It was very complicated, how Father first got himself into debt and then proceeded to worsen his situation permanently, and as I was but a boy in my early and middle teens then, I did not much understand it. Besides, it was not then or ever Father’s way to provide people with the details of his business matters, so that most of what I know I learned years later and gleaned from others. He could not keep everything from us, of course. Especially since we, his family, had so often to cover for him and over time were called upon to make so many material sacrifices that were a direct result of the Old Man’s schemes. But I do not think that anyone — family member, friend, or business associate, or even Father’s own lawyers, when later he was suing and being sued — knew all the facts of his financial dealings. He tended to give out partial or contradictory information and sometimes even false information, all designed, or so it seemed, to keep his interrogator from asking further questions, as if somewhere at the bottom there were a secret fraud, when in fact there was none — it was only Father who was being fooled, and for the most part fooled by himself. He was deceived by his desires, actually, which is why, when it all came crashing down on his head, he blamed his own greed and vanity.
Early on, his secrecy had sprung from an ingrained sense of decorum and desire for privacy. Then for many years, when he was in flight from bankruptcy and, later, from the consequences of bankruptcy itself, he probably felt that secrecy was necessary to protect his family and business associates. “A man who is wholly candid about his finances, who opens his ledgers to anyone who asks, such a man abandons his responsibility to Others,”Father insisted, although he had arrived at this philosophy by a somewhat circuitous route. It served him well in the end, however, and others also. After Kansas and Harpers Ferry — when what had originally been Yankee manners, and then self-interested necessity, had become military policy — these habits of secrecy and occasional dissembling protected many of the people who were his chief supporters, and they may well have even saved the lives of some good men, like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Howe and Frank Sanborn.
It started back in the middle ’30s, after Father had closed down his tannery in New Richmond and returned to Hudson, Ohio, where, like so many other men of small money and big ideas, he got drawn into buying land and farms on easy credit and unsecured loans. Of course, with hindsight one can say that it was inevitable and hardly inexplicable, and having found himself dangerously overextended, he should simply have cut his losses and gotten out. But the Old Man, once he had determined that optimism was realism, could not be shaken from his course. After all, just take a look around, he would say in those early days of the land boom. All over the Western Reserve, men clearly less intelligent and hard-working than he were getting fabulously rich. Why not jump in himself? And why not bring in friends and family, too? Share the coming harvest.
At first, however, and for a long time, he successfully resisted the temptation to join the general run to speculate on land with borrowed money. That was when optimism was not realism; it was fantasy, or worse. He saw it then as a sickness, the mentality of a stampeding herd. And he justified his resistance, typically, on moral grounds, on principle, fortified by the Bible. As in Deuteronomy 15:6: Thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow. As in Proverbs 22:7: Therichruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.
Later, when he began to borrow, it was on principle then, too. He borrowed everywhere from everyone — from his father and brothers in Akron, from rich men and poor, banks, friends, and strangers. He had a well-deserved reputation for probity and honesty, and so great was his belief in his ability to take the measure of land (a not altogether unfounded belief: though self-taught, he was a skillful surveyor and possessed a sensitive, knowing eye for good farmland) and so attractive a talker was he that, once he set his mind to make a purchase, it was not difficult for him to convince others to become his partners and to loan him the money for his share of the partnership as well. From this side of the fence, however, he took to citing Luke 14: 28–30—the story of the man who tried to build a tower and did not have sufficient material to finish it and was mocked by his neighbors. And 2 Kings 6:4–6—the story of the borrowed iron axe-head that fell into the water and was made to float and was not lost. And also, from 2 Kings 4:1–7—the story of Elisha’s widowed daughter-in-law, whose sons were taken in bond by her creditors, so she borrowed many vessels from her neighbors, and the vessels were made to fill with oil, which were then sold to pay all her debts, even that for the borrowed vessels, freeing her sons and leaving the rest for her and her sons to live luxuriously on afterwards.
Sadly, Father’s Bible failed to warn him that the newly elected President, Martin Van Buren, would abruptly establish the National Bank and change the lending rules, causing the famous Panic of ’37. Thanks to Van Buren’s National Bank, soon all the small-monied borrowing men like Father were left holding packets of worthless paperpiles of currency issued by the various states and high mountains of mortgaged titles to vast tracts of western land and farms that could be neither sold for one-tenth their costs nor rented for the interest due on the unsecured loans that had purchased them barely a year before. The lucky fellows and the bankers and politicians who understood the system and thus had been able to anticipate the sudden deflation of value that inevitably follows hard upon a speculative boom, those men sold off their properties early and high and walked away counting their profits. Within weeks, they were doing the President’s bidding, calling in their neighbors’ loans and hiring sheriffs to seize land, houses, livestock, and even the personal property of the foolishly stubborn men who persisted in believing that the decline was only a temporary aberration. For those men, men like John Brown, surveyor, tanner, and small-time stockman, the collapse of the land boom was catastrophic.
Thus, by the summer of ’39, Father — who two years earlier had thought himself practically an Ohio land baron, who in his mind had laid out an entire town on five thousand mortgaged acres overlooking the Cuyahoga River, where he expected soon to see a government-financed canal that would be as enriching to him as the Erie had been to developers in western New York; a penniless man who owned title to two mortgaged farms he did not live on and one, the Haymaker Place, that he loved and hoped to make his family estate one day; a one-time tanner of hides raising thoroughbred horses and blooded Saxony sheep, who rode about like a squire in a carriage behind a matched pair of gray Narragansetts, all this on borrowed money — that man suddenly, inexplicably, found himself hounded by bondsmen, banks, process-servers, and sheriffs.
Bound as much by principle and Biblical text as when he had stayed out, Father with foolish consistency covered his borrowings with more borrowing and dropped deeper and deeper into debt. In ‘37 and ‘38, with everyone else rushing to sell short and salvage what little property he could, Father, almost alone, refused to get out. “This too shall pass, children, this too shall pass,” he would say. “We must be patient.” But all his promissory notes, which had been piled on top of one another even higher than any of us had imagined, were coming due. One by one, his titles began to be seized, titles that he had used to guarantee second loans, which afterwards he had used for the purchase of still other properties, until finally it began to look as though he would lose all his plots of land, his canal-side properties, also his carriage and Narragansetts and the blooded stock. Even the house we lived in, the Haymaker Place, was under siege, the sweet little farmstead that we older boys and Mary, sister Ruth, and the younger children had been managing well enough to keep the family adequately fed and clothed, while Father raced around the countryside frantically trying to keep his paper empire from being blown utterly away.