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.