads into the bargain" and to "hang some black abolitionists" or "throw ’em out onto the ice," but the Free Staters gathered inside shot off their Sharps carbines and drove them away. No one knew how many Free Staters were prevented from voting or chased away, but all those who got through swore they’d done so at peril of their lives. Our husbands decided to stay the night—everyone was sure that members of a group who styled themselves the "Kickapoo Rangers" would attack the farmhouse—but after a while, a man, his son, and his nephew decided to hazard a dash for home. These three did get chased, and trapped in a fence corner. The man and one of the boys had to try and hold off the "Rangers," while the other boy ran back to the farmhouse for help. Thomas and Charles were in the house, and they happened to be the only two with Sharps rifles, as all the other Lawrence men had left. Charles, who was a better shot than Thomas, agreed to go out with the party of rescuers, who were in the charge of a Captain Brown, still another Brown, a man of thirty-five or so, well liked by all the Leavenworth people, who was a committed Free Stater.

  Not long after that, the two parties converged. The Free Staters were on the verge of driving off the proslave party, when a larger party of these Kickapoo Rangers arrived. Now there was what I suppose would qualify in Kansas as a bona fide battle. Brown on his side drew up his men in a line, and the others did, too. The firing commenced, and Charles said that he had never been so scared in his life, even when he was taken prisoner by the Missourians during the "war" and threatened with hanging. After a while, the Missourians got into some houses nearby and fired at the Free Staters, who were in the open. Captain Brown made Charles lie down behind a snowbank and keep firing with his Sharps carbine, while the others went more slowly, muzzle-loading after each shot. Pretty soon, though, the Free Staters themselves retreated to some of the nearby buildings, and then the battle petered out, as no one’s rifle had enough range to do much damage in these circumstances. Brown had the men retreat to the cabin where the election had taken place and where Thomas still was, with some other men and the ballot box. Two of the Free Staters were hit and slightly wounded. About the Missourians, they were soon to find out.

  The cabin was crowded, and after a while men began to agitate to leave, both to get back to the safety of their own homes and to remove the ballot box to a safer place. Finally, Captain Brown decided to take a buggy and a wagon and seven men and try to get back to Leavenworth. Thomas and Charles resolved to wait until morning and come on to Lawrence, as they had the mail with them and no need to go back to Leavenworth.

  As they were making their way down the road, Captain Brown and his men passed another wagon but ignored it. Then, coming around a curve in the road, they saw two more wagons and were surrounded and taken. These, again, were the Kickapoo Rangers—there is a town up by Leavenworth called Kickapoo, and it is full of the lowest sort of characters—and they took away the weapons of all our men and dragged them off to a local store where the owner sympathized with the slave power, all for the sake of working to death a little Negro boy of some ten years.

  Now was when the real horror commenced, for the Kickapoo Rangers were drunk as they could be, and instead of destroying the ballots and paroling the men, which is what they said they were going to do, the southerners got a length of rope from the owner of the store (gratis, I presume) and threatened all the prisoners with hanging. It turned out that one of their number had been killed, a man named Cook, and they were howling for revenge. There was a proslave man who was more reasonable, some sort of army man named Captain Martin, and he argued for the release of all the prisoners. Eventually, he managed to engineer the escape of all of them except Captain Brown, who was being held in a separate room. Another man went off to Leavenworth to try and bring some men to help, but no one would come.

  When the news came back to Lawrence of what they did to Captain Brown, we we
re convinced at last and permanently that the Ruffians were animals—worse than animals, merciless fiends who had no thoughts in their heads except of the most brutal sort. They killed him with hatchet blows and kicks, then got drunker, then threw him in the wagon and drove him home to his wife, where they threw him in the yard and shouted, "Here’s Brown!" and drove off, laughing. Some people said that he was still alive and died in her arms, but others said that he was dead. It was shocking enough either way.

  Charles and Thomas knew the beginning of this story by the time they got home, but not the end. They had met Captain Brown and liked him; he was not an old man by any means, but someone like US. After everything was known, they were speechless in the way you get when some vile thing has brushed past you. All of Lawrence was talking of nothing else, but they didn’t want to talk of it at all.

