I was a boy; I was frightened by my father’s face. I remember recoiling from him, as if he himself were one of the guardian serpents. I remember Father looking straight into our eyes, burning us with his gaze, as he told us to hear him now. He had determined that he would henceforth put his sins of pride and vanity behind him. And he would go out from here and wage war on slavery. The time has come, he declared, and he wished to join the time in full cry. “And I mean to make war by force and arms!” he said. “Not such weak-kneed war as Mister Garrison is determined to make, he and that crowd of Boston, parlor-polite abolitionists. I mean to make the sort of war that was waged by the great Negroes, Cinque, Nat Turner, and L’Ouverture, and by the Roman slave Spartacus. I mean to make war in which the enemy is known and strictly named as such and is slain for his enmity to our cause.”
He called us his children, even Mary, and said that the time for talk was past. The time for seeking the abolition of slavery by means of negotiations with Satan had always been long past. There never was such a time. Therefore, before us, his beloved family, before his wife and sons, and before God, he was making tonight his sacred pledge.
Here Father explained what we already knew, that he had long entertained such a purpose anyhow, despite his slackness and distraction, but that he now believed it was his duty, the utmost duty of his life, to devote himself to this purpose, and he wished us fully to understand this duty and its implications. Then, after spending considerable time in setting forth in most impressive language the hopeless and hideous condition of the slave, much of the details borrowed from our just-completed reading of Mr. Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, Father seemed to have finished his declaration, when suddenly he asked us, “Which of you is willing to make common cause with me?” He looked from one face to the next. “Which of you, I want to know, is willing to do everything in your power to break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil from Satan’s teeth?” He put the question to us one by one. “Are you, Mary? John? Jason? Owen?”
My stepmother, my elder brothers, and I, we each of us in turn softly answered yes.
Whereupon Father kneeled down in prayer and bade us to do likewise. This position in prayer impressed me greatly, I remember, as it was the first time I had ever known him to assume it, for normally he remained standing in prayer, with his hands grasping a chair-back and his head merely lowered.
When he had finished the prayer, which was for guidance and protection in our new task, he stood, as did we, and he asked us to raise our right hands to him. He then administered to us an oath, which bound us to secrecy and total devotion to the purpose of fighting slavery by force and arms to the extent of our ability.
“We have thus now begun to wage war!” he declared. Although it seemed to me then, as it does now, so many years later, that he had already begun his war against slavery numerous times before this, here he was, in a sense beginning it again. And although I did not know it on that particular night, he would find himself obliged to bind himself to this sacred purpose many more times in the future as well. Father’s repeated declarations of war against slavery, and his asking us to witness them, were his ongoing pronouncement of his lifelong intention and desire. It was how he renewed and created his future.
Tonight, however, was significantly different. This was the first time that he had determined forthrightly to take up arms and wage war by force. Also, and more importantly, perhaps, it was the first time that I myself was a part of his pledge, that we all were sworn together, bound by our war on slavery to see the end of it, or of us. The overthrow of slavery was no longer Father’s private obsession. I had allowed him to make it mine as well.
Chapter 3
There is something that I have always wanted to explain, because in the various considerations of Father’s lifelong commitment to the overthrow of slavery, it has been much misunderstood. A great but little noted problem faced by Father throughout his life was his constantly divided mind. This division arose because, as much as he wished to be a warrior against slavery, he also wished to be, like most Americans, a man of means.
To be fair, it was a more basic and praiseworthy need than that. He had a large family, after all, and merely to house and feed and clothe them required enormous, sustained effort, especially if his only sources of income were his farm and his tannery. And by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, he was beginning to fear that, because of this requirement, he would always be a poor man with no time to wage war against slavery. His poverty, therefore, sabotaged his moral life. That is how it seemed to him. And that is what eventually led him down a path that very nearly did indeed sabotage his moral life.
Despite his having been poor and struggling since childhood, the Old Man himself dated the onset of his true financial woes to his thirty-ninth year, to the period of what he called his “extreme calamity.” Father always believed that there were three ways to make money in America: manufacturing or growing things; buying things low; and selling things high. A man who did only one of these would forever remain poor. He had to do at least two of them: best if he did all three, but without capital to invest in large-scale manufacture, impossible. A farmer made things, as it were, and sold them; a tanner did the same. Father had tried making and selling for nearly two decades, but he was still poor and exhausted: the process of manufacturing food, livestock, or leather goods took too long and consumed all a man’s days and nights, and thus he would never in his lifetime accumulate sufficient capital to manufacture steel, for instance, or some other item of great cost where the margins of profit were large enough to enrich him in his own time. He might turn to buying low and selling high, then. And what could be easily bought and rapidly sold by a man with little or no capital? Land. Hundreds of thousands, millions, of acres of loamy land rolling west from the Alleghenies all the way to the Mississippi and beyond. There was no greater or cheaper material resource available to an Ohio man in those days.
Inexpensive, arable land — it lay for miles all around him, and every month new immigrants from the crowded New England states and the eastern seaboard cities and even parts of Europe were pouring into the Western Reserve, bringing with them an insatiable hunger for farmland. They would also need new roads and canals to ship their produce east, new settlements and villages to reside and do business in, new schools and churches and public buildings to accommodate their expanding society. But before all else, they needed land, for they were mostly small farmers and young, and they brought with them or could easily borrow the necessary cash to buy it with. And in those years the bankers were eager to loan money with little or no collateral to secure it, for they well understood that a man who did not need that land for his own use, if he borrowed enough money to buy it first, could turn around and sell it for a higher price tomorrow, could pocket the difference, borrow more and buy more and sell that, too.
Basically, that was how Father fell into debt — by following the advice of bankers — and afterwards no amount of time and energy spent at war against the slavers, no amount of preaching to his neighbors, and no amount of training and conditioning his large family to become an army for the Lord could keep his mind free of his terrible indebtedness. Thus his divided mind.