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.
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.