With no further greeting, he said to Father straight out, in an even voice, “You may wish to know, sir, that early yesterday it was reported in Saint Louis that Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was brutally assaulted in the Senate chamber. You may also wish to know the name of his assailant, Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina. The senator from Massachusetts, a strong supporter of the abolitionist cause, which I take to be your cause as well, was beaten unmercifully by the Southerner. He was clubbed on the head with a stout cane, and it is very likely that he will not survive the attack.”
I had never seen Father as wild as he was then. He pulled off his hat and threw it on the ground. His face reddened with rage, and his brow darkened down as if his brain were on fire. He lifted his arms into the air and cried, “How can this be! How can such a thing happen!”
I said nothing, but the others, too, cried out their shock and anger at this latest outrage by the slavemasters. Then the messenger, if that is, indeed, what he was, said to us, “I bid you good evening, sirs” and, touching his hat a second time, rode slowly off, disappearing into the darkness as silently and swiftly as he had come.
For a long while after that, Father and the boys acted crazy, as if trying to outdo one another in their ranting and their wild promises to avenge this heinous crime against one of our heroes. I waited until they began to calm somewhat, and when I thought they could hear me clearly, I said, “It’s time now to go down along the Pottawatomie, where we can sharpen our swords and commence to use them.”
That silenced everyone, even Father, who seemed to break out of a trance. He shook his head violently, as if ridding it of evil spirits or bad dreams, and suddenly he was scrambling up on Reliance and shouting for Oliver to get the wagon moving. He took his own reins in his hands and slapped them against the flanks of the Morgans. The horses leapt forward, and Oliver was obliged to run and grasp onto the rear of the box and clamber aboard whilst it was moving. We watched for a minute longer, saying nothing, and then the others, Salmon, Fred, and Henry, mounted their horses — I had never got down from mine — and we took off at a full gallop, chasing after Father and Oliver, the wagon rumbling in the darkness ahead of us and ahead even of Father, racing along the rough old buffalo-track, the California Road, that led down from the heights of the Ottawa lands to the winding, narrow Cottonwood valley of the Pottawatomie.
Who can say which event is accidental and which is not? Or even if there exists such a thing as a true accident, a purely causeless event? When you take away belief in God’s will, then every untoward event and every blessing is viewed as merely the result of history; or else its origin is said to be a mystery; or else we lamely and with extreme insecurity reason backwards from effect to cause — from consciousness of guilt, for instance, backwards to the sinful act. Thus, if my feelings of guilt were made a measure of my intention, I have to concede that, even though I was not aware of it at the time, I nonetheless fully intended to kill my beloved friend Lyman Epps and only arranged for it afterwards to resemble an accident, in my own eyes as much as in the eyes of others. And thus it would, indeed, be as I felt it (but did not believe it) afterwards — a crime. A murder. By the same token, by the weight of guilt, I fully intended to go down there along the Pottawatomie Creek that night with my father and brothers and haul five men who claimed to love slavery and hate Negroes out of their cabins and butcher them for the sheer, murderous pleasure of it. For afterwards that is how guilty I felt, as if I had done it for the pleasure of it.
But if events are driven not by a man’s unconscious desires, and not by pure mystery, and not by some deep, unknown historical force — then what? After all, I was not obliged by circumstances or by any other man to go there with my sword and brandish it the way I did. No, I hold myself responsible for my own bloody acts. And I believe that I am further responsible, and to nearly the same degree, for the bloody acts that night of my father and brothers, too. For without my having instigated the attack and then goaded them when they grew timorous and frightened by the idea, they would not have done it.
Simply, I showed them at the time and afterwards that if we did not slay those five pro-slave settlers and did not do it in such a brutal fashion, the war in Kansas would have been over. Finished. In a matter of weeks, Kansas would have been admitted to the Union as a slave-state, and there would have been nothing for it then but the quick secession of all the Northern states, starting with New England, and the wholesale abandonment of three million Negro Americans to live and die in slavery, along with their children and grandchildren and however many generations it would take before slavery in the South was finally, if ever, overthrown. There would have been no raid on Harpers Ferry, certainly, and no Civil War, for the South would not have objected in the slightest to the break-up of the Union. Let them go. We will happily keep our slaves.
When we went down to the Pottawatomie, I believed all that. And in spite of my guilty feelings, I believe it still. No, I swear, I did not go down there for the pleasure of killing my enemies, nor did Father, nor my brothers, despite what the writers, North and South, puzzling over the causes of that event, have said in the intervening years. On that dark May night in ’56,1 truly thought that we were shaping history, that we were affecting the course of future events, making one set of events nearly impossible and another very likely, and I believed that the second set was morally superior to the first, so it was a good and necessary thing, what we were doing. We could slay a few men now, men who were guilty, perhaps, if only by association, and save millions of innocents later. That’s how terror, in the hands of the righteous, works.
And we were right, after all. For it did work. The terror and the rage that we caused with those murders ignited the flames of war all across Kansas, to be sure, and all across the Southern states and in the North as well. We turned Kansas bloody. With a single night’s work, we Browns made the whole territory bleed. The Missourians came flying back across the river determined anew to kill every abolitionist in Kansas, and the Northerners were forced to return blow for blow, until both sides lost sight of the possibilities of a short-term peace and were instead engaged in a fight to the death. Which was exactly as Father and I and, to a lesser degree, the rest of us Browns wanted.
If we had learned anything over the last decade, it was that there was no other way to defeat slavery, except with a willingness to die for it. We had learned what the Negroes long knew. And thus we merely did what the Negroes themselves had done over and over in the past — in Haiti, in the mountains of Jamaica, and in the swamps of Virginia — but could not do out there on the plains of Kansas. We did what we wanted the Negroes to do in Kansas. By slaying those five pro-slavers on the Pottawatomie that night, we placed hundreds, thousands, of other white men in the same position that we alone amongst the whites had held for years: for now every white man in Kansas, anti-slaver and pro-slaver alike, had to be ready to die for his cause.