It was around this time that, with John and Jason spending so much time up in Lawrence with the Osawatomie Rifles and the Free-State legislature, Father decided that we had better send the women and Tonny over to Uncle Sam Adair’s place in the village of Osawatomie. He also decided to abandon Browns Station and move to a temporary camp in the trackless brushland along the Mosquito Creek, a camp that every few days we could shift to a new location. We were free as the wind off the plains now, able to appear and disappear almost at will. Everything we owned we carried in one wagon, and most of what we owned was weaponry. We were all of us on horseback by now, thanks to stock we had liberated from the hands of the slavers, although we had not saddles for everyone, and Fred and Oliver, when he wasn’t driving the wagon, rode bareback. Roaming the rolling, treeless hillcountry and slipping along the dark river-bottoms where black walnut, oak, and cottonwood trees grew in lush groves, we were more like a roving Indian band than a company of white guerillas. Our chieftain, who was Father, of course, always Father, set policy, but I decided day-to-day on how best to implement that policy.
Then, on the second of May, when we were encamped in the woods just south of the old French trading post on the Marais des Cygnes, a rich Missouri planter named Jefferson Buford, who had rounded up close to four hundred men from all over the South, led his mob straight across the border into the territory. Not ten miles from us, men were flying banners that cried, The Supremacy of the White Race! and Alabama for Kansas. A day later, we heard from a local Free-State settler that, out on the Peoria Indian lands, fifteen miles from our old camp at Browns Station, a company of some thirty or so Georgians loosely attached to Buford’s force had pitched their tents and were carousing, working up their courage with whiskey and insults. It was country that we knew firsthand and well, so on a cold, overcast day, Father and I rode out there in the wagon to reconnoiter and see what we could learn of the character of Colonel Buford’s force. We pretended to be government surveyors running a line that happened to lie in the middle of their squat. Calling ourselves Ruben Shiloh and his son Owen from Indiana and pretending to have no opinions on the struggle over Kansas, Father and I stopped for a while by the Georgians’ cook wagon, where most of the men had assembled to drink corn whiskey and lounge idly by the fire, two of their favorite activities, it seemed. We secretly counted the number of their horses and weapons, sidearms mostly and old, single-shot hunting rifles, and we talked a little and listened a lot, as they loudly cursed the abolitionists and swore to kill every last one. They loved their leader, Jefferson Buford, and called him Colonel Buford, although, when Father asked, they could not say in which army or militia he had been commissioned.
They were a staggering, loutish bunch of poor, ignorant, landless Southerners, men who bragged that they had come over to Kansas to help themselves first, by seizing abolitionists’ land-claims, and the South second, by killing as many Yankee nigger-lovers as they could find. “Especially those damned Browns,” whom they’d been hearing about from the Shermans and Doyles down on the Pottawatomie. “Them Browns’re goin’ first!” they declared. We tipped our hats and rode on.
Later, in the wagon on the way back to our camp, for a long time Father and I were silent, each of us lost in his own thoughts. Finally, when we were four or five miles from the Georgians’, Father turned to me and said, “You know, Owen, the real problem here isn’t what it seems. It’s not our differences from those fellows. The real problem is that those men truly don’t understand us.”
“How’s that a problem?”
“It just came to me, so I’ll have to say it as I think it. But the pro-slavers, all these Border Ruffians coming over from the South — fact is, they think we’re just like them except that we’re Northerners, that’s all. They think that, like them, we’ve come out here at the behest and in the pay of a gang of rich men and politicians. In their minds, we’re out here following some Yankee version of their Colonel Buford, and, like them, all we want out of this for ourselves is a piece of free land. Strange. But that is the problem.”
“What’s the solution, then?”
“I’m not sure. I think we have to show them somehow that they’re wrong about us. We should figure out how to show these Southerners the true nature and extremity of our principles. We have to show them the difference between them and us. Mainly, they have to see that we are willing to die for this. For they are not. And more to the point, because they are not willing to die for their cause, they have to see that we are willing to kill for ours. There it is! That’s our secret strength, Owen. All those poor, drunken fools and thieves, they really do believe that we are cowards, no different than they, and that Kansas, since they presently outnumber us, is easy pickings. And if they cry bloody murder and threaten to burn down our houses, it’s only because they think that as soon as the battle starts, we’ll pack up and run north and leave them our land.”
“They’ll see otherwise;’ I said.
“Now is the time, I believe. It’s time, Owen, time to buckle on our swords and wade straight into their midst. It’s time to wreak bloody havoc. We need to slay so many of them with a single, terrifying blow that the rest will start having sobering second thoughts.”
“Fine by me. I’d kill every last one. Give them only enough Kansas soil to lie down dead in.”
“You would, but maybe you won’t have to. I know men like this. I’ve seen them everywhere, even in the North. It’s a basic human type. These fellows are only the degraded, pathetic pawns of other men, who are much more evil than their pawns. Oh, sure, these poor, deluded fellows hate Negroes, all right, and they love slavery. But not because they themselves own Negro slaves or depend upon them to work their puny farms. You don’t see any slave-traders amongst these fellows, do you? And no cotton planters, either. No, these are poor men, Owen. And like most people, North and South, but especially South, they’re landless and slaveless and ignorant and illiterate. They’re serfs, practically, but with no lord of the manor to protect them. And it’s because they’ve been taught for centuries to love and envy the rich man who owns slaves that they hate the Negro, and now they have come out here to conquer Kansas for slavery. That’s all. Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin’s as white as the rich man’s, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”
“Very nice” I said. “But how do you propose to show them this?” I asked, out of politeness more than interest. Father’s endless, convoluted theories concerning slavery and Negroes frequently strengthened my brothers’ resolve, and even from time to time charged up the Old Man himself, but they had long since ceased to motivate me. I had my own motivations, which needed no firming. Iron hardeneth iron. For me, the soft, warm days of pusillanimity were long gone.