  We sat silent around our fire the next few evenings. Louisa knitted busily and I attempted to sew, but Thomas and Charles said nothing and did nothing. When I suggested that Thomas might read from one of his books, he said, "I can’t think which one," and Louisa didn’t dare suggest that Charles sing, one of his favorite amusements. Louisa and I traded glances over and over. I was not sure what she was thinking, as she was of an especially, you might say uniquely, sanguine temperament, and K.T. seemed to suit her very well; but I was thinking fearful and bitter thoughts, all mixed in together. I was of course glad that my husband had escaped without injury, but that gladness gave way to horror every time I thought of Mrs. Brown, who seemed, in my mind, to be myself in a different dress. I hated the Missourians for these deeds with a fresh hatred—as fresh as if my friends and I hadn’t known for months how the Missourians were. But I also resented our men, even Thomas and Charles, for going off and getting into it. I could both imagine and not imagine what they had seen, and I couldn’t throw off the feeling that they hadn’t needed to witness it and therefore to bring it home; and so, while I knew they weren’t at fault, I seemed to feel, some moments, as if they were. And yet, Thomas’s dejection aroused my pity, too. No authorities on marriage that I had encountered had ever discussed this welter of uncomfortable emotions that seemed to go with the condition. I feared that K.T. was going to bear me down in the end. I suppose we all did so.

  On the other hand, the speed of events didn’t give us much leisure to ponder them, and it was hard to tell whether that would, in the end, contribute to our salvation or our destruction.

  CHAPTER 14

  I Do Yet Another Thing I Have Never Done Before

  Those persons, who keep their bodies in a state of health, by sufficient exercise, can always be guided by the calls of hunger. They can eat when they feel hungry, and stop when hunger ceases; and then they will calculate exactly right. —p. 98

  AFTER THE DEATH OF Captain Brown, the Missourians who were prepared to hang, shoot, dismember, kill, and otherwise clear us out of K.T began to gather in the border towns and prepare their springtime strategy. Some of their papers came into town, and in one, the very voice of the Kickapoo Rangers, the editor reflected our own sentiments back to us in a way that seemed astounding, given the horror of Captain Brown’s death. Declaring that "forbearance has now ceased to be a virtue," the editor called for the proslave faction to "strike your piercing rifle-balls and your glittering steel to their black and poisonous hearts!" Their strategy seemed to be like that of a man who attacks another in a barroom and then, when he has his victim at the point of death, starts screaming that he is being terribly injured and must kill his victim in order to save himself. For the most part, these papers and the reports of what the proslave faction said of us were almost more inflaming than their actions, because they seemed calculated to insult us and deny the truth of what was all around us. Many in Lawrence, I have to say, were nicely warmed by resentment of these insults.

  But for others, myself among them, the prolonged frigid weather made even the prospect of being hanged, shot, dismembered, killed, or otherwise cleared out rather an abstract one. The possibility of being frozen to death was distinctly more likely. Every day at the end of January and the beginning of February, gangs of men went out on the ice of the river dressed in every item of clothing that they could find, plus buffalo skins and blankets, like the Indians, to chop wood and carry it into town on every form of sledge or sleigh. The horses and mules wore blankets, too, though they were as furry as they could be. Most days, Charles and Thomas went with these parties, though some evenings the two of them were detailed to guard the town. No one knew when the Missourians would cross the border and make their attack. On the one hand, we feared it would be soon, and given Lawrence’s position, we would be unable to defend ourselves, but on the other hand, we feared it would be later, when there would be many more of them.

  Some days, Charles and Thomas went to Leavenworth to get the mail, only to find once they got there that the mail had been stolen or destroyed in Missouri. Of course, the postmaster at Leavenworth didn’t say that the absent mail was stolen or destroyed, but all of Lawrence knew that it had been—enough got through to indicate what had not gotten through: all sorts of people were expecting bank drafts, letters, and goods that their relatives and friends in the east proposed to send or had sent, but they disappeared in Missouri.

  Louisa kept her fires going and put on another light shawl, and when the men were out, she marched back and forth between our two rooms, knitting as she went. Unlike me, she was an excellent needlewoman, and it took her only a short time to knit up a cap or some mittens from her stock of wool. Most of these she knitted in children’s sizes and gave away to anyone she heard of who was poor or cold. I sat beside the fire, doing my best to get through our sewing. Louisa was alive to the rights and wrongs of our cause, and it was at this time that she somehow got to be acquainted with General Lane, an acquaintanceship that, as I have said, soon extended to Charles and lasted as long as General Lane was alive. And yet, even though General Lane and Louisa quickly became intimates, there was never the least gossip that their friendship was of the wrong sort. Considering General Lane’s well-deserved reputation, this was a great testament to Louisa’s strength of character.

  I doubt that General Lane remembered from one time to the next that he had ever met me, but I certainly noticed him, for he was very noticeable and liked to be noticed. Perhaps knowing that he would never pass for a figure of elegance, he adopted quite the opposite standard and dressed very roughly, even for a Kansan. But he was a compelling-looking gentleman, as Louisa would say (often did say), with thick dark hair, pleasing, regular features, and a surpassingly intense gaze. His great rival then and for the rest of his life was Dr., then Governor, Robinson. Of the two, Robinson had lived the wilder and more exciting life, with stints in California and the war in Mexico, but he had the looks and demeanor of a steady man of middle age, while General Lane, who was ambitious, certainly, but had simply come to K.T. from Indiana, had the looks and demeanor of a great romantic adventurer.

  General Lane, Louisa told me, was utterly convinced that the Missourians were poised to attack, and a few days after the incident in Leavenworth, he wrote two letters to President Pierce himself. Though they were over the signatures of both General Lane and Governor Robinson, they sounded much more like Lane, the hotheaded one, than Robinson, who was always advising patience. At any rate, I was alarmed: one letter said that we had authentic information that an attack was imminent, and the other that the Missourians had artillery to use against us (and both said that they planned to "butcher" the Free Staters of Kansas). Copies of the letters, or papers people said were copies, got passed around all over Lawrence, and I won’t say that everyone thought the Missourians were either massed or poised to attack. Owing to his recent experience, my husband thought they were ready to do anything but only "poised" to take advantage of any situation that might offer itself for the many to waylay the few. Thomas and Louisa, in fact, had a small debate about this very subject a few days after the letters were carried off to Washington.

&
nbsp; "If we think in military terms," said Thomas, "we’ll get it all wrong. However much they call themselves captains and lieutenants, they are but bullies, and they think as bullies think. We’ve the arms and the men to handle them."

  "The Missourians are but a portion of the forces arraying themselves at the border, and rapidly getting to be the smaller portion. Real military men from all over the south are ready to stir this pot and see what bubbles to the surface, if you ask me," said Louisa, with a sip of her tea (tea was plentiful and hot every night). "General Lane hears from his sources that slave-power newspapers are filled with advertisements for regiments of soldiers."

  "Bands of emigrants—"

  "Bands of armed emigrants, with no women, no children, no plows or sickles or seed."

  Thomas ostentatiously pulled his shawl more closely about his shoulders and chuckled. "I hope they get here soon, because they will surely get a surprise if they do."

  Charles interposed. ’’Anyway, we’ve elected our officials. Jim Lane says they have to comport themselves like elected officials now, or we an’t got a chance. I think calling for troops to protect us is an excellent strategy. Puts us in the right but shows them we know our way around these things."

  "We are already in the wrong, according to them. I don’t know if there is any strategy that will put us in the right," said Thomas. ’’And another thing here is that we’re talking up these Ruffians as if they know what they’re doing. Didn’t we just finish a war, so called? Weren’t you a prisoner, so called? And what did you do? Why, you held up a blanket so the fire wouldn’t go out, while they drank themselves silly and gambled themselves poor. When we write to the President in these terms like ’butcher’ and ’artillery,’ we’re convincing ourselves to be scared off, and we forget what we already know."

  "It could have easily been worse," said Charles